Chapter XI: The State (4)

The Culture had bound up all its forces in strict form. Now they were released, and “Nature”--that is, the cosmic--broke forth immediate. The change from the absolute State to the battling Society of nations that marks the beginning of every Civilization may mean for idealists and ideologues what they like--in the world of facts it means the transition from government in the style and pulse of a strict tradition to the _sic volo, sic jubeo_ of the unbridled personal régime. The maximum of symbolic and _super_-personal form coincides with that of the Late period of the Culture--in China about 600, in the Classical about 450, for ourselves about 1700. The minimum in the Classical lies in the time of Sulla and Pompey, and for us will be reached (and possibly passed) in the next hundred years. Great interstate and internal conflicts, revolutions of a fearful kind, interpenetrate increasingly, but the questions at issue in all of them without exception are (consciously and frankly or not) questions of unofficial, and eventually purely personal, power. It is historically of no importance what they themselves aimed at theoretically, and we need not know the catchwords under which the Chinese and Arabian revolutions of this stage broke out, nor even whether there were such catchwords. None of the innumerable revolutions of this era--which more and more become blind outbreaks of uprooted megalopolitan masses--has ever attained, or ever had the possibility of attaining, an aim. What stands is only the _historical fact_ of an accelerated demolition of ancient forms that leaves the path clear for Cæsarism.

But the same is true also of the wars, in which the armies and their tactical methods become more and more the creation, not of the epoch, but of uncontrolled individual captains, who in many cases discovered their genius very late and by accident. While in 300 there were _Roman_ armies, in 100 there were the armies of Marius and Sulla and Cæsar; and Octavian’s army, which was composed of Cæsar’s veterans, led its general much more than it was led by him. But with this the methods of war, its means, and its aims assumed raw-natural and ferocious forms,[745] very different from those prevailing before. Their duels were not eighteenth-century Trianon duels, encounters in knightly forms with fixed rules to determine when a man might declare himself exhausted, what maximum of force might be employed, and what conditions the chivalry permitted a victor to impose. They were ring-battles of infuriated men with fists and teeth, fought to the bodily collapse of one and exploited without reserve or restraint by the victor. The first great example of this “return to Nature” is afforded by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, which, instead of artificial manœuvres with small bodies, practised the mass-onset without regard to losses and thereby shattered to atoms the refined strategy of the Rococo. To bring the whole muscular force of a nation on to the battlefields by the universal-service system was an idea utterly alien to the age of Frederick the Great.[746]

Similarly, in every Culture, the technique of war hesitatingly followed the advance of craftsmanship, until at the beginning of the Civilization it suddenly takes the lead, presses all mechanical possibilities of the time relentlessly into its service, and under pressure of military necessity even opens up new domains hitherto unexploited--but at the same time renders largely ineffectual the personal heroism of the thoroughbred, the ethos of the noble, and the subtle intellect of the Late Culture. In the Classical world, where the Polis made mass-armies essentially impossible--for relatively to the general smallness of Classical forms, tactical included, the numbers of Cannæ, Philippi, and Actium were enormous and exceptional--the second Tyrannis (Dionysius of Syracuse leading) introduced mechanical technique into warfare, and on a large scale.[747] Then for the first time it became possible to carry out sieges like those of Rhodes (305), Syracuse (213), Carthage (146), and Alesia (52), in which also the increasing importance of rapidity, even for Classical strategy, became evident. It was in line with this tendency that the Roman legion, the characteristic structure of which developed only in the Hellenistic age, worked like a machine as compared with the Athenian and Spartan militias of the fifth century. In China, correspondingly, iron was worked up for cutting and thrusting weapons from 474, light cavalry of the Mongolian model displaced the heavy war-chariot, and fortress warfare suddenly acquired outstanding importance.[748] The fundamental craving of Civilized mankind for speed, mobility, and mass-effects finally combined, in the world of Europe and America, with the Faustian will to domination over Nature and produced dynamic methods of war that even to Frederick the Great would have seemed like lunacy, but to us of to-day, in close proximity to our technics of transportation and industry, are perfectly natural. Napoleon horsed his artillery and thereby made it highly mobile (just as he broke up the mass army of the Revolution into a system of self-contained and easily moved corps), and already at Wagram and Borodino it had augmented its purely physical effectiveness to the point of what we should call rapid-fire and drum fire.[749] The second stage is--most significantly--marked by the American Civil War of 1861-5--which even in the numbers of troops it involved far surpassed the order of magnitude of the Napoleonic Wars[750] and in which for the first time the railway was used for large troop-movements, the telegraph-network for messages, and a steam fleet, keeping the sea for months on end, for blockade, and in which armoured ships, the torpedo, rifled weapons, and monster artillery of extraordinary range were discovered.[751][752] The third stage is that of the World War, preluded by the Russo-Japanese conflict;[753] here submarine and aircraft were set to work, speed of invention became a new arm in itself, and the extent (though most certainly not the intensity) of the means used attained a maximum. But to this expenditure of force there corresponds everywhere the ruthlessness of the decisions. At the very outset of the Chinese Shan-Kwo period we find the utter annihilation of the State of Wu--an act which in the preceding Chun-tsiu period chivalry would have made impossible. Even in the peace of Campo Formio Napoleon outraged the _convenances_ of the eighteenth century, and after Austerlitz he introduced the practice of exploiting military success without regard to any but material restrictions. The last step still possible is being taken in the peace treaty of the Versailles type, which deliberately avoids finality and settlement, and keeps open the possibility of setting up new conditions at every change in the situation. The same evolution is seen in the chain of the three Punic Wars. The idea of wiping out one of the leading great powers of the world--which eventually became familiar to everyone through Cato’s deliberately dry insistence on his “_Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam_”--never crossed the mind of the victor of Zama and, for all the wild war-ethics of the Classical Poleis, it would have seemed to Lysander, as he stood victorious in Athens, an impiety towards every god.

The Period of the Contending States begins for the Classical world with the battle of Ipsus (301) which established the trinity of Eastern great powers, and the Roman victory over the Etruscans and Samnites at Sentinum (295), which created a mid-Italian great power by the side of Carthage. Then, however, the characteristic Classical preference for things near and in the present resulted in eyes’ being shut while Rome won, first the Italian south in the Pyrrhic adventure, then the sea in the first Punic War, and then the Celtic north through C. Flaminius. The significance even of Hannibal (probably the only man of his time who clearly saw the trend of events) was ignored by all, the Romans themselves not excepted. It was at _Zama_, and not merely later at Magnesia and Pydna, that the Hellenistic Eastern powers were defeated. All in vain the great Scipio, truly anxious in the presence of the destiny to which a Polis overloaded with the tasks of a world-dominion was marching, sought thereafter to avoid all conquest. In vain his entourage forced through the Macedonian War, against the will of every party, merely in order that the East could thenceforth be ignored as harmless. Imperialism is so necessary a product of any Civilization that when a people refuses to assume the rôle of master, it is seized and pushed into it. The Roman Empire was _not_ conquered--the “_orbis terrarum_” condensed itself into that form and forced the Romans to give it their name. It is all very Classical. While the Chinese states defended even the mere remnants of their independence with the last bitterness, Rome after 146 only took upon herself to transform the Eastern land-masses into provinces because there was no other resource against anarchy left. And even this much resulted in the inward form of Rome--the last which had remained upright--melting in the Gracchan disorders. And (what is unparalleled elsewhere) it was not between states that the final rounds of the battle for Imperium were fought, but between the parties of a city--the form of the Polis allowed of no other outcome. Of old it had been Sparta _versus_ Athens, now it was Optimate _versus_ Popular Party. In the Gracchan revolution, which was already (134) heralded by a first Servile War, the younger Scipio was secretly murdered and C. Gracchus openly slain--the first who as Princeps and the first who as Tribune were political centres in themselves amidst a world become formless. When, in 104, the urban masses of Rome for the first time lawlessly and tumultuously invested a private person, Marius, with Imperium, the deeper importance of the drama then enacted is comparable with that of the assumption of the mythic Emperor-title by the ruler of Tsin in 288. The inevitable product of the age, Cæsarism, suddenly outlines itself on the horizon.

The heir of the Tribune was Marius, who like him linked mob and high finance and in 87 murdered off the old aristocracy in masses. The heir of the Princeps was Sulla, who in 82 annihilated the class of the great merchants by his proscriptions. Thereafter the final decisions press on rapidly, as in China after the emergence of Wang Cheng. Pompey the Princeps and Cæsar the Tribune--tribune not in office, but in attitude--were still party-leaders, but nevertheless, already at Lucca, they were arranging with Crassus and each other for the first partition of the world amongst themselves. When the heirs of Cæsar fought his murderers at Philippi, both had ceased to be more than groups. By Actium the issue was between individuals, and Cæsarism will out, even in such a process as this.

In the corresponding evolution within the Arabian world it is, of course, the Magian Consensus that takes the place of the bodily Polis as the basic form in and through which the facts accomplish themselves; and this form, as we have seen, excluded any separation of political and religious tendencies to such an extent that even the urban bourgeois urge towards freedom (marking, here as elsewhere, the beginning of the Period of Contending States) presents itself in orthodox disguise, and so has hitherto almost escaped notice.[754] It appeared as a will to break loose from the Caliphate, which the Sassanids, and Diocletian following them, had created in the forms of the feudal state. From the times of Justinian and Chosroës Nushirvan this had had to meet the onset of Frondeurs--led by the heads of the Greek and Mazdaist Churches, the nobility, both Persian-Mazdaist (above all Irak) and Greek (particularly the Asiatic), and the high chivalry of Armenia, which was divided into two parts by the difference of religion. The absolutism almost attained in the seventh century was then suddenly destroyed by the attack of Islam. In its _political_ beginnings Islam was strictly aristocratic; the handful of Arabian families[755] who everywhere kept the leading in their hands, very soon formed in the conquered territories a new higher nobility of strong breed and immense self-sufficingness which thrust the dynasty down to the same level as its English “contemporaries” thrust theirs. The Civil War between Othman and Ali (656-661) was the expression of a true Fronde, and its movements were all in the interests of two clans and their respective adherents. The Islamic Whigs and Tories of the eighth century, like the English of the eighteenth, _alone_ practised high politics, and their coteries and family quarrels are more important to the history of the time than any events in the reigning house of the Ommaiyads (661-750).

But with the fall of the gay and enlightened dynasty that has resided in Damascus--that is, West-Aramæan and Monophysite Syria--the natural centre of gravity of the Arabian Culture reappeared; it was the East-Aramæan region. Once the basis of Sassanid and now of Abbassid power, but always--irrespective of whether its shaping was Persian or Arabian, or its religion Mazdaist, Nestorian, or Islamic--it expressed one and the same grand line of development and was the exemplar for Syria as for Byzantium alike. From Kufa the movement started which led to the downfall of the Ommaiyads and their _ancien régime_, and the character of this movement--of which the whole extent has never to this day been observed--was that _of a social revolution directed against the primary orders of society and the aristocratic tradition_.[756] It began among the Mavali, the small bourgeoisie in the East, and directed itself with bitter hostility against the Arabs, not _qua_ champions of Islam but _qua_ new nobility. The recently converted Mavali, almost all former Mazdaists, took Islam more seriously than the Arabs themselves, who represented also a class-ideal. Even in the army of Ali the wholly democratic and Puritan Qaraites had split off,[757] and in their ranks we see for the first time the combination of fanatic sectarianism and Jacobinism. Here and now there emerged not only the Shiite tendency, but also the first impulses towards the Communistic Karramiyya movement, which can be traced to Mazdak[758] and later produced the vast outbreaks under Babek. The Abbassids were anything but favourites with the insurgents of Kufa, and it was only owing to their great diplomatic skill that they were first allowed a footing as officers and then--almost like Napoleon--were able to enter into the heritage of a Revolution that had spread over the whole East. After their victory they built Baghdad--a resurrected Ctesiphon, symbol of the downfall of feudal Arabism--and this first world-city of the new Civilization became from 800 to 1050 the theatre of the events which led from Napoleonism to Cæsarism, _from the Caliphate to the Sultanate_, which, in Baghdad no less than in Byzantium, is the Magian type of power without form--here also the only kind of power still possible.

We have to recognize quite clearly, then, that in the Arabian world as elsewhere democracy was a class-ideal--the outlook of townsmen and the expression of their will to be free from the old linkages with land, be it a desert or plough-land. The “no” which answered the Caliph-tradition could disguise itself in very numerous forms, and neither free-thought nor constitutionalism in our sense was necessary to it. _Magian mind and Magian money are “free” in quite a different way._ The Byzantine monkhood was liberal to the point of turbulence, not only against court and nobility, but also against the higher ecclesiastical powers, which had developed a hierarchy (corresponding to the Gothic) even before the Council of Nicæa. The consensus of the Faithful, the “people” in the most daring sense, was looked upon as willed by God (“Nature,” Rousseau would have said), as _equal_ and free from all powers of the blood. The celebrated scene in which the Abbot Theodore of Studion adjured the Emperor Leo V to obey (813) is a Storming of the Bastille in Magian forms.[759] Not long afterwards there began the revolt of the Paulicians, very pious and in social matters wholly radical,[760] who set up a state of their own beyond the Taurus, ravaged all Asia Minor, defeated one Imperial levy after another, and were not subjugated till 874. This corresponds in every way to the communistic-religious movement of the Karramiyya, which extended from the Tigris to Merv and whose leader Babek succumbed only after a twenty years’ struggle (817-837);[761] and the other like outbreak of the Carmathians[762] in the West (890-904), whose liaisons reached from Arabia into all the Syrian cities and who propagated rebellion as far as the Persian coast. But, besides these, there were still other disguises of the political party-battle. When now we are told that the Byzantine army was Iconoclast and that the military party was consequently opposed by an Iconodule monkish party, we begin to see the passions of the century of the image-controversy (740-840) in quite a new light, and to understand that the end of the crisis (843)--the final defeat of the Iconoclasts and _simultaneously_ of the free-church monkish policy--signifies a Restoration in the 1815 sense of the word.[763] And, lastly, this period is the time of the fearful slave-rebellion in Irak--the kernel of the Abbassids’ realm--which throws sudden light upon a series of other social upheavals. Ali, the Spartacus of Islam, founded in 869, south of Baghdad, a veritable Negro state out of the masses of runaways, built himself a capital, Muktara, and extended his power far in the directions of Arabia and Persia alike, where he gained the support of whole tribes. In 871 Basra, the first great port of the Islamic world, inhabited by nearly a million souls, was taken, deluged in massacre, and burnt. Not till 883 was this slave-state destroyed.

Thus slowly the Sassanid-Byzantine forms were hollowed out, and in the place of the ancient traditions of the higher officialdom and nobility there arose the inconsequent and wholly personal power of incidental geniuses--_the Sultanate_. For this is the specifically Arabian form, and it appears simultaneously in Byzantium and Baghdad and takes its steady course from the Napoleonic beginnings about 800 to the completed Cæsarism of the Seljuk Turks about 1050. This form is purely Magian, belongs only to that Culture, and is incomprehensible without the most fundamental axioms of its soul. The Caliphate, a synthesis of political (not to say cosmic) beat and style, was not abolished--for the Caliph as the representative of God recognized by the Consensus of the elect is sacred--but he was deprived of all powers that Cæsarism needed to possess, just as Pompey and Augustus in fact, and Sulla and Cæsar in fact and in name, abstracted these powers from the old constitutional forms of Rome. In the end there remained to the Caliph about as much power as the Senate and the Comitias had under Tiberius. The whole richness of being in high form--in law, costume, ethic--that had once been a symbol, was now mere trappings covering a formless and purely factual régime.

So we find by the side of Michael III (842-867) Bardas, and by Constantine VII (912-959) Romanos--the latter even formally Co-Emperor.[764] In 867 the ex-groom Basileios, a Napoleonic figure, overthrew Bardas and founded the sword-dynasty of the Armenians (to 1081), in which generals instead of Emperors mostly ruled--force-men like Romanos, Nicephorus, and Bardas Phocas. The greatest amongst them was John Tzimisces (969-976) in Armenian Kiur Zan. In Baghdad it was the _Turks_ who played the Armenian rôle; in 842 the Caliph Vathek invested one of their leaders for the first time with the title of Sultan. From 862 the Turkish prætorians held the ruler in tutelage, and in 945 Achmed, the founder of the Sultan-dynasty of the Buyids, formally restricted the Abbassid Caliph to his religious dignities. And then there set in, in both the world-cities, an unrestrained competition between the mighty provincial families for possession of the supreme power. In the case of the Christian we find, indeed, Basileios II and others challenging the great latifundia lords, but this does not in the least mean social purposes in the legislator. It was an act of self-defence on the part of the momentary potentate against possible heirs, and closely analogous, therefore, to the proscriptions of Sulla and the Triumvirs. Half Asia Minor belonged to the Dukas, Phocas, and Skleros connexions; the Chancellor Basileios, who could keep an army on pay out of his own fabulous resources, has long ago been compared with Crassus.[765] But the imperial age proper begins only with the Seljuk Turks.[766] Their leader Togrulbek won Irak in 1043 and Armenia in 1049, and in 1055 forced the Caliph to grant him the _hereditary_ Sultanate. His son Alp Arslan conquered Syria and, by the victory of Manzikert, gained eastern Asia Minor. The remnant of the Byzantine Empire thenceforward possessed no importance to, or influence on, the further destinies of the Turkish Islamic Imperium.

This is the phase, too, which in Egypt is concealed under the name of the “Hyksos.” Between the XIIth and the XVIIIth Dynasties lay two centuries,[767] which began with the collapse of the _ancien régime_ which had culminated with Sesostris III,[768] and ended with the beginning of the New Empire. The numbering of the dynasties itself suffices to disclose something catastrophic. In the lists of kings the names appear successive or parallel, usurpers of obscurest origin, generals, people with strange titles, often reigning only a few days. With the very first king of the XIIIth Dynasty the high-Nile records at Semne break off, and with his successor the archives at Kahun come to an end. It is the time out of which the Leiden Papyrus portrays the great social revolution.[769] The fall of the Government and the victory of the mass is followed by outbreaks of the army and the rise of ambitious soldiers. In Egypt from about 1680 appears the name of the “Hyksos,”[770] a designation with which the historians of the New Empire, who no longer understood or wished to understand the meaning of the epoch, covered up the shame of these years. These Hyksos, there can be no doubt whatever, played the part that the Armenians played in Byzantium; and in the Classical world too, the destinies of the Cimbri and Teutones, would have gone the same way had they defeated Marius and his legions of city _canaille_; they would have filled the armies of the Triumvirs again and again, and in the end probably set up barbarian chieftains in their place--for the case of Jugurtha shows the lengths to which foreigners dared to go with the Rome of those days. The provenance or constitution of the intruders does not matter--they might be body-guards, insurgent slaves, Jacobins, or purely alien tribes. What does matter is what they were for the Egyptian world in that century of theirs. In the end they set up a state in the Western Delta and built a capital, Auaris, for it.[771] One of their leaders, Khyan by name, who styled himself, not Pharaoh, but “Embracer of the Country” and “prince of the young men” (names as essentially revolutionary as the _Consul sine collega_ or _dictator prepetuus_ of Cæsar’s time) a man probably of the stamp of John Tzimisces, ruled over all Egypt and spread his renown as far as Crete and the Euphrates. But after him began a fight of all the districts for the Imperium, and out of that fight Amasis and the Theban dynasty eventually emerged victorious.

For us this time of Contending States began with Napoleon and his violent-arbitrary government by order. His head was the first in our world to make effective the notion of a military and at the same time popular world-domination--something altogether different from the Empire of Charles V and even the British Colonial Empire of his own day. If the nineteenth century has been relatively poor in great wars--and revolutions--and has overcome its worst crises diplomatically by means of congresses, this has been due precisely to the continuous and terrific war-preparedness which has made disputants, fearful at the eleventh hour of the consequences, postpone the definitive decision again and again, and led to the substitution of chess-moves for war. For this is the century of gigantic permanent armies and universal compulsory service. We ourselves are too near to it to see it under this terrifying aspect. In all world-history there is no parallel. Ever since Napoleon, hundreds of thousands, and latterly millions, of men have stood ready to march, and mighty fleets renewed every ten years have filled the harbours. It is a war without war, a war of overbidding in equipment and preparedness, a war of figures and tempo and technics, and the diplomatic dealings have been not of court with court, but of headquarters with headquarters. The longer the discharge was delayed, the more huge became the means and the more intolerable the tension. This is the Faustian, the dynamic, form of “the Contending States” during the first century of that period, but it ended with the explosion of the World War. For the demand of these four years has been altogether too much for the principle of universal service--child of the French Revolution, revolutionary through and through, as it is in this form--and for all tactical methods evolved from it.[772] The place of the permanent armies as we know them will gradually be taken by professional forces of volunteer war-keen soldiers; and from millions we shall revert to hundreds of thousands. But _ipso facto_ this second century will be one of _actually_ Contending States. _These_ armies are not substitutes for war--they are _for_ war, and they want war. Within two generations it will be they whose will prevails over that of all the comfortables put together. In these wars of theirs for the heritage of the whole world, continents will be staked, India, China, South Africa, Russia, Islam called out, new technics and tactics played and counterplayed. The great cosmopolitan foci of power will dispose at their pleasure of smaller states--their territory, their economy and their men alike--all that is now merely province, passive object, means to end, and its destinies are without importance to the great march of things. We ourselves, in a very few years, have learned to take little or no notice of events that before the War would have horrified the world; who to-day seriously thinks about the millions that perish in Russia?

Again and again between these catastrophes of blood and terror the cry rises up for reconciliation of the peoples and for peace on earth. It is but the background and the echo of the grand happening, but, as such, so necessary that we have to assume its existence even if, as in Hyksos Egypt, in Baghdad and Byzantium, no tradition tells of it. Esteem as we may the wish towards all this, we must have the courage to face facts as they are--that is the hall-mark of men of race-quality and it is by the being of these men that _alone_ history is. Life if it would be great, is hard; it lets choose _only_ between victory and ruin, not between war and peace, and to the victory belong the sacrifices of victory. For that which shuffles querulously and jealously by the side of the events is only literature,--written or thought or lived literature--mere truths that lose themselves in the moving crush of facts. History has never deigned to take notice of these propositions. In the Chinese world Hiang-Sui tried, as early as 535, to found a peace league. In the period of the Contending States, imperialism (_Lien-heng_) was opposed by the League of Nations idea (_Hoh-tsung_),[773] particularly in the southern regions, but it was foredoomed like every half-measure that steps into the path of a whole, and it had vanished even before the victory of the North. But both tendencies alike rejected the political taste of the Taoists, who, in those fearful centuries, elected for intellectual self-disarmament, thereby reducing themselves to the level of mere material to be used up by others and for others in the grand decisions. Even Roman politics--deliberately improvident as the Classical spirit was in all other respects--at least made one attempt to bring the whole world into one system of equal co-ordinated forces which should do away with all necessity for further wars--that is, when at the fall of Hannibal Rome forwent the chance of incorporating the East. But reluctance was useless; the party of the younger Scipio went over to frank Imperialism in order to make an end of chaos, although its clear-sighted leader foresaw therein the doom of his city, which possessed (and in a high degree) the native Classical incapacity for organizing anything whatever. The way from Alexander to Cæsar is unambiguous and unavoidable, and the strongest nation of any and every Culture, consciously or unconsciously, willing or unwilling, has had to tread it.

From the rigour of these facts there is no refuge. The Hague Conference of 1907 was the prelude of the World War; the Washington Conference of 1921 will have been that of other wars. The history of these times is no longer an intellectual match of wits in elegant forms for pluses and minuses, from which either side can withdraw when it pleases. The alternatives now are to stand fast or to go under--there is no middle course. The only moral that the logic of things permits to us now is that of the climber on the face of the crag--a moment’s weakness and all is over. To-day all “philosophy” is nothing but an inward abdication and resignation, or a craven hope of escaping realities by means of mysticisms. It was just the same in Roman times. Tacitus tells us[774] how the famous Musonius Rufus tried, by exhortations on the blessings of peace and the evils of war, to influence the legions that in 70 stood before the gates of Rome, and barely escaped alive from their blows. The military commander Avidius Cassius called the Emperor Marcus Aurelius a “philosophical old woman.”

In these conditions so much of old and great traditions as remains, so much of historical “fitness” and experience as has got into the blood of the twentieth-century nations, acquires an unequalled potency. For us _creative_ piety, or (to use a more fundamental term) the pulse that has come down to us from first origins, adheres only to forms that are older than the Revolution and Napoleon,[775] forms which grew and were not made. Every remnant of them, however tiny, that has kept itself alive in the being of any self-contained minority whatever will before long rise to incalculable values and bring about historical effects which no one yet imagines to be possible. The traditions of an old monarchy, of an old aristocracy, of an old polite society, in so much as they are still healthy enough to keep clear of professional or professorial politics, in so far as they possess honour, abnegation, discipline, the genuine sense of a great mission (_race-quality_, that is, and training), sense of duty and sacrifice--can become a centre which holds together the being-stream of an entire people and enables it to outlast this time and make its landfall in the future. To be “in condition” is everything. It falls to us to live in the most trying times known to the history of a great Culture. The last race to keep its form, the last living tradition, the last leaders who have both at their back, will pass through and onward, victors.

X {sic}

By the term “Cæsarism” I mean that kind of government which, irrespective of any constitutional formulation that it may have, is in its inward self a return to thorough formlessness. It does not matter that Augustus in Rome, and Hwang-ti in China, Amasis in Egypt and Alp Arslan in Baghdad disguised their position under antique forms. The spirit of these forms was dead,[776] and so all institutions, however carefully maintained, were thenceforth destitute of all meaning and weight. Real importance centred in the wholly personal power exercised by the Cæsar, or by anybody else capable of exercising it in his place. It is the _récidive_ of a form-fulfilled world into primitivism, into the cosmic-historyless. Biological stretches of time once more take the place vacated by historical periods.[777]

At the beginning, where the Civilization is developing to full bloom (to-day), there stands the miracle of the Cosmopolis, the great petrifact, a symbol of the formless--vast, splendid, spreading in insolence. It draws within itself the being-streams of the now impotent countryside, human masses that are wafted as dunes from one to another or flow like loose sand into the chinks of the stone. Here money and intellect celebrate their greatest and their last triumphs. It is the most artificial, the cleverest phenomenon manifested in the light-world of human eyes--uncanny, “too good to be true,” standing already almost beyond the possibilities of cosmic formation.

Presently, however, the idea-less facts come forward again, naked and gigantic. The eternal-cosmic pulse has finally overcome the intellectual tensions of a few centuries. In the form of democracy, money has won. There has been a period in which politics were almost its preserve. But as soon as it has destroyed the old orders of the Culture, the chaos gives forth a new and overpowering factor that penetrates to the very elementals of Becoming--the Cæsar-men. Before them the money collapses. _The Imperial Age, in every Culture alike, signifies the end of the politics of mind and money_. The powers of the blood, unbroken bodily forces, resume their ancient lordship. “Race” springs forth, pure and irresistible--the strongest win and the residue is their spoil. They seize the management of the world, and the realm of books and problems petrifies or vanishes from memory. From now on, new destinies in the style of the pre-Culture time are possible afresh, and visible to the consciousness without cloaks of causality. There is no inward difference more between the lives of Septimius Severus and Gallienus and those of Alaric and Odoacer. Rameses, Trajan, Wu-ti belong together in a uniform up-and-down of historyless time-stretches.[778]

Once the Imperial Age has arrived, there are no more political problems. People manage with the situation as it is and the powers that be. In the period of Contending States, torrents of blood had reddened the pavements of all world-cities, so that the great truths of Democracy might be turned into actualities, and for the winning of rights without which life seemed not worth the living. Now these rights are won, but the grandchildren cannot be moved, even by punishment, to make use of them. A hundred years more, and even the historians will no longer understand the old controversies. Already by Cæsar’s time reputable people had almost ceased to take part in the elections.[779] It embittered the life of the great Tiberius that the most capable men of his time held aloof from politics, and Nero could not even by threats compel the Equites to come to Rome in order to exercise their rights. This is the end of the great politics. The conflict of intelligences that had served as substitute for war must give place to war itself in its most primitive form.

It is, therefore, a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of the period to presume, as Mommsen did,[780] a deep design of subdivision in the “dyarchy” fashioned by Augustus, with its partition of powers between Princeps and Senate. A century earlier this constitution would have been a real thing, but that would in itself suffice to make it impossible for such an idea to have entered the heads of the present force-men. Now it meant nothing but the attempt of a weak personality to deceive itself as to inexorable facts by mantling them in empty forms. Cæsar saw things as they were and was guided in the exercise of his rulership by definite and unsentimental practical considerations. The legislation of his last months was concerned wholly with transitional provisions, none of which were intended to be permanent. This precisely is what has generally been overlooked. He was far too deep a judge of things to anticipate development or to settle its definitive forms at this moment, with the Parthian War impending. But Augustus, like Pompey before him, was not the master of his following, but thoroughly dependent upon it and its views of things. The form of the Principate was not at all his discovery, but the doctrinaire execution of an obsolete party-ideal that Cicero--another weakling--had formulated.[781] When, on the 13th January 27, Augustus gave back the state-power to the “Senate and People” of Rome--a scene all the more meaningless because of its sincerity--he kept the Tribunate for himself. In fact, this was the one element of the polity that could manifest itself in actuality. The Tribune was the legitimate successor of the Tyrant,[782] and as long ago as 122 B.C. Caius Gracchus had put into the title a connotation limited no longer by the legal bounds of the office, but only by the personal talents of the incumbent. From him it is a direct line through Marius and Cæsar to the young Nero, who set himself to defeat the political purposes of his mother Agrippina. The Princeps,[783] on the other hand, was thenceforth only a costume, a rank--very likely a fact in society, certainly not a fact in politics. And this, precisely, was the conception invested with light and glamour by the theory of Cicero, and _already_--and by him of all people--associated with the Divus-idea.[784] The “co-operation” of the Senate and People, on the contrary, was an antiquated ceremonial, with about as much life in it as the rites of the Fratres Arvales--also restored by Augustus. The great parties of the Gracchan age had long become retinues--Cæsarians and Pompeians--and finally there only remained on the one side the formless omnipotence, the plain brutal “fact,” the Cæsar--or whoever managed to get the Cæsar under his influence--and on the other side the handful of narrow ideologues who concealed dissatisfaction under philosophy and thenceforward sought to advance their ideals by conspiracy. What these Stoics were in Rome, the Confucians were in China--and, seen thus, the episode of the “Burning of the Books,” decreed by the Chinese Augustus in 212, begins to be intelligible through the reproach of immense vandalism that the minds of later literates fastened upon it. But, after all, these Stoic enthusiasts for an ideal that had become impossible had killed Cæsar:[785] to the Divus-cult they opposed a Cato- and Brutus-cult; the philosophers in the Senate (which by then was only a noble club) never wearied of lamenting the downfall of “freedom” and fomenting conspiracies such as Piso’s in 65. Had this been the state of things at Nero’s death, it would have been Sulla over again; and that is why Nero put to death the Stoic Thrasea Pætus, why Vespasian executed Helvidius Priscus, and why copies of the history of Cremutius Cordus, which lauded Brutus as the last of the Romans, were collected and burnt in Rome. These were acts of defensive State necessity _vis-à-vis_ blind ideology--acts such as those we know of Cromwell and Robespierre--and it was in exactly the same position that the Chinese Cæsars found themselves _vis-à-vis_ the school of Confucius, which had formerly worked out their ideal of a state-constitution and now had no notion of enduring the actuality. This great Burning of the Books was nothing but the destruction of one part of the politico-philosophical literature and the abolition of propaganda and secret organizations.[786] This defensive lasted in both Imperia for a century, and then even reminiscences of party-political passions faded out and the two philosophies became the ruling world-outlook of the Imperial age in its maturity.[787] But the world was now the theatre of _tragic family-histories_ into which state-histories were dissolved; the Julian-Claudian house destroyed Roman history, and the house of Shi-hwang-ti (even from 206 B.C.) destroyed Chinese, and we darkly discern something of the same kind in the destinies of the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut and her brothers (1501-1447). It is the last step to the definitive. With world-peace--_the peace of high policies_--the “sword side”[788] of being retreats and the “spindle side” rules again; henceforth there are only _private_ histories, private destinies, private ambitions, from top to bottom, from the miserable troubles of fellaheen to the dreary feuds of Cæsars for the private possession of the world. The wars of the age of world-peace are private wars, more fearful than any State wars because they are formless.

For world-peace--which has often existed in fact--involves the private renunciation of war on the part of the immense majority, but along with this it involves an unavowed readiness to submit to being the booty of others who do _not_ renounce it. It begins with the State-destroying wish for universal reconciliation, and it ends in nobody’s moving a finger so long as misfortune only touches his neighbour. Already under Marcus Aurelius each city and each land-patch was thinking of itself, and the activities of the ruler were his private affair as other men’s were theirs. The remoter peoples were as indifferent to him and his troops and his aims as they were to the projects of Germanic war-bands. On this _spiritual_ premiss a second Vikingism develops. The state of being “in form” passes from nations to bands and retinues of adventurers, self-styled Cæsars, seceding generals, barbarian kings, and what not--in whose eyes the population becomes in the end merely a part of the landscape. There is a deep relation between the heroes of the Mycenæan primitive age and the soldier-emperors of Rome, and between, say, Menes and Rameses II. In our Germanic world the spirits of Alaric and Theodoric will come again--there is a first hint of them in Cecil Rhodes--and the alien executioners of the Russian preface, from Jenghiz Khan to Trotski (with the episode of Petrine Tsarism between them) are, when all is said and done, very little different from most of the pretenders of the Latin-American republics, whose private struggles have long since put an end to the form-rich age of the Spanish Baroque.

With the formed state, high history also lays itself down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb and enduring. The timeless village and the “eternal” peasant[789] reappear, begetting children and burying seed in Mother Earth--a busy, not inadequate swarm, over which the tempest of soldier-emperors passingly blows. In the midst of the land lie the old world-cities, empty receptacles of an extinguished soul, in which a historyless mankind slowly nests itself. Men live from hand to mouth, with petty thrifts and petty fortunes, and endure. Masses are trampled on in the conflicts of the conquerors who contend for the power and the spoil of this world, but the survivors fill up the gaps with a primitive fertility and suffer on. And while in high places there is eternal alternance of victory and defeat, those in the depths pray, pray with that mighty piety of the Second Religiousness that has overcome all doubts for ever.[790] There, in the souls, world-peace, the peace of God, the bliss of grey-haired monks and hermits, is become actual--and there alone. It has awakened that depth in the endurance of suffering which the historical man in the thousand years of his development has never known. Only with the end of grand History does holy, still Being reappear. It is a drama noble in its aimlessness, noble and aimless as the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and alternance of land and sea, of ice and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at it or we may lament it--but it is there.