Chapter XIV: The Form-World of Economic Life (6)

[727] From the end of the fourth century the nobility developed into a closed circle of families that had, or claimed to have, consuls among their ancestors. The more strictly this condition was enforced, the more frequent were the falsifications of the old consul-lists in order to “legitimize” rising families of strong race and talent. The first (and truly revolutionary) outburst of forgery occurs in the epoch of Appius Claudius the Censor, when the curule ædile C. Flavius, the son of a slave, put the list in order--that was the time when even royal cognomina were discovered amongst plebeian families. The second was in the days of the battle of Pydna (168), when the dominance of the nobility began to assume Cæsarian forms (E. Kornemann, _Der Priesterkodex in der Regia_, 1912, pp. 56, et seq.). Of the 200 Consulates between 232 and 133, 159 fell to 26 families, and thereafter blood-quality being exhausted, but the form as such being all the more studiously preserved in consequence--the rise of _novi homines_ like Cato and Cicero became a rare phenomenon.

[728] Another instance, among many, is its rôle in preparing the German crash of 1918.

[729] And even in France, where the judicial class in the parlements openly scorned the Government, and with impunity tore down royal proclamations from the walls and put up their own _arrêts_ instead (R. Holtzmann, _Französ. Verfassungsgesch._, 1910, p. 353); where “orders were given, but not obeyed, laws enacted, but not executed” (A. Wahl, _Vorgesch. d. franz. Revolution_, I, 29 and passim); where high finance could overthrow Turgot and anyone else whose reform-schemes disquieted it; where the whole educated world, headed by princes and nobles, prelates and generals, was Anglomaniac and applauded opposition in any shape or form--even there nothing would have happened but for the sudden concurrence of a set of incidents--the fashion which set in amongst French officers of aiding the American republicans in their struggle with the English King; the diplomatic reverse in Holland (27 Oct. 1787) in the middle of the reforming activity of the Government; and the perpetual change of ministers under pressure from irresponsible quarters. In the British Empire, the falling-away of the Colonies was the result of attempts of high-Tory circles (in collusion with George III, but in reality of course in their own interests) to strengthen the Royal power. This party possessed in the Colonies a strong contingent of royalists, notably in the South: these elements, fighting on the British side, decided the battle of Camden, and after the final victory of the rebels mostly emigrated to Canada, which had remained loyal.

[730] In 1793 there were 306 members of the House of Commons who were elected by 160 persons in all. Old Sarum, the constituency of the elder Pitt, consisted of one tenement, returning two members.

[731] Afterwards--from 1832--the English nobility itself, through a series of prudent measures, drew the bourgeoisie into _co-operation_ with it, but under its continued guidance and, above all, in the framework of tradition, within which consequently the young talent grew up. Democracy thus actualized itself here so that the Government remained strictly “in form”--the old aristocratic form--while the individual was free to practise politics according to his bent. This transition, in a peasantless society dominated by business interests, was the most remarkable achievement of inner politics in the nineteenth century.

[732] Early, that is, in the post-revolutionary era here considered.--_Tr._

[733] The reassertion of this tradition after the emergency-army of the Wars of Liberation (1812-15) had dispersed into the body of the community is a remarkable story, in which military and political standpoints cannot be separated. See Vidal de la Blache, _La Régéneration de l’Armée Prusse_ (1910), Ch. vi.--_Tr._

[734] See _Preussentum und Sozialismus_, pp. 40, et seq.

[735] The genesis of the Roman Tribunate was a blind incident, the happy consequences of which no one really foresaw. Western Constitutions, on the contrary, have been thoroughly thought out and their effects precisely calculated--whether the calculation proved to be correct or incorrect, the care is undeniable.

[736] From the few European works that concern themselves with questions of ancient Chinese history, it emerges that Chinese literature contains a very great amount of material bearing on this period, which corresponds in innumerable parallels to our own present time. But there is a total lack of any political treatment of it that can be taken seriously. References: Hübotter, _Aus den Plänen der Kämpfenden Reiche_ (1912); Piton, “The Six Great Chancellors of Tsin,” _China Review_, XIII, 202, 255, 365, XIV, 3; Ed. Chavannes, _Mém. hist. de Se-ma-tsien_ (1895 and following); Pfizmair, _Sitz. Wien Akad._, XLIII (1863) (“Tsin”), XLIV (“Tsu”); A. Tschepe, _Histoire du royaume de Ou_ (1896), and _de Tchou_ (1903).

[737] Corresponding more or less to the province of Shen-si.

[738] On the middle Yang-tse-kiang.

[739] Biography 13 of Sze-ma-tsien. So far as the translated evidences allow us to judge, the preparation and dispositions of these campaigns, the boldness of the operations by which he drove the enemy on to ground where he could beat him, and the novel tactical execution of the separate battles, stamp Pe-Ki as one of the greatest military geniuses of all time, a figure worthy indeed of adequate treatment by a military expert. It is from this period that we have the authoritative work of Sun-tse on War: Giles, _Sun-Tse on the Art of War_ (1910). [Or Capt. E. R. Calthrop, _The Book of War--Sun and Wu_ (1908).--_Tr._]

[740] See pp. 312, et seq.

[741] Now approximately Shan-tung and Pe-chi-li.

[742] Piton, “Lu-puh-Weih,” _China Rev._ XIII, pp. 365 et seq.

[743] Even if the Chinese authors themselves misunderstood the expression in the same, or anything like the same, way as their Western translators, the fact would only prove that the appreciation of political problems vanished as rapidly in the Chinese Imperial Age as in fact it did in the Roman--because they were no longer personally and livingly experienced. The much-admired Sze-ma-tsien is after all a compiler of the same rank as Plutarch (with whom he corresponds in date also). The high point of historical comprehension, _which presumes an equivalent experience in life_, must for China have lain in the period of the Contending States, as it lies for us in the nineteenth century and after.

[744] Both, like most of the leading statesmen of the time, were pupils of Kwei-ku-tse, whose knowledge of men, deep sense of the historically possible, and command of the diplomatic technique of the age (the “Art of the vertical and the horizontal”) must have made him one of the most influential personalities of the period. Another figure of the same sort of weight after him was the thinker and war-theorist above alluded to, Sun-tse, who amongst others was the tutor of the Chancellor Lui-Si.

[Sun-Tse’s book of war, as presented in Calthrop’s translation, is comparable to nothing in Western military literature short of Clausewitz’s _Vom Kriege_. Clausewitz was a contemporary and product of the Napoleonic epoch, and the glow of Romanticism has not yet passed from him; Sun, on the other hand, came “later,” and his atmosphere is the shrewd factual atmosphere of pre-Cæsarism.--_Tr._]

[745] A story is told of Sun, that when for a jest (or a demonstration of tactics) opposed forces were made up from the court ladies, one of the commanders, the sovereign’s favourite wife, was executed by Sun’s command for disobeying an order.--_Tr._

[746] Frederick’s “conscripts” (_Landeskinder_) were a long-service element, small in proportion to the population, and of serf status. Only the relative poverty of Prussia compelled this much of departure from the then normal procedure of recruiting volunteers, to which the Prussian army reverted as soon as its treasury could afford to do so. Maurice de Saxe is the one outstanding soldier of the period who advocated universal citizen service. But the famous “_Rêveries_” were written (“in thirteen sleepless nights”) in 1732, before he had held high command. The military works of Leibniz touch upon the subject, but he was a practical man as well as a philosopher, and his detailed proposals are in the spirit of the time. On the contrary, the pure philosopher Spinoza definitely advocated universal service.--_Tr._

[747] Large, that is, relatively to the general development of Classical technics in other fields, which was of the slightest--not in any way outstanding if judged by, say, Assyrian or Egyptian standards.

[748] The book of the Socialist Moh-ti, of this period, treats of universal love of mankind in its first part, of fortress artillery in its second--a singular example of contraposition of truths and facts. Forke in _Ostasiat. Ztschr._, VIII (Hirth number).

[749] A whole literature exists for Napoleon’s “case-shot attack,” which was closely studied in the years before 1914 with the definite aim of finding a key to victories that the mechanical developments in the defensive rifle had made doubtful.--_Tr._

[750] On the side of the North, more than 1½ million men out of barely 20 million inhabitants.

[The total of men of military age in the North was 4,600,000, of whom 2,780,000 actually enlisted. The figure of 1,700,000 is a reduction to a three-year level--i.e., men who served throughout the war counting as 1⅓ each and men who served for one year as ⅓ each. The Southern states put into the field, on the same three-years’ basis, 900,000 out of 1,065,000 men of military age. (Dodge, _Birds Eye View of our Civil War_.)--_Tr._]

[751] To which should be added, though on a small scale, the first serious attempts at submarines, machine-guns, and magazine rifles.--_Tr._

[752] Amongst the wholly new problems was that of rapidly restoring railways and bridges; the bridge at Chattanooga, for the heaviest military trains, 240 metres long and 30 metres high, was built in 4½ days.

[753] Modern Japan belongs to the Western Civilization no less than “modern” Carthage of the third century to the Classical.

[754] For the politico-social history of the Arabian World there is the same lack of deep and penetrating research as for the Chinese. Only the political evolution of the Western margin up to Diocletian, regarded hitherto as within the Classical pale, is an exception.

[755] It was a few thousands only that accompanied the first conquerors and spread themselves from Tunis to Turkestan, and these everywhere constituted themselves a self-contained and close Estate in the entourage of the new potentates. An “Arabian _Völkerwanderung_” is out of the question.

[756] J. Wellhausen, _Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz_ (1902), pp. 309, et seq.

[757] Compare the inner divisions of the English Parliamentary army in and after the Civil Wars.--_Tr._

[758] See p. 261.

[759] K. Dieterich, _Byz. Charakterköpfe_, p. 54: “Since thou wilt have an answer from us, receive it then! Paul has said some in the Church are ordained by God to be Apostles, some prophets, but he said nothing about Emperors--we will not follow though it were an angel that bade us; how much less if thou!”

[760] Cf. p. 316.

[761] Huart, _Gesch. d. Araber_ (1914), I, p. 299.

[762] See _Ency. Brit._, XI ed., art. “Carmathians.”--_Tr._

[763] Krumbacher, _Byz. Lit.-Gesch._, p. 969.

[764] For all this see Krumbacher, op. cit., pp. 969-90; C. Neumann, _Die Weltstellung des Byz. Reiches vor den Kreuzzügen_ (1894), pp. 21, et seq.

[765] Krumbacher, op. cit., 993.

[766] And perhaps not in Baghdad alone, for the gifted Maniakes, who was hailed by the army in Sicily as Emperor and fell in 1043 in his march on Byzantium, must have been a Turk.

[767] 1785-1580. See, for the following, Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._ §§ 298, et seq.; Weill, _La Fin du moyen empire égyptien_ (1918). That Ed. Meyer’s assignment is correct as compared with the 1670 years of Petrie has long been proved by the thickness of the strata in which objects have been found and the tempo of the style-evolution (Minoan included). Here it is demonstrated afresh by comparison with corresponding sections in the other Cultures.

[768] P. 387.

[769] Erman, “_Mahnworte eines ägypt. Propheten_” (_Sitz. Preuss. Akad._, 1919, pp. 804, et seq.): “The higher officials are displaced, the land robbed of its royalty by a few madmen, and the counsellors of the old state pay their court to upstarts; administration has ceased, documents are destroyed, all social differences abolished, the courts fallen into the hands of the mob. The noble classes go hungry and in rags, their children are battered on the wall, and their mummies torn from the grave. Mean fellows become rich and swagger in the palaces on the strength of the herds and ships that they have taken from their rightful owners. Former slave-girls become insolent and aliens lord it. Robbery and murder rule, cities are laid waste, public buildings burned down. The harvest diminishes, no one thinks now of cleanliness, births are few--and oh, that mankind might cease!” Here is the very picture of the megalopolitan and Late revolution, as it was enacted in the Hellenistic (p. 405) and in 1789 and 1871 in Paris. It is the world-city masses, will-less tools of the ambition of leaders who demolish every remnant of order, who desire to see in the outer world the same chaos as reigns within their own selves. Whether these cynical and hopeless attempts start from alien intruders like the Hyksos or the Turks, or from slaves as in the case of Spartacus and Ali; whether the division of property is shouted for as at Syracuse or has a book for banner like Marxism--all this is superficial. It is wholly immaterial what slogans scream to the wind while the gates and the skulls are being beaten in. Destruction is the true and only impulse, and Cæsarism the only issue. The world-city, the land-devouring demon, has set its rootless and futureless men in motion; and in destroying they die.

[770] The Papyrus says: the “archer-folk from without”--that is, the barbarian mercenary troops. To these the native youth attached itself.

[771] Glance also at the Negro-state in Irak and the “contemporary” attempts of Spartacus, Sertorius, and Sextus Pompey, and we get a fair idea of the variety of the possibilities. Weill assumes, 1785-1765, the collapse of the Kingdom, a usurper (a general); 1765-1675, numerous small potentates, in the Delta wholly independent; 1675-1633, struggle for unity, especially the rulers of Thebes, with an ever-increasing retinue of dependent rulers, including the Hyksos; 1633, victory of the Hyksos and defeat of the Thebans; 1591-1571, final triumph of the Thebans.

[772] As an inspiriting idea it may be retained; translated into actuality it will never be again.

[773] Piton, op. cit., p. 521.

[774] _Hist._, III, 1.

[775] Including the constitution of the United States of America. Only thus can we account for the reverence that the American cherishes for it, even where he clearly sees its insufficiency.

[776] Cæsar recognized this clearly. “_Nihil esse rem publicam, appellationem modo sine corpore ac specie_” (Suetonius, _Cæsar_, 77).

[777] See p. 48.

[778] See p. 48.

[779] Cicero, in his _Pro Sestio_, draws attention to the fact that five people for each tribe attended plebiscites, and these really belonged to tribes other than that which they were representing. But these five were present only in order to have themselves bought by the possessors of the real power. Yet it was hardly fifty years since the Italians had died in masses for this franchise.

[780] And, strangely, Ed. Meyer also, in his masterpiece _Cæsars Monarchie_, the one work of statesmanlike quality yet written about this epoch--and previously in his essay on Augustus (_Kleine Schriften_, pp. 441, et seq.).

[781] _De Re Publica_, 54 B.C., a monograph intended for Pompey.

[782] P. 395.

[783] See p. 409.

[784] In _Somnium Scipionis_, VI, 26, he is a god who so rules the State _quam hunc mundum ille princeps deus_.

[785] It was with every justification that, in the presence of the corpse, Brutus called out the name of Cicero, while Antony, on his side, denounced him as the intellectual author of the deed. But this “freedom” meant nothing but the oligarchy of a few families, for the masses had long ago become tired of their rights. Nor is it in the least surprising that Money was behind Intellect in the murder, for the great fortunes of Rome saw in Cæsarism the beginning of the end of their power.

[786] Taoism, on the other hand, was supported, as preaching the entire renunciation of politics. Said Shakespeare’s Cæsar:

“Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’nights.”

[787] Tacitus, even, failed to understand. He hated these first Cæsars, because they defended themselves by every imaginable means against a stealthy opposition--in _his own_ circles--an opposition that from Trajan’s time no longer existed. (Yet a little longer, and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius could himself be a Stoic.--_Tr._)

[788] P. 329.

[789] Pp. 89 and 349.

[790] P. 310.

[791] “Empires perish, but a good verse stands,” said W. von Humboldt on the field of Waterloo. But, all the same, the personality of Napoleon preformed the history of the next century. Good verses!--he should have questioned a peasant by the way-side. They “stand”--for literary teaching. Plato is eternal--for philologists. But Napoleon inwardly rules _us_, all of _us_, our states and our armies, our public opinion, the whole of our political outlook, and the more effectually the less we are conscious of it.

[792] P. 361.

[793] P. 116 and 339.

[794] P. 363.

[795] This is what is expressed in the English proverb: “Men, not measures,” which is the very key to the secrets of all political achievement.

[796] Pp. 18 and 364.

[797] See p. 341.

[798] The same, too, holds good of the Churches, which are different in kind from the Religion--namely, elements of the world of facts and, therefore, political and not religious in the type of their leadership. It was not the Christian evangel, but the Christian martyr, who conquered the world, and that which gave him his strength was not the doctrine, but the example, of the Man on the Cross.

[799] It should scarcely need to be emphasized that this is the basic principle, not of an aristocratic régime, but of government itself. Cleon, Robespierre, Lenin, every gifted mass-leader, has treated his office thus. Anyone who genuinely felt himself as the delegate of the multitude, instead of as the regent of such as do not know what they want, would not remain master of his house for one day. The only question is whether the great popular leaders apply their powers for their own benefit or for that of others; and on that much might be said.

[800] Originally an assembly of nineteen princes and free cities (1529).

[801] See pp. 355, 398, et seq.

[802] Hence it is that on the soil of burgher equality the possession of money immediately takes the place of genealogical rank.

[803] See p. 354.

[804] Pp. 424, et seq. Compare also Wellhausen, _Die relig.-polit. Oppositionsparteien im alten Islam_ (1901).

[805] It is an important factor in the democracy of England and America that in the first the yeomanry had died out and in the second has never existed. The “farmer” is spiritually a suburban and in practice carries on his farming as an industry. Instead of villages, there are only fragments of megalopolis.

[806] And wherever, as in Egypt, India, and the West, there exists a _political_ opposition between the two primary Estates, there is also a clerical party--the party, so to speak, of the Church as distinct from religion and of the priest as distinct from the believer.

[807] And with its content of race-strength it has an excellent chance of successfully doing so.

[808] P. 409.

[809] _Plebs_ corresponds to the “Tiers” (burghers and yeomen) of the eighteenth century, _populus_ to the megalopolitan masses of the nineteenth. The difference manifested itself in their respective attitudes towards the freed slaves, mostly of non-Italian origin. These the Plebs, as an order, sought to thrust away into as few tribes as possible, but in the Populus as a party they very soon came to play the decisive rôle.

[810] P. 412.

[811] Simultaneously, too, the Roman Catholic Church quietly changed the basis of its politics from a class to a party, and did so with a strategic sureness that cannot be too much admired. In the eighteenth century it had been, as regards the style of its diplomacy, the allocation of its offices and the spirit of its higher circles, aristocratic through and through. Think of the type of the abbé, and of the prince-prelates who became ministers and ambassadors, like the young Cardinal Rohan. Now, in the true liberal fashion, opinions took the place of origins, working-power that of taste, and the great weapons of democracy--press, elections, money--were handled with a skill that liberalism proper rarely equalled and never surpassed.

[812] For what follows see M. Gelzer, _Die Nobilität d. röm. Republik_ (1912), pp. 43, et seq.; A. Rosenberg, _Untersuchungen zur röm. Centurienverfassung_(1911), pp. 62, et seq.

[813] The reputation of Tammany Hall in New York is universal, but the relations approximate to this condition in all countries ruled by parties. The American Caucus, which first distributes the offices of State amongst its members and then forces their names upon the mass-electorate, was introduced into England by Joseph Chamberlain in his “National Liberal Federation,” and in Germany its advances have been rapid since 1919.

[814] P. 305.

[815] P. 18, et seq.

[816] For the story of this tragic experiment, see Ed. Meyer, _Gesch. d. Alt._, § 987, et seq.

[817] See p. 417. The “plans of the Contending States,” the Tchun-tsiu-fan-lu, and the biographies of Sze-ma-tsien are full of examples of the pedagogic in interventions of “wisdom” into the province of politics.

[818] For this “Sun-state” formed of slaves and day-labourers see Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencycl._, 2, 961. Similarly, the revolutionary King Cleomenes III of Sparta was likewise under the influence of a Stoic, Sphærus. One can understand why “philosophers and rhetors”--i.e., professional politicians, fantastics and subverters--were expelled again and again by the Roman Senate.

[819] P. 310.

[820] P. 114.

[821] The early democracy, which in our case reaches up to Lincoln, Bismarck, and Gladstone, has to learn this by _experience_. The later democracy, in our case mature parliamentarism, starts out from it; here truths and facts finally separate out in the form of party ideals and party funds. It is the money that gives the real parliamentarian his sense of being freed from the dependence which is implicit in the naïve idea that the elector has of his delegate.

[822] P. 452.

[823] P. 354.

[824] That the mass all the same _feels_ itself as freed is simply another outcome of the profound incompatibility between megalopolitan spirit and mature tradition. Its _acts_, so far from being independent, are in inward relation with its subjection to money-rule.

[825] The German Constitution of 1919--standing by virtue of its date on the verge of the _decline_ of democracy--most naïvely admits a dictature of the party machines, which have attracted all rights into themselves and are seriously responsible to no one. The notorious system of proportional election and the Reichslist [see _Ency. Brit._, 1922 Supplement, II, 249.--_Tr._] secures their self-recruitment. In place of the “people’s” rights, which were axiomatic in the Frankfurt Constitution of 1848, there is now only the right of parties, which, harmless as it sounds, really nurses within itself a Cæsarism of the organizations. It must be allowed, however, that in this respect it is the most advanced of all the constitutions. Its issue is visible already. A few quite small alterations and it confers unrestricted power upon individuals.

[826] And _legislation_, too, was bound up with an office. Even when, as a formality, acceptance or rejection by an assembly was requisite, the law in question could be brought in only by an official; for example, a Tribune. The constitutional demands of the masses, therefore (which in any case were mostly instigated by the real power-holders), expressed themselves in the issue of the elections to office, as the Gracchan period shows.

[827] Even Cæsar, at fifty years of age, was obliged to play this comedy at the Rubicon for his soldiers because they were used to it and expected it when anything was asked of them. It corresponds to the “chest-tones of deep conviction” of our political assemblies.

[828] But the Cleon type must obviously have existed also in contemporary Sparta, and in Rome at the time of the Consular Tribunes.

[829] Gelzer, _Nobilität_, p. 94; along with Ed. Meyer’s _Cæsar_ this book gives the best survey of Roman democratic methods.

[830] “_Inaurari_,” to which end Cicero recommended his friend Trebatius to Cæsar.

[831] “_Tributim ad prandium vocare_,” Cicero, _Pro Murena_, 72.

[832] For from that time sesterces flowed through his hands by the million. The votive treasures of the Gallic temples which he put up for sale in Italy sent down the value of gold with a rush. From King Ptolemy he and Pompey extorted 144,000,000 (and Gabinius another 240,000,000) as the price of recognition. The Consul Æmilius Paullus (50) was bought for 36,000,000, Curio for 60,000,000. We can guess from such figures how enviable was the position of his closer associates. At the triumph of 46 every soldier in an army of well over 100,000 men received 24,000 sesterces, officers and other leaders much more. Yet at his death the state treasury was still full enough to secure Antony’s position.

[833] Gelzer, op. cit., p. 68.

[834] Extortion and corruption were the usual charges. As in those days these things were identical with politics, and the judges and plaintiffs had acted precisely in the same way as the defendants, the art consisted in using the forms of a well-acted ethical passion to cover a party speech, of which the real import was only comprehensible to the initiated. This corresponds entirely with the modern parliamentary usage. The “people” would be very much astonished to see party opponents, after delivering wild speeches in the chamber (for the reporters) chatting together in the lobbies, or to be told how a party passionately champions a proposal after it has made certain by agreement with the other side that it will not be passed. In Rome, too, the judgment was not the important thing in these “trials”; it was enough if a defendant voluntarily left the city and so retired from the occupancy of, or candidature for, office.

[835] See Pöhlmann, _Griech. Gesch._ (1914), pp. 236, et seq. [Cf. Aristophanes, _Wasps_.--_Tr._]

[836] Thus it was possible for Rutilius Rufus to be condemned in the notorious case of 93, because as proconsul he had in accordance with his duty proceeded against the extortions of the concessionnaire associations.

[837] Radio broadcasting has now emerged to enable the leader to make personal conquests of the million, and no one can foretell the changes in political tactic that may ensue therefrom.--_Tr._

[838] The most striking example of this for future generations will be the “War-guilt” question, which is the question--_who_ possesses the power, through control of press and cable in all parts of the world, to establish in world-opinion that truth which he needs for his political ends and to maintain it for so long as he needs it? An altogether different question (which only in Germany is confused with the first) is the purely scientific one--to _whose_ interest was it that an event about which there was already a whole literature should occur in the summer of 1914 in particular?

[839] In preparation for the World War the press of whole countries was brought financially under the command of London and Paris, and the peoples belonging to them reduced to an unqualified intellectual slavery. The more democratic the inner form of a nation is, the more readily and completely it succumbs to this danger. This is the style of the twentieth century. To-day a democrat of the old school would demand, not freedom for the press, but freedom from the press; but meantime the leaders have changed themselves into parvenus who have to secure their position _vis-à-vis_ the masses.

[840] The great Burning of the Books in China (p. 433) was innocuous by comparison.

[841] P. 434.

[842] Herein lies the secret of why all radical (i.e., poor) parties necessarily become the tools of the money-powers, the Equites, the Bourse. Theoretically their enemy is capital, but practically they attack, not the Bourse, but Tradition on behalf of the Bourse. This is as true of to-day as it was for the Gracchan age, and in all countries. Fifty per cent of mass-leaders are procurable by money, office, or opportunities to “come in on the ground-floor,” and with them they bring their whole party.

[843] P. 415.

[844] See _Preussentum und Sozialismus_, p. 41, et seq.

[845] _Political Discourses_, 1752.

[846] The celebrated _Wealth of Nations_, 1776.

[847] It was the opinion of the expert, almost everywhere, that the economic consequences of general mobilization would compel the breaking-up of hostilities within a few weeks.

[848] P. 81.

[849] Pp. 1, et seq., and 335.

[850] P. 327, et seq.

[851] Pp. 95, 120, et seq.

[852] P. 5.

[853] “_Negotium_” (by which is meant every form of gainful activity; business is _commercium_) “_negat otium neque quærit veram quietem quæ est deus_,” are the words of the _Decretum Gratiani_ (cf. p. 77).

[854] Pilate’s question settles also the relation of economy to science. The religious man will always try in vain, catechism in hand, to improve the instincts of his political environment. But it goes on its way undisturbed and leaves him to his thoughts. The saint can only choose between adapting himself to this environment--and then he becomes a Church politician and conscienceless--and fleeing from it into a hermitage or even into the Beyond. But the same happens also--and here not without a comic side to it--in the intellectualism of the city. The philosopher who has built up an ethical-social system that is replete with virtue and (of course) the only true one, may enlighten the economic life as to how it should behave and at what it should aim. It is even the same spectacle, whether labelled liberal, anarchistic, or socialistic, or derived from Plato, Proudhon, or Marx. Here, too, economy carries on undisturbed and leaves the thinker to choose between withdrawing to pour out on paper his lamentations of this world, and entering it as an economic politician, in which case he either makes himself ridiculous, or else promptly throws his theory to the devil and starts to win himself a leading place.

[855] See pp. 1, et seq.

[856] See p. 6.

[857] Exactly the same is true of wandering bands of hunters and pastorals. But the economic foundation of the great Culture is always a mankind that adheres fast to the soil, and nourishes and supports the higher economic forms.

[858] See p. 331.

[859] Undershaft in Shaw’s _Major Barbara_ is a true ruler-figure of this realm.

[860] P. 344. As a means for governments it is called finance-economy (financial policy). Here the whole nation is the object of a levy of tribute, in the forms of taxes and customs, of which the purpose is not to make, so to say, the upkeep of its life more comfortable, but to secure its historical position and to enhance its power.

[861] Using the phrase widely, as including, for instance, the rise of workmen, journalists, and men of learning to positions of leadership.

[862] P. 331.

[863] P. 31.

[864] See pp. 172 and 280.

[865] Including the medical profession, which indeed is indistinguishable in primitive times from the priests and magicians.

[866] Herdsmen, fishermen, and hunters included. There is, moreover, a strange and very profound relation between peasant and miner, evidenced in ancient sagas and rites. The metals are coaxed out of the shaft as the corn out of the earth, and the game out of the thicket. And for the real miner even metal is something that _lives_ and grows.

[867] This is true from the earliest sea-voyaging to the Bourse of the world-city, and all traffic, whether by river, road, or rail belongs with it.

[868] With this belong the machine industry, with its purely Western type of the inventor and engineer, and practically, also, a great part of the modern agronomy, as, for instance, in America.

[869] Even to-day the mining and metal industries are felt to be somehow nobler than, for example, the chemical and electrical. They possess the most ancient patent of nobility in the technical world, and a relic of cult-mystery lies over them.

[870] That is, up to the limit of servage and slavery, although very often--as in the present-day East and as in Rome in the case of “vernæ”--slavery itself may be nothing but a form of compulsory-labour contract and, apart from that, hardly sensible. The free employee often lives in far stricter subjection and enjoys far less respect, and his formal right to “give notice” is in many cases practically valueless to him.

[British readers will recall in this connexion the “Chinese slavery” controversy in South Africa in 1904, and the questions of indentured labour that come to the surface not infrequently in Australian politics. And in an older generation defenders of slavery as practised in the sugar islands of the West Indies are still to be found--not to mention the survivors and tradition-bearers of the “Old South” in the United States.--_Tr._]

[871] P. 60.

[872] We know this accurately for the Egyptian and the Gothic beginnings, and in general terms for the Chinese and the Classical; as for the _economic pseudomorphosis_ of the Arabian (see pp. 189, et seq., 349) it may be summarized, after Hadrian, as a process of disintegration of the highly civilized Classical money-economy culminating in the appearance, under Diocletian, of a Springtime barter-economy with, in the East, the true Magian element of bargaining visibly superposed.

[873] P. 343.

[874] Neither the copper pieces of the Italian Villanova-graves of early Homeric times (Willers, _Gesch. d. röm. Kupferprägung_, p. 18) nor the early Chinese bronze coins in the form of women’s drapery (_pu_), bells, rings, or knives (_tsien_, Conrady, _China_, p. 504) are described as money, but quite distinctly symbols of goods. And the coins struck by the governments of early Gothic times (in imitation of the Classical) as signs of sovereignty figured in economic life only as wares; a piece of gold is worth as much as a cow, _but not vice versa_.

[875] Hence it is that so often he is not an outcome of the fixed and self-contained life of the countryside, but an alien appearing in it, an alien having neither importance nor antecedents. This is the rôle of the Phœnicians in the earliest period of the Classical; of the Romans in the East in Mithradates’s time; of the Jews, and with them Byzantines, Persians, and Armenians, in the Gothic West; of the Arabs in the Sudan; of the Indians in East Africa; and of the West-Europeans in present-day Russia.

[876] And, consequently, on a very small scale. As foreign trade was in those days highly adventurous and appealed to the imagination, it was as a rule immensely exaggerated. The “great” merchants of Venice and the Hansa about 1300 were hardly the equals of the more distinguished craftsmen. The turnover of even the Medici or the Fugger about 1400 was equivalent to that of a shop-business in a small town to-day. The largest merchant vessels, in which usually several traders held part shares, were much smaller than modern German river-barges, and made only _one_ considerable voyage each year. The celebrated wool-export of England, a main element of Hanseatic trade, amounted about 1270 to hardly as much as the contents of two modern goods-trains (Sombart, _Der moderne Kapitalismus_, I, pp. 280, et seq.).

[877] P. 91.

[878] Cf. Vol. I, Ch. II.

[879] Marks and dollars are no more “money” than metres and grammes are “forces.” _Pieces_ of money are real values. It is only our ignorance of Classical physics that has saved us from confusing gravitation with a pound-weight--in our mathematics, with its Classical basis, we still mix number with magnitude, and our imitation of Classical coinage has brought about the same confusion between money and pieces of money.

[880] Conversely, therefore, we can call the metric system (cm., g.) a valuation, and in fact all money-measures proceed from the weight theories of physics.

[881] Similarly all value-theories, however objective they are meant to be, are developed--and inevitably so--out of a subjective principle. That of Marx, for example, defines value in the way that promotes the interest of the manual worker, the effort of the discoverer or the organizer seeming to him, therefore, valueless. But it would be wrong to describe this as “erroneous.” All these theories are “right” for their supporters and “wrong” for their opponents, and it is not reasons but _life_ that settles whether one is a supporter or an opponent.

[882] The Western introduced (on a very modest scale) by the Bank of England from the end of the eighteenth century, the Chinese dating from the period of the Contending States.

[883] And is thought of as “amount,” whereas we speak of the “extent” of a property in goods.

[884] Even to the modern pirates of the money-market who intervene amongst the interveners and gamble with money as “wares.”

[885] Preisigke, _Girowesen im griechischen Ægypten_ (1910). These trading forms of the Ptolemaic period were already in vogue, and at the same high level, under the XVIIIth Dynasty.

[886] So also with the bourgeois ideal of freedom. In theory and, therefore, constitutionally, a man may be free _in principle_, but _actually_, in the economic private-life of the cities, he is made free only by money.

[887] The name “bourse” can be applied even in other Cultures, if by that word we mean the thought-organ of a developed money-economy.

[888] Preface to _Major Barbara_ (Constable, London 1909).

[889] P. 343.

[890] The “farmer” is the man whose connexion with the piece of land is no longer anything more than practical.

[891] The increasing intensity of this thinking appears in the economic picture as a _growth of the available money-mass_, which is abstract and imagined and has nothing to do with the visible supply of gold as a ware. The “stiffening” of the money-market, for example, is a purely intellectual process played out in the hands of a small handful of men. The increasing energy of money-thinking consequently awakens, in every Culture, the feeling that the “value of money is going down”--enormously so, for example, in the time between Solon and Alexander--with reference, namely, to the unit of calculation. What actually happens is that the mercantile units of value have become artificial and no longer comparable with the primary and livingly experiential values of the peasant economy. In the end it ceases to matter in what figures the Attic treasure of the Delian League (454) or the sums involved in the peace-treaties of 241 and 201, or the booty of Pompey in 64 are reckoned, and whether we ourselves shall pass in a few decades from the milliards--still unknown in 1850, but commonplace to-day--to the billions. There is no common standard for the value of a talent in 430 and in 30 B.C., for gold, like cattle and corn, has continually altered not only its own numeration, but its significance within an ever-advancing urban economy. The only steady element is the fact that quantity of money--not to be confused with the stock of tokens and the means of payment--is an _alter ego_ mirroring thought in money.

[892] Cf. Vol. I, Ch. II.

[893] Friedländer, _Röm. Sittengesch._, IV (1921), p. 301.

[894] Sallust, _Catilina_, 35, 3.

[895] P. 458.

[896] How difficult it was for Classical man to figure to himself the transformation of a physically indefinable asset like land into bodily money is shown by the stone posts (ὅροι) on land in Greece, which were meant to _represent_ the mortgages on it, and by the Roman method of sale _per æs et libram_, in which a clod of earth was handed over for a coin in the presence of witnesses. Consequently, trade in goods (properly so called) never existed, nor anything like, for example, a current price for arable land. A regular relation between land-value and money-value was as unthinkable to the Classical mind as such a relation between artistic value and money-value. Intellectual--i.e., incorporeal--products like dramas and frescoes possessed economically no value at all. For the Classical idea of law, cf. p. 81.

[897] Not very much can have been left of Classical art-treasures even by Augustus’s time. The refined Athenians themselves thought far too unhistorically to be moved to spare a chryselephantine statue merely because it was the work of Phidias. It is worth remembering that the gold parts of the famous Athene-figure of the Parthenon cella were made removable and tested for weight from time to time. Economic use of them, therefore, was provided for from the outset.

[898] _Ges. Schriften_, IV, 200, et seq.

[899] P. 600.

[900] The belief that slaves ever constituted, even in Athens or Ægina, as much as a third of the population is a complete delusion. On the contrary, the revolutions of the period after 400 presuppose an enormous surplus of free paupers.

[901] P. 480.

[902] Herein lies the difference between this slavery and the sugar-slavery of our own Baroque. The latter represents a threshold phase of our _machine industry_, an organization of “living” energy, which began with man-fuel, but presently passed over to coal-fuel; and slavery came to be considered immoral only when coal had established itself. Looked at from this angle, the victory of the North in the American Civil War (1865) meant the economic victory of the concentrated energy of coal over the simple energy of the muscles.

[903] Pp. 371, et seq. The resemblance with the Egyptian administration under the Old Kingdom and the Chinese in the earliest Chóu period is unmistakable.

[904] The _clerici_ of these exchequer offices were the archetype of the modern bank-clerk. Cf. p. 371.

[905] Hampe, _Deutsche Kaisergeschichte_, p. 246. Leonardo Pisano, whose _Liber Abaci_ (1202) was authoritative in accountancy till well beyond the Renaissance, and who introduced, besides the Arabian system of numerals, negative numbers to indicate debit, was promoted by the great Hohenstaufen.

[906] P. 75.

[907] Sombart, _Der moderne Kapitalismus_, II, p. 119.

[908] There is a close relation between our picture of the nature of electricity and the process of the “clearing-house,” in which the positive and negative money-positions of several firms (centres of tension) are equated amongst themselves by a purely mental act and the true position made presentable by a booking. Cf. Vol. I, Ch. XI.

[909] Vol. I, ch. II.

[910] P. 81.

[911] In our Culture the credit of a country rests upon its economic capacity and the political organization thereof--which imparts to the operations and bookings of finance the character of real money-creations--and not on any quantity of gold that may be put into this or that. It is the Classicist superstition that raises the gold reserve to the status of an actual measure of credit--actual in that the level of credit is thereby made dependent, not upon “will,” but upon “can.” But the current coins are _wares_, which, relatively to national credit, possess a _price_--the poorer the credit, the higher the price of gold--so that thenceforth it can only be upheld against that of _other_ wares. Thus gold is measured like other wares against the unit of book-reckoning, and not vice versa as the term “gold standard” suggests. It serves also as means of payment in minor transactions, as for that matter a postage-stamp does. In old Egypt (whose money-thought is astoundingly like the Western) there was nothing resembling the coin even under the New Empire. The written transfer was entirely sufficient, and the Classical coins that filtered in from 650 to the founding of Alexandria and the Hellenistic régime were usually cut to pieces and reckoned by weight as a ware.

[912] That is why it does not exist for our (present) jurisprudence.

[913] All this equally holds good for the case of “workers” taking over the leadership of the works. Either they are incapable of management, and the business collapses, or they are capable of something, and then they themselves become inwardly entrepreneurs and think thenceforward only of maintaining their power. No theory can eliminate this fact from the world, for so life _is_.

[914] Thus it is only since 1770 that the banks have become centres of an economic power which made its first intervention with politics at the Congress of Vienna. Till then the banker had in the main concerned himself with bill business. The Chinese, and even the Egyptian, banks had a different significance, and the Classical banks, even in the Rome of Cæsar’s day, may best be described as cash-tills. They collected the yield of taxes in cash, and lent cash against replacement; thus the temples, with their stock of precious metal in the form of votive offerings, became “banks.” The temple of Delos, through several centuries, lent at ten per cent.

[915] The idea of the Firm took shape even in Late Gothic times as “_ratio_” [hence the modern French phrase “_raison sociale_”--_Tr._] or “_negotiatio_.” It is impossible to render it exactly in a Classical language. _Negotium_ meant for the Romans a concrete process, a “deal” and not a “business.”

[916] Pöhlmann, _griech. Geschichte_ (1914), p. 216, et seq.

[917] Gercke-Norden, _Einl. in der Altertumswissensch._, III, p. 291.

[918] Kromayer, in Hartmann’s _Röm. Gesch._, p. 150.

[919] The “Jews” of those times were the Romans (p. 318), and the Jews themselves were peasants and artizans and small traders (Pârvan, _Die Nationalität der Kaufleute im röm. Kaiserreiche_, 1909; also Mommsen, _Röm. Gesch._, V, p. 471); that is, they followed the very callings that in the Gothic period became the _object_ of their merchant activity. Present-day “Europe” is in exactly the same position _vis-à-vis_ the Russians whose profoundly mystical inner life feels “thinking in money” _as a sin_. (The Pilgrim in Gorki’s _Night-asylum_, and Tolstoi’s thought generally; pp. 194, 278.) Here to-day as in the Syria of Jesus’s time we have two economic worlds juxtaposed (pp. 192, et seq.): an upper, alien, and civilized world intruded from the West (the Bolshevism of the first years, totally Western and un-Russian, is the lees of this infiltration), and a townless barter-life that goes on deep below, uncalculating and exchanging only for immediate needs. We have to think of the catchwords of the surface as a voice, in which the Russian, simple and busied wholly with his soul, hears resignedly the will of God. Marxism amongst Russians is based on an inward misunderstanding. They bore with the higher economic life of Petrinism, but they neither created it nor recognized it. The Russian does not fight Capital, but he does not _comprehend_ it. Anyone who understands Dostoyevski will sense in these people a young humanity _for which as yet no money exists_, but only goods in relation to a life whose centre of gravity does _not_ lie on the economical side. The horror of values supervening from nowhere which before the war drove many to suicide is a misconstrued literary disguise of the fact that, for a townless barter-thinking, money-getting by means of money is an impiety, and (from the view-point of the coming Russian religion) a sin. To-day, with the towns of Tsarism in ruin and the mankind in them living the village life under the crust (temporarily) of urban-thinking Bolshevism, he has freed himself from the Western economy. His apocalyptic hatred--the same that the simple Jew of Jesus’s day bore to the Roman--is directed against Petersburg, as a city and the seat of a political power of Western stamp, but also as the centre of a thinking in Western money that has poisoned and misdirected the whole life. The Russian of the deeps to-day is bringing into being a third kind of Christianity, still priestless, and built _on the John Gospel_--a Christianity that stands much nearer to the Magian than to the Faustian and, consequently, rests upon a new symbolism of baptism, and looks neither at Rome nor at Wittenberg, but past Byzantium towards Jerusalem, with premonitions of coming crusades. This is the _only_ thing that this new Russia really cares about. And it will no doubt let itself fall once again under the economy of the West, as the primitive Christian submitted to the Romans and the Gothic Christian to the Jews. But inwardly it has no part nor lot therein. (Cf. pp. 192, 226, 278, 293, 295.)

[920] See the article “Diocletian, Edict of,” _Ency. Brit._, XI ed.--_Tr._

[921] P. 6.

[922] Pp. 9 et seq.

[923] P. 25.

[924] P. 25.

[925] P. 268.

[926] P. 134.

[927] Pp. 25, et seq.; 267, et seq.

[928] And not vice versa. Cf. p. 268.

[929] The “correctness” of physical data (i.e., their applicability never disproved up to date, and therefore ranking as an _interpretation_) is wholly independent of their technical value. An undoubtedly wrong, and even self-contradictory, theory may be more valuable for practical purposes than a “correct” and profound one, and physical science has long been careful to avoid applying the words “right” and “wrong” in the popular sense, and to regard their syntheses as images rather than flat formulæ.

[930] What Diels has managed to assemble in his work _Antike Technik_ amounts to a comprehensive nullity. If we take away from it what belongs to the older Babylonian Civilization (such as water clocks and sun-dials) and to the younger Arabian Springtime (such as chemistry or the wonder-clock of Gaza), there is nothing left but devices, such as door-locks of a sort, that it would be an insult to attribute to any other Culture.

[931] The Chinese Culture, too, made almost all these European discoveries on its own account--including compass, telescope, printing, gunpowder, paper, porcelain--but the Chinese did not wrest, but _wheedled_, things out of Nature. No doubt he felt the advantages of his knowledge and turned it to account, but he did not hurl himself upon it to exploit it.

[932] P. 301.

[933] It is the same spirit that distinguishes the Jewish, Parsee, Armenian, Greek, and Arab ideas of business from that of the Western peoples.

[934] P. 301. Albertus Magnus lived on in legend as the great magician. Roger Bacon meditated upon steam-engines, steamships, and aircraft. (F. Strunz, _Gesch. d. Naturwiss. im Mittelalter_, 1910, p. 88.)

[935] P. 268. According to Roger Bacon the “third rôle of science,” which is not relative to the other sciences, consists in the power that makes it to search the secrets of nature, to discover past and future, and to produce so many marvellous results that power is assured to those who possess it.... The Church should take it into consideration in order to spare Christian blood in the struggle with the infidel and above all in preparation for the perils that will menace us in the days of Antichrist (E. Gilson, _Philosophie au Moyen Âge_, p. 218).--_Tr._

[936] P. 288.

[937] Greek fire was only to terrify and to ignite, but here the tense force of the gases of explosion are converted into energy of motion. Anyone who seriously compares the two does not understand the spirit of the Western technique.

[938] Marx is quite right; it is one of the creations (and what is more, the proudest creation) of the bourgeoisie. But, spellbound as he is by the ancient-mediæval-modern scheme, he has failed to note that it is only the bourgeoisie of this one single Culture that is master of the destiny of the Machine. So long as it dominates the earth, every non-European tries and will try to fathom the secret of this terrible weapon. Nevertheless, inwardly he abhors it, be he Indian or Japanese, Russian or Arab. It is something fundamental in the essence of the Magian soul that leads the Jew, as entrepreneur and engineer, to stand aside from the creation proper of machines and devote himself to the business side of their production. But so also the Russian looks with fear and hatred at this tyranny of wheels, cables, and rails, and if he adapts himself for to-day and to-morrow to the inevitable, yet there will come a time when he will _blot out the whole thing from his memory and his environment_, and create about himself a wholly new world, in which nothing of this Devil’s technique is left.

[939] Compared with this mighty contest between the two handfuls of steel-hard men of race and of immense intellect--which the simple citizen neither observes nor comprehends--the battle of mere interests between the employing class and the workers’ Socialism sinks into insignificance when regarded from the distant world-historical view-point. The working-class movement is what its leaders _make_ of it, and hatred of the owner has long enlisted itself in the service of the bourse. Practical communism with its “class-war”--to-day a long obsolete and adulterated phrase--is nothing but the trusty henchman of big Capital, which knows perfectly well how to make use of it.

[940] In this sense the interest-politics of the workers’ movements also belong to it, in that their object is not to overcome the money-values, but to possess them.

[941] P. 345.

Transcriber’s notes

Apparent typographical errors in English were silently corrected, while non-English text is almost always rendered as printed, with occasional corrections (especially in citations) when further inquiry was made. The index contained dozens of incorrectly spelled or variant proper nouns; where this was noticed, the index spelling was made consistent with the main text. The index entry was not moved even if the new spelling would require it.

Any “{sic}” in this text is the transcriber’s.

Italics are shown by _underscores_.