DO 64075 CD OUP—552— 7-7-66—10,000 OSMANIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Call No. ^Xo " ' Accession No. / ps\ g*( g . Author (>! . pa 0 *3 C <X • Tit]e- l^€^ Rol-^f C Ia*4 - This book should be returned on or before the date last marked below. *•'*"* ;r %* 4<l " "* THE RULING CLASS Dilexi justitiam, quaesivi veritatem THE RULING CLASS (Element! di Scienza Politico) by GAETANO MOSCA TRANSLATION BY HANNAH D. KAHN EDITED AND REVISED, 'WITHIN INTRODUCTION, BY McGRAW-HUL BOOK COMPANY, INC. NEW YORK AND LONDON 1989 COPYRIGHT, 1989, BY THE MCGRAW-HILL BOOK COMPANY, INC. *BINTBD IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Att rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission of the publishers. CONTENTS PAGE INTKODUCTION ix CHAPTEB I. POLITICAL SCIENCE 1 Political science, §§1-2. — The experimental method and its limita- tions, §3. — Science and political science, §4. — Environmental theories; climate, §5. — North and South theories, §§6-8, — Mountain and plain, §9. — Eacial theories; the struggle for existence, §10.— The concept of race; superior and inferior races, §11. — Race and social type, §12. — Evolutionary theories: the struggle for preeminence vs. the struggle for existence, §13. — Evolution and progress, §§14-15. — The historical method, §§16-20. vll. THE RULING CLASS 50 The concept of the ruling class, §1. — Ruling class and the classifica- tion of governments, §2. — The organized minority and the unorgan- ized majority, §3. — Political forces: Military valor: serfdom in Poland, §4. — Wealth, §5. — Religion and learning, §6. — Hereditary tendencies in ruling classes, §7. — Stability and rejuvenation of ruling classes, §8. III. FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS (including Elementi, Chap. VI, §§5-8) 70 The political formula, §1. — Social type, §2. — Religion and social type, §§3-5, — The feudal type of political organization, §6.*^The bureaucratic state, §§7-8.~:-Comte's classification: the three stages, §§9-11.— Spencer's classification: militant and industrial states, §§11-12. IV. RULING CLASS AND SOCIAL TYPE 108 Social type and expansion, §1. — Ruling class and mixtures of social types, §2. — Unity of social type and class differentiation, §§3-4. — Lower classes and social type, §5. — Class isolation and social type* §6. V. JURIDICAL DEFENSE 120 The moral sense and evolution, §§1-2. — Mechanisms for moral dis- cipline, §3. — Religion and morals, §4. — Law and morals: juridical defense and type of political organization, §5. — Despotisms and absolute principles, §6. — Balance of social forces, §7. — Separation of church and state, §8. — Distribution of wealth and middle class, §9.— vi CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE Organization and representation of social forces, §10. — Tendencies toward self-assertion of social forces: the United States, §11. VR SUFFRAGE AND SOCIAL FORCES ....*? 158 Democratic theory: majority rule, §1. — Majority and minority in the representative system, §2. — Government control of economic production, §8. — The concept of state, §4. (For Elementi, Chap. VI, §§5-8, see Chap. Ill above.) Vll. CHURCHES, PARTIES, AND SECTS 163 Groups and the struggle instinct, §1. — Sectarian tendencies in human groupings, §2. — Traits of prophets and founders, §3. — The growth of religions and sects, §4. — Doctrines and social environment, §5. — The appeal of doctrines to sentiments good and bad, §6. — Religion and realities: Christianity, Mohammedanism, §7. — Choices of faiths: mimetism, §8. — The Church and worldliness, §9. — Persecution and mass control, §10. — The arts of propaganda, §11. — Struggle and social type: Is permanent peace desirable? §12. VIII. REVOLUTION 199 Hellenic and medieval revolutions, §1. — Roman, feudal, and Moham- medan revolutions, §2. — Revolutions in China, §3. — National upris- ings and wars of independence, §4. — Peasant rebellions and their leaders, §5. — Modern French revolutions and over-bureaucratization, §6. — Secret societies, revolutionary traditions, §7. C" IX. STANDING ARMIES 222 Military power in primitive societies, §1. — Mercenaries and feudal societies, §2. — Mercenary tyrannies, §3. — Rise of standing armies, §4. — Citizen militias, §5. — Social distinctions: officers and privates, §6. — Race and military valor, §7. — Standing armies and juridical defense, §8. X. PARLIAMENTARISM 244 Ruling class and the problems of modern society, §1.— ^The future of religion, §§2-4. — The crisis of democracy, §5. — Evils of parliamen- tary systems and types of criticism, §6. — Reform of parliamentary systems: "constitutional" reform, §7. — Decentralization and middle class, §8. XL COLLECTIVISM (Elementi, Chap. X, §§9-19) . . 271 Ancient socialism; Rousseau and the rise of socialism in Europe, §1. — Collectivism and faith in social betterment, §2. — Ruling class under collectivism, §3. — Absolute justice and social living, §4. — Anarchism, §5. — The class struggle, §6. — Socialism and the abolition of poverty, §7. — Causes of the growth of socialism, §8, — Prospects of socialism, §9. — Socialism and State control: Christian socialism, §10. — Social- ism and equality, §11. CONTENTS vii CHAPTKB PAGE XII. THEOBY OP THE RULING CLASS (Elementi, Part II, Chap. I) .... 329 History of the concept of ruling class, §1. — Hilling class theory and democratic bias, §2. — The concept of ruling class and scientific method, §3. XIII. TYPES OF POLITICAL ORGANIZATION (Elementi, Part II, Chap. II), . 338 Primitive monarchies, §1. — The Near-Eastern empire, §2. — The Greek city-state, §3. — Its weaknesses and limitations, $4. XIV. EVOLUTION OF POLITICAL ORGANIZATION (Elementi, Part II, Chap. Ill) 860 The Roman city-state, and the concept of citizenship, §1. — Rise of Roman bureaucracy and standing army: the Empire, §2. — Decline of Roman middle class and fall of the Empire, §3. — The barbarian kingdoms and feudalism, §4. — Rise of the national absolutisms, §5. — Middle class and representative system, §6. — The English consti- tution as a model for the Continent, §7. — The representative system and level of civilization: structural weaknesses of the representative . system, §8. XV. PRINCIPLES AND TENDENCIES IN RULING CLASSES (Elementi, Part II, Chap. IV) 394 Autocratic and liberal principles, aristocratic and democratic ten- dencies, §1. — Autocratic systems, §2. — Ruling class and autocracy, §3. — Liberal systems, §4. — The democratic tendency and replenish- ment of ruling class, §5. — The aristocratic tendency and social fossili- zation, §6. — Balance of principles and tendencies, §7. XVI. RULING CLASS AND INDIVIDUAL (Elementi, Part II, Chap. V) ... 430 Rulers and ruling class, §1. — Ruling class and the governed; foreign dominations, §2. — Historical materialism, the economic interpreta- tion of history, §3. — Government by the best, §4. — Absolute justice and relative justice, §5. — Science and social movement, §6. XVII. FUTURE OF REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT (Elementi, Part II, Chap. VI) 465 The nineteenth century as an historical period, §1. — Liberty, equality, fraternity, and their application, §2. — Democracy and level of civilization, §3. — Germs of decay in the representative system, §4. — Alternatives to the representative system: dictatorship of the proletariat, bureaucratic absolutism, syndicalism, §5. — Restoration of the representative system in Europe, §6. INDEX AND BIBLIOGRAPHY 495 INTRODUCTION I. Taine and Mosca: the Teorica.—IL The Concept of History.— III. Social Forces and Balance of Social Forces. — IV. Juridical Defense: the importance of Political Organization. — V. Standing Armies. — VI. Social Type and Political Formula. — VII. Level of Civilization. — VIII. Democracy and Representative System. — IX. Mosca and Pareto. — X. On Translating Mosca. I. TAINE AND MOSCA: THE Teorica Gaetano Mosca's theory of the ruling class was evolved in its first form during the years 1878-1881, while Mosca was a* student under Angelo Messedaglia atUie iJiiiversity of Palermo. It occurred to him at that time to generalize the method which Taine had used in the Ancien regime. There, it will be remem- bered, Taine sought the origins of the French Revolution in the decadence of the groups of people that had ruled France during the golden age of the old monarchy, a class which he considered and analyzed under three headings, the crown, the clergy and the nobility. The first thought of the student Mosca was that perhaps any society might be analyzed the way Taine had analyzed monarchi- cal France; and his second was that, in view of the vogue that doctrines of majority rule had had in the nineteenth century, he had hit upon a most fertile and suggestive hypothesis, (jit one looks closely at any country, be it commonly known as a mon- archy, a tyranny, a republic or what one will, one inevitably finds that actual power is wielded never by one person, the monarch or head of the state, nor yet by the whole community of citizens, but by a particular group of people which is always fairly small in numbers as compared with the total population. Taine had shown, also, that the traits of the brilliant French civilization of the age of the Great King were the traits less of the French people at large than of the same French aristocracy and, in fact, seemed to be connected with the special conditions under which that aristocracy had functioned during the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries. That principle, too, could bf ITU I X INTRODUCTION generalized into the thesis that the dominant traits of the civili- zation of a given society during a given period will be the traits of the group of people who govern it (politicians, rulers). Today Mosca is eighty years old; but at no time in the course of his long life has he ever been quite able to forget the thrill of discovery that he experienced away back in the seventies as he found himself in possession of what he thought to be a golden key to the arcana of human history. To tell the truth, the originality of his discovery has not seldom been a subject of dispute among his colleagues and competitors; and during the fifty years that have intervened since those days, many writers have busied themselves compiling lists of thinkers who have explicitly noted a fact which has always been perfectly apparent to everybody, viz., that in all human groups at all times there are the few who lie and the many who are ruled. The maxim that there is nothing new under the sun is a very true maxim; that is to say, it covers about half the truth, which is a great deal of truth for a maxim to cover. All human beings who have lived on earth have lived, by and large, on the same earth. They have all beheld, at least out of the corners of their eyes, the same realities; they have all experienced the same emotions; they have all thought, we may imagine, the same thoughts. But what the history of human civilization shows is the unending variety with which individuals evaluate the various things that everybody sees. Probably no human being since Adam has been without an approximate knowledge of the law of gravity; but no one till Galileo's day thought of centering his whole attention upon the falling object and making it the pivot of a scientific revolution. No human being since the day of Cain and Abel has been unaware that people preach moral principles and then use such power as they have often, if not always, without regard to moral principles. Yet no one before Machiavelli ever thought of taking that fact and founding upon it a scientific politics which would eliminate ethical considerations. I believe Croce has said it somewhere: ^he i>riginality of thinkers lies not always in their seeinf foings that nobody else seen, but^rften in the stress tiiB3^gHg^TinW fo flu Ind now tothat. I consider it useful to make this little digres- sion rforthe benefit of an ever-lengthening roster of source hunters who spend their time drawing literary and scientific INTRODUCTION xi parallels without considering questions of stress or the uses that men of genius make of commonplaces. CThe medieval Venetians or the ancient Romans were so much in possession of the concept of class and of the concept of ruling classes that they devised meticulous legislation to cover class relations and even the movement of social atoms from class to class. All the same, no Venetian and no Roman ever formulated Mosca's theory of the ruling class. Class is a visible external fact of everyday life in Europe, and few European writers have been able to discuss social problems at any great length without eventually encoun- tering the fact of class, of class struggle, of class circulation, in some form or other. None of them, however, not Guicciardini, not Marx, not Taine, made the use of the fact of class that Mosca made. And conversely, one may say the same of those who have paralleled or utilized Mosca — of Michels, of Sorel, of Paretoy ! Why do individual thinkers come to stress certain relations and facts which everybody observes and takes for granted? Usu- ally these problems of personal evolution are beyond recovery by history. We shall never know why Voltaire became a mocking skeptic while his brother remained a pious "enthusiast.? We know, indeed, that, in periods of intense and free cultural activ- ity, if a certain number of intellectuals are placed in one general environment in the presence of the same general problems, certain numbers of them will evolve the same solutions. This fact is ordinarily taken account of in the remark that at certain periods certain concepts, certain manners of thinking, seem to be "in the air." Sorel developed the concept of the political myth in the first decade of the twentieth century. Mosca had developed his concept of the "political formula" twenty years before. Sorel was not a methodical scholar. He kn^w nothing of Mosca. Evidently the concept was "in the air." (\For two generations before Mosca's time, socialism had been emphasizing the con- flict of classes, and in Italy in particular the educated classes had become explicitly aware of their duties and responsibilities as "leading" or "directing" classes (dassi dirigenti). One should not be surprised, therefore, at such evident parallels as exist between Mosca and many other thinkers before him or after him. J While tne details of individual evolution most often remain undiscoverable, apart from individual memoirs or confessions xii INTRODUCTION which are themselves not too trustworthy in such regards, one i& usually able to note certain general environmental circumstances that seem to influence individual choices of stress in certain directions. When we find Mosca in possession of Taine in 1878, we should not forget that Mosca was an Italian while Taine was a Frenchman. I find it very French in Taine that he should never have been interested in the general bearings of the method that he was using. So true is this that, as he proceeds to rear his intellectual structure about the old regime, he is continually led into the fallacy of assigning particular causes (associated with the fact of the exclusion of the French aristocracy from their feudal functions) to phenomena that are general and world- wide— preciosity, for instance, rationality, politeness, display, all of which recur in times and places where ruling classes are situ- ated far otherwise than was the French aristocracy of the golden age. I find it also very French in Taine that he should never free himself, in the Origines, from the preoccupation with good citizenship. Aspiring indeed to a stern and rigorous historical method, Taine can think of history only as at the service of certain high moral ideals. Mosca instead was an Italian, to whom the analytical method of thinking came naturally. He leaped upon Taine's method as a tool for straight thinking and sought to be, and, to a surprising extent in one still so young, succeeded in being "objective." I find that very Italian. Italians do easily and as a matter of course what other human beings do rarely, if at all, and then only with great effort and after hard and sustained discipline: they think by processes of distinction. While the rest of the world is hunting for ways to show that the true is good and the good true, and that both are beautiful, the Italians are busy keeping virtue, truth and beauty separate and in the heart as well as in the mind. Perhaps that is the great Italian "contribu- tion to civilization," which Italian nationalists are always trying to discover. One may as well add that Mosca is a Sicilian (born at Palermo in 1858). That too is a determining factor in his individuality which Americans especially should bear in mind. /Americans as a rule stand at an opposite pole to the run of Sicilians in their manner of approaching life through thought. Americans are impatient of theory and suspicious of philosophies and general INTRODUCTION Xlil principles. We study history and almost never the philosophy of history. Few American lawyers will have anything to do with the philosophy of law. Let an American show a definite pro- pensity for theoretica^genefalizing and he wiIT EeTSaSecl Jrpm as an impracCcarnTenacei It is amazing, on the other "hand, witE"wKaf & deartTTcfljieoretical discipline certain famous Americans can get along through life and go far. To that deficiency we partly owe the reputation for ignorance and na!vet6 that we enjoy, as a nation, in a more sophisticated Europe.^ The level of theory in the United States is much lower than the level of theory on the Continent. The Continent in its turn is, on the whole, in the rear of Italy in this respect, and the great Italian theoreticians tend to be southerners. In a charming "confession" with which he prefaced the 1884 edition of the Teorica, Mosca tells of his great interest as a boy in history and boasts of his retentive memory. But what strikes one in Mosca, the historian, is the fact that history has no meaning whatever to him until it has become general principle, uniformity, philos- ophy. So it was with Vico and Bruno, and so it is with Croce — all men of the Italian South. Two other determinations, one professional, the other Sicilian, have perhaps a more direct bearing upon Mosca's development of the vision he owed in the first instance to Taine. V In the Teorica of 1884, Mosca kept strictly to problems of government, and that interest is paramount even in the Elements. This narrowing of his field is all the more striking as one contrasts the uses to which the concept of class, or of the ruling class, has been put by thinkers all the way from Marx to Pareto.) The reason undoubtedly is that Mosca began life as a student of constitutional law and of political theories. He became an unsalaried lecturer on-JJiQjgfe, subjects, first at Palermo (1881- 1886), then at Rome (1887-1895) . Prom Rome he went on to be a professor of constitutional law at Turin (1895-19&3), returning to Rome (1923-1931) as professor of political theories. Now it is clear that government proper is only one phase of social life, while the implications of the theory of the ruling class as Taine had applied that theory in the sixties and as Mosca had con- ceived it in 1881, lead out into society as a whole and beckon toward a general sociology, Mosca was never to follow them in that direction beyond the limits reached in the Elements] xiv INTRODUCTION Perhaps in a spirit of professional specialization, perhaps for practical reasons, he always kept turning backward and inward upon the strictly constitutional or political problem, leaving some of his richest and most suggestive ideas in the form of hints, assertions, or casual observations, but at any rate undeveloped. Sicilian again one may call the political bent which Mosca's placid biography shows. Not all Sicilians are politicians, but when a Sicilian is a politician he is a good one. The Sicilian takes to politics as a duck to water. North Italians, too, of course, have been seen in Italian public life. But they make a great to-do about it. They shout and wave their arms from soap-boxes, they fill the newspapers with their publicities, their polemics, their marches on Rome, they fight libel suits and duels; and finally they get into the government, only to be upset, as likely as not, at the next turn of the wheel. The Sicilian, instead, simply takes the train and goes to Rome, where a coach-in-four is waiting to drive him to what Carducci called "the summit of the Capijol." That, more or less, was Mosca's experience in public life. Editor of the journal of the Chamber of Deputies from 1887 to 1895 (a bureaucratic post — it maintained him during his unpaid lectureship at the university), he became a deputy himself in 1908, and sat with the Liberal Conservatives during two legislatures till 1918 (those included the war years), serving also as under-secretary for the Colonies under the Salandra ministry (1914-1916). And there he was, in 1918, senator for life by the usual royal appointment, and all without any great clamor, any boisterous quarrels or exposures, without even any particular public fame. Prezzolini and Papini tried to publicize Mosca in 1903-1904 — "to valorize him as a public asset/' as the language went in those days. Prezzolini made a second effort in his Voce series in 1912 (see // nuovo nazionalwmo). One need mention this aspect of Mosca's career, always eminent yet never prominent, simply as reinforcing the mental attitudes that inclined him to leave his work permanently in a somewhat embryonic form, and even to subordinate it, in some few respects, to the outlook of a political party. The Italian and Sicilian background, the professional outlook, the political talent, which are revealed by this forward look from Mosca's student days, help us to understand the developments that Mosca gave to his theory of the ruling class in the years INTRODUCTION XV 1881-1883. At that time he was in possession of three or four simple concepts which he thought he could use for the construc- tion of an outline history of the rise of the modern state. ( Con- trary to theories of majority rule, he perceived, societies are always ruled by minorities, by oligarchies. The current classifi- cation of governments, therefore — Aristotle's (monarchies, aris- tocracies, democracies), Montesquieu's (absolutisms, limited monarchies, republics), Spencer's (militant and industrial states) — could be dispensed with in favor of a classification of oligarchies. Essaying this classification, Mosca distinguished a number of types: military and priestly aristocracies, hereditary aristocracies, aristocracies of landowners, aristocracies of liquid wealth (money), aristocracies of merit (allowing, that is, free access to power to all elements in society and notably to people of the poorer classes). Now the various political theories that have prevailed in history — "chosen people" theories based on conceptions of race or family, divine-right theories or theories of popular sovereignty — by np means reflect the realities underlying this classification. Mosc4, therefore, went on to develop his theory of the "political formula." There is always a ruling minority, but such minorities never stop at the brute fact of holding power. They justify their rule by theories or principles which are in turn based on beliefs or ethical systems which are accepted by those who are ruled. These "political formulas" contain very little that could be described as "truth," but they should not be regarded as deliberate deceptions or mystifications on the part of scheming rulers. They express, rather, a deep need in human nature whereby the human being more readily defers to abstract universal principles than to the will of indi- vidual human beings. / 7 Mature in 1881, these ideas were formulated in the Teorica dei gwerni e governo parlamentare, which was complete in 1883 and published in 1884 (2d ed., 1925). In spite of its age and the writings of Mosca that have followed it, this book still has its interest and its points of originality. Eleven years later, 1895, Mosca completed and published his Elements (Elementi di scienza politico,, 1896). As compared with the Teoriea> the Elements presents the theory of the ruling class in more rounded form, along with a series of new concepts that are exceedingly suggestive) xvi INTRODUCTION II. THE CONCEPT OF HISTORY In the Elements, in line with an outstanding preoccupation of European scholarship during the nineties, Mosca confronts the problem of constructing a political science (which he prefers to keep distinct from sociology). The content of that science will be the discovery of the constant tendencies or laws that determine the behavior of the human masses (page 1) and regulate the organization of political authority (page 3). These tendencies or laws can be discovered only from a study of "social facts," which in turn can be found only in the history of the various nations (page 41): "It is to the historical method that we must return." Actually, Mosca's practice is better than this incomplete statement would indicate. / He will of course take the facts about society from any source or method that can supply them, only so they are facts — from economics, from anthropology, from psychology, or any similar science. He does explicitly reject for the politico-social field any absolute or exclusive acceptance of climatic or north-and-south theories, anthropological theories based on the observation of primitive societies (the question of size is important), the economic interpretation of history (it is too unilateral), doctrines of racial superiorities and inferiorities (many different races have had their moments of splendor), and evolutionary theories (they fail to account for the rhythmical movement of human progress — biological evolution would require continuous improvement). ,)However, apart from some keen remarks (as, for instance, those on the limitations of the experimental method or on the applicability of science to the control of social living), the main interest in this statement of the problem of scientific sociology lies in the fact that it undoubt- edly influenced the penetrating and altogether novel discussion of the same problem in Pareto's Trattato (chap. I), which, in turn, is the final enlargement of an essay by Pareto written in 1897. The interest of Mosca's view comes out if we consider it not from the standpoint of social science, but from that of historical science. Now if one were to say that this view is new and original, a host of scholars would appear with no end of citations to show that Mosca says nothing that has not been known to INTRODUCTION xvii everyone since the days of Herodotus. Historians have always felt more or less vaguely that their work ought somehow to enrich human experience, that one can, after all, learn something from the fact that billions of human beings have lived out their lives on earth before us. Historians as metaphysical and theological as Bonald have always contended that history con- firmed their arbitrary creeds. On the other hand a very respect- able list of authorities could be quoted to show that history can teach us nothing; that life is always new; that where there is a will there is a way; that no impulse of the present need be checked in the light of analogies from the past. If one examines the present outlook of historical science in the United States, one observes a considerable variety of attitudes and practices. Of the routine and elementary task of the historian, the construc- tion of the historical record, there is general awareness, and one notes many distinguished performances in this field. As to the meaning of the record, its utility — why "to know all about Poussin" is any more important than to know how many ciga- rette butts are thrown daily on the subway stairs — the greatest bewilderment prevails. There is the anecdotic interest in history, the sentimental titillation that comes from reliving exciting episodes in the past or retraversing the lives of unusual or successful individuals (the common rule in literary or free- lance productions). There is the propaganda history, where the writer is meticulous about the accuracy of the record and even makes contributions to it, but then feels it necessary to give the record an apparent meaning by saucing it with reflec- tions which amount to saying, "I am a pacifist"; "I am a socialist"; "I am a Catholic"; and so on. There is the pseudo- scientific or semi-artistic history where the record is again accurate and fairly complete, but where the writer gives it an arbitrary meaning by organizing the facts around more or less unconscious sentimental attitudes borrowed from his environ- ment, now ethical, now romantic, now optimistic, now (if the author is unusually intelligent) ironical or cynical. Finally, there is the Bobinsonian history, the most scientific of these various types, where the past is taken as the explanation of the present, and, to a certain extent, the present is taken as the explanation of the past, but where the matter of choosing ideals is regularly left hazy and doubtful. xviii INTRODUCTION Into this atmosphere Mosca's conception of history should come as a clarifying breeze. The record of human experience is now from three to ten thousand years old. It is probable that during that time human nature has been able to make a fairly complete revelation of its general traits, its basic tendencies and laws. What are those tendencies, those laws? It is the business of the historian to tell us, and history is a mere amusement, a purposeless activity, unless its record is made to contribute to knowledge of tendencies and laws. To complete this theory a remark or two may be necessary. The construction of the historical record, the determination of facts in their sequence, motives or causes is a research by itself. In itself it has no purpose and envisages no utility. It has its own methods, its own technique, which reign sovereign over the research. As regards what can be learned from history, it is clear that the latter can supply only the general forms of human behavior — the specific situation will always be new, without exact precedent or analogy in the past. Mosca feels that history is probably better able to tell us what not to do than what to do in the given case. But, really, it always remains a question of tendencies, of psychological, social forces which man may conceivably learn to master some day, the way he has learned, and marvelously learned, to master and utilize the material forces of nature. At any rate, Mosca's conception of history suggests the proper attitude to take toward his various theses. "Human societies are always governed by minorities"; "Rapid class circulation is essential to prog- ress"; "Human societies are organized around collective illu- sions"; "Level of civilization corresponds to grade of juridi- cal defense"; "Human societies show a tendency to progress toward higher and higher levels of civilization"; " Over-bureau- cratization facilitates revolution." These and the others like them would be so many tentative statements of general laws. They are subject to objective scientific criticism, emendation, refutation. HI. SOCIAL FORCES AND BALANCE OF SOCIAL FORCES (The concept of social forces was already present in Mosca's early Teorica. In the Elements it is amplified, and its implica- tions are more fully perceived. INTRODUCTION XIX A "social force" is any human activity or perquisite that has a social significance — money, land, military prowess, religion, education, manual labor, science — anything. The concept derives from the necessity of defining and classifying ruling classes. A man rules or a group of men rules when the man or the group is able to control the social forces that, at the given moment in the given society, are essential to the possession and retention of power/ / Implicit in the theory of the ruling class is the law (I like to call it "Mosca's law") that "type and level of civilization vary as ruling classes vary." Ruling classes will vary in respect to the number and grade of the social forces which they control, toler- ate, stimulate or create. The internal stability of a regime can be measured by the ratio between the number and strength of the social forces that it controls or conciliates, in a word, represents, and the number and strength of the social forces that it fails to represent and has against it. Progressive, and one might even say "successful," regimes regularly create social forces which they find it difficult to absorb; governments often fall because of their virtues, not their defects) (a drastic emendation to Taine and to ethical interpretations <)f history in general). Struggle is one of the continuous and never-failing aspects of human life. Social forces, therefore, regularly manifest themselves in aspira- tions to power. Soldiers want to rule, and they are a hard group to control since they hold the guns and know best how to use them. Money wants to rule and it is hard to control money because most people succumb to the glamour and influence of wealth. Priests want to rule, and they have the weight of the ignorant masses and the majesty of the mysteries of life in their favor. Scientists want to rule, and, from Plato to Comte and from Comte to Scott, they have dreamed of dictators who will establish their technocracies and their "rules of the best." Labor wants to rule and would rule did it not always encounter the law of the ruling class and fall into the hands of its leaders. Public officeholders want to rule, and they might easily do so for they already sit in the seats of power, j When we have Mosca safely ensconced among the immortals, a mystery will confront the historian of social theories: Why, having reached this point in his meditations, did Mosca not throw his political research away and set out to write a sociology? XX INTRODUCTION The answer will probably be found in the professional and tem- peramental determinations to which we have alluded. Mosca was thinking primarily of the political aspects of society and could never wholly divest himself of that interest. Montesquieu had supplied him, already in his student days, with the concept of balance — with Montesquieu it was a balance of powers, of which the American constitution was eventually to supply an impressive example. Mosca transfers the concept to social forces. In certain cases we see social forces that do succeed in usurping power, and one symptom of the usurpation is their imposition by force of the political formula that they happen to hold as an absolute principle to which everyone must bow and which every- one must believe or pretend to believe. That means tyranny, and it also means a reduction in the number of active social forces and, therefore, a drop in level of civilization. In other cases we see, for example, military power checked and balanced by money or by religion; or money, perhaps, checked and balanced by taxation imposed by land; or an obstreperous reli- gious hierarchy checked and balanced now by superstitious sects which grow up within itself, now by coalitions of external forces of enlightenment. At certain moments — they are the heavenly interludes in history — we see fairly stable balances of forces where nearly everyone can do as he pleases and have his say so that the whole infinite potentialities of human nature burst into bloom. IV. JURIDICAL DEFENSE: THE IMPORTANCE OF POLITICAL ORGANIZATION This beneficent balance is attained, Mosca decides, at times and in peoples where it has become law, where, that is, the aggressiveness of social forces, or of the individuals who embody them, is checked, not by the sheer manifestation of force applied case by case, but by habit, custom, acquiescence, morals, insti- tution and constitution — in a word (his word), juridical defense (government by law with due process). Contrary to Marxist, evolutionary and other materialistic or sociological interpreta- tions of history, Mosca holds that the problem of political organ- ization is paramount. If ruling classes can be appraised by noting the number and grade of social forces which they recognize, INTRODUCTION xxi the governments which various ruling classes manage can be appraised by the grade of juridical defense which they provide. This Mosca seems sometimes to regard as very largely a technical problem of government. A blossoming Mohammedan civiliza- tion first became stationary and then declined because the caliphs failed to solve the problem of the army. The armies in the provinces followed their generals, the generals became independent and arbitrary despots; social forces contracted in numbers and then languished. There is no reason to assume that the evolution of the Mohammedan peoples was any more predetermined than that of the Christian peoples. The fact is that at certain moments in their history they, or rather their ruling classes, must have made wrong political decisions that headed them toward decline instead of toward higher levels of civilization. In the case of the Mohammedan world one mistake, according to Mosca's system, would have been the failure to separate church and state, since that separation he regards as one of the basic essentials for a proper balance of social forces. A high grade of juridical defense depends also, Mosca con- tends, upon a sufficient division of wealth to allow of the existence in fairly large numbers of people of moderate means; in fact, the numbers of such people will probably supply the gauge for measuring the effectiveness and stability of the balance of social forces. The presence of a strong middle class in a society means that education is discovering and utilizing the resources of talent which, quite independently of race and heredity, are forever developing in the human masses at large (resources which backward societies somehow fail to use; that is why they are back- ward). It also means that the ruling classes always have avail- able materials with which to restock and replenish themselves as their own personnels deteriorate under pressure of the multiple forces that are always edging aristocracies toward decline. Middle classes represent the variety and the intensity of a society's activities and the maximum variety in types of wealth and in distribution of wealth. Standing apart from the daily clash of the more powerful interests, they are the great repositor- ies of independent opinion and disinterested public spirit. One hardly need say it; In developing these postulates and their many corollaries, Mosca has written the classic of Italian con- xxii INTRODUCTION servatism, which functioned as an influential minority in Italy's political life just before the war. But supposing we bring these arguments back to the strictly objective plane. We have spoken of "mistakes" and of choices as though the lawgivers of Mosca, like those of Rousseau or of the many writers who antedated the rise of deterministic theories, were free agents who could do with society just as they pleased. Suppose it be conceded that the separation of church and state and a distribution of wealth that allows the existence of a strong middle class are essential in a society if it is to attain a high level of civilization. How is science to obtain the recognition and application of those "laws" in the face of the religious interests which will in all pious enthusiasm continue to strive for uniform- ity of dogma and for control of education and the state, and in the face of the greed of human beings, who will go madly on amassing great fortunes and then using them to acquire power and domin- ion? Mosca leaves us no hope except in the enlightened states- manship of those who wield power over the nations. Instructive in this connection is the distinction he draws between the politician and the statesman, the former being the man who is skilled in the mere art of obtaining power and holding it, whereas the latter is the man who knows how to manipulate the blind instincts of the human masses in the direction of conformity with the laws of man's social nature, much as the navigator manipulates the brute forces of tide and wind to the advantage of his ship and its passengers. Mosca has little confidence in the inborn good sense of the masses and despairs of ever bringing any great number of people to a rational and scientific view of public problems. \ History shows not a few ruling classes, on the other hand, the Venetian and English aristocracies, for instance, which have been able to lay interests and sentiments aside to a very considerable extent and to govern scientifically and objectively .\ V. STANDING ARMIES .Ampler consideration of the problem of juridical defense leads Mosca to one of the most brilliant and original investigations in the Elements. Prom the standpoint of struggle, military power is the best equipped of all social forces to assert itself and claim dominion. Why then is the military dictatorship INTRODUCTION xxiii not the normal form of human government? The peoples of the western world have for some generations now been familiar with systems where armies and navies are rigidly subject to civil authorities, and they are wont to regard the military rebellion as something exceptional and monstrous. Actually the human beings who have lived on this earth in security from the brutal rule of the soldier are so few in number, on the back- ground of the whole of human history, as hardly to count. The military tyranny in some form or other is in fact the common rule in human society; and even in the best-ordered societies, as we are only too easily able to observe after the experience of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, any serious dis- turbance of an established order of a nonmilitary type is likely to result in a reversion to the military dictatorship. The process by which the modern civilized nations have escaped from this grievous law of man's social nature Mosca rightly regards as one of the most interesting in history. Paradoxically enough, and contrarily to the modes of thinking of those liberals who dream of total disarmaments, Mosca finds the solution of the secret in the growth of the standing army. Croce, somewhere in the Ethics, classifies human beings into four types, corresponding to the stresses of the four "forms of the spirit" which he makes basic in his system: the artist, the scientist, the statesman, the saint. That classification overlooks the adventurer, the warrior, the man who instinctively resorts to violence in his relations with his fellow men and prefers dangerous living to any other mode of existence. The antics of this individual on the stage of history are so conspicuous and withal so fascinating that a virtual revolution in historical method has been required in order to win some attention from the thoughtful for the types whom Croce recognizes. Give the adventurer a good brain, a good education, a supply of genius and an historical opportunity, and he becomes a Napoleon or an Alexander. Give him a great ideal and he becomes a Garibaldi. Give him a chance and he becomes a Mussolini. Give him a job and he becomes a soldier and a general. Ignore him and he becomes the gangster and the outlaw. A believer in final causes might soundly assert that the man of violence was invented by a wise Creator as a sort of catalyzer for human progress. The adventurer is never in the majority. The majority of human xxiv INTEODUCTION beings prefer peaceful orderly existences, and, when they dream, they dream of heavens where there is only light and music and no sorrow or toil, where the lion lies down with the lamb, where manna falls now from the sky and now from the government, where, in short, we are free from the competition of our neighbors and from the wearying struggle of life. Eras of prosperity are continually recurring in human history when the dream of security and idleness seems almost realizable; then, just as regularly, the man of violence comes along and sets the wheels to grinding again. So in our day, the citizens of the prosperous democracies had referred the movement of history to the social workers and the lawyers at Geneva in order to settle back in the night clubs to enjoy the nobility of their peaceful sentiments and the dividends of science. But a Hitler, a Mussolini, a Japanese general rises and tells them that to win or retain the right to drink and dance and be self-complacent they have to get out and fight. On the other hand, the man of violence is not much more than that. The world that he creates is a pretty wretched affair. Give him the power and he regularly enslaves the rest of men, leaving them only the bare means of subsistence. Quite regu- larly he stultifies thought into hypocrisy and flattery, and the stimulating lift of organized public spirit he replaces with some form of mob fanaticism. Mosca conceives of the standing army as a device automatically arrived at by the modern world for disciplining, canalizing and making socially productive the combative elements in the peoples. In loosely organized societies ^olence oncentrates around a large number of different focuses and differing inter- ests, and the anarchy of the Middle Ages and of feudal societies at large results. In our own day, in Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, we have seen that as soon as the stability of a society wavers power recreates itself in small center, and periods of rule by local gangs ensue for greater or lesser lengths of time. The standing army, instead, tapers up to conti j by the state and therefore becomes part and parcel of the social order. Strong enough to enable the state to master local or sporadic manifestations of violence, it is itself under the direct control of all those mighty social forces which create and maintain the state itself. Recent history again confirms this conception INTRODUCTION XXV of the status and objective role of the standing army. The national army of our time is an organism of incalculable might. The human forces which it embraces, the weapons and other material agencies of which it disposes, are incredibly powerful. Yet we have seen two revolutions take place in great and highly civilized countries in the face of the army and against the army. Certain observers of the rise of Fascism and National Socialism in Italy and in Germany looked to the loyally monarchical or republican armies to crush those movements, and undoubtedly they could have with a mere show of force. But the submersion of the German and Italian armies in the established order was complete, and, lacking the impulse from the apex of civil author- ity, they did not move. Not only that: Once new rulers were established in the seats of power, the armies responded obediently to their new orders. What is the secret of the amazing subordination of the armies of the West? Mosca finds the answer in the aristocratic char- acter, so to say, of the army, first in the fact that there is a wide and absolute social distinction between private and officer, and second that the corps of officers, which comes from the ruling class, reflects the balance of multiple and varied social forces which are recognized by and within that class. The logical implications of this theory are well worth pondering. If the theory be regarded as sound, steps toward the democratization of armies — the policy of Mr. Hore-Belisha, for instance — are mistaken steps which in the end lead toward military dictator- ships; for any considerable democratization of armies would make them active social forces reflecting all the vicissitudes of social conflict and, therefore, preponderant social forces. On the other hand, army officers have to be completely eliminated from political life proper. When army officers figure actively and ex officio in political councils, they are certain eventually to dominate those councils and replace the civil authority — the seemingly incurable cancer of the Spanish world, for an example. VI. SOCIAL TYPE AND POLITICAL FORMULA The concept of social type is basic in Mosca's thought, and, since the phenomenon of the social grouping is one of the facts that the historian encounters at the most superficial glance at society, there is nothing remarkable in that. An elementary xxvi INTRODUCTION discussion of what Mosca calls social type is already present in Machiavelli. Mosca's analysis of the elements that constitute the greater social groupings was complete in the nineties. It is interesting that at that early date he was discounting race as a factor in the sense of nationality and emphasizing the greater importance of the myth of race. But he was also, with remark- able insight, foreseeing an intensification of nationalisms in the twentieth century as a sort of compensation for the decline of faith in the world religions which, under the pressure of experi- mental science, were losing their utility as cohesive forces in society. Quite original and too much neglected, I believe, is Mosca's conception of the modern sense of nationality as a product of the world religions, to the extent that those religions, with their doctrines that transcend race and nationality, came to embrace the most diverse groups within the same social type and so inclined those groups to coalesce individually around political formulas of a nonreligious character. That doctrine throws light upon the conflict of church and state in the Middle Ages in the West, a conflict that was essential to the growth of secular civilization which rescued Europe from the fossilization that settled upon the Mohammedan and eastern worlds. In this regard Mosca, one may say, has formulated rather than prosecuted the research into the complicated interplay of group instincts within each separate society. His conclusions, at any rate, are susceptible of almost indefinite elaboration. The methodological advantages of Mosca's concept of social type are very considerable. In the first place it points the way to sound scientific solutions of conflicts that cannot be solved by ethical methods. For instance, the United States prohibits the immigration of Asiatics. Whenever our diplomats go prattling about democratic principles or even Christian principles they expose themselves to devastating rejoinder from the Japa- nese diplomats, who can quite properly observe that democratic or Christian principles would require unlimited Asiatic immigra- tion. It is well to note, therefore, that the questions at issue are not questions of democratic theory or Christian ethics, but questions of social type, which latter are always settled either by force or by accommodation and reconciliation of apparent interests. INTRODUCTION xxvii To complete our examination of conscience we might go on and ask what, then, we are to do with our democratic principles and our Christian ethics? The answer is that these latter are for- mulas which have a very limited scientific validity and function as guides of conduct within strictly limited fields. What those limits shall be, just how and where they shall be drawn, are problems for statesmen, not for pastors or for professors of ethics. Our civilization subsists only so long as our social type subsists. Whether or not certain social types "ought" to vanish in the interests of civilization is a cosmic question that could be answered only by some neutral divinity looking at our planet from afar off. What we know is that social types good and bad insist on existing and that the measure of that insistence is a measure of force (or of accommodation as a substitute for force). So it is with any conflict between a universal ethical ideal and the instincts and the interests of social type. The extent to which political formulas of universal pretension are serviceable for specific groups is an interesting and important one which the events of our time have raised to a critical prom- inence. Hitler's Germany seems to have concluded that a national myth in which only Germans can believe is of stronger cohesive potency than universal myths such as Christianity, democracy or socialism. Apparent to the eye is the advantage of ease of enforcement, in that such a myth makes a direct appeal to group instincts without mitigations or attenuations from rationality. But equally apparent are the disadvantages. Strictly national myths, like the "chosen people" myths of the Jews or Greeks, tend to sharpen international antagonisms unduly. Hitler is building up the same universal detestation that the pan-Germanism of the first decade of the century aroused. Such myths, besides, have in the past been effective only on very low planes of civilization where they have had very few social forces to fuse or coordinate. One may wonder whether German civilization will not in the end be oversimplified by the long inculcation of an exclusively national myth. Fascist Italy is working on the theory that the universal myth can be subordinated to the national myth (subjugation of church to state) and then used as a channel of influence upon the, countries that accept or tolerate it. Says Mussolini (to Pro- xxviii INTRODUCTION fessor Starkie, The Waveless Plain, page 397): "The Latin tradition of Imperial Rome is represented by Catholicism. . . . There are in the world over 400,000,000 men [i.e., human beings] who look towards Rome from all parts of the earth. That is a source of pride for us Italians." Soviet Russia is using a uni- versal political formula, communism, and explicitly claims leadership over the minorities which accept the myth in other countries. The myth intrinsically has considerable potency, as resting on powerful combative sentiments (hatred of the poor for the rich), reinforced by humanitarian sentiments of aversion to suffering (poverty can be abolished). In this sense it has its analogies with early democratic theory, which rested on those same sentiments. It is less fortunate than democratic theory in respect of the sentiments of property. These it openly flouts, whereas democratic theory takes full advantage of them. • It is curious that Russian nationalism has grown in intensity under the communist political formula much as the western national- isms grew up inside the Christian and democratic formulas. However, all such formulas are absolute and strive to achieve uniformity of acceptance. When their universal character is taken too seriously, believed, that is, with too great ardor, they suck the life blood from the social type, either by absorbing too much of the type's combative energy or by oversimplifying its structure and so lowering its civilization levely Mosca's concept of social type has another methodological advantage in that it supplies the general form and, therefore, emphasizes the common nature of many varied phenomena. Two men see each other at a distance in Hong Kong. They meet in Cairo, and the fact that they had seen each other at a distance in Hong Kong constitutes a bond between them that justifies closer contacts. They form thereby an embryonic social type, which rests upon a single, inconsequential fact. At another extreme we find millions of people bound together by millions of ties, memories, interests, common experiences. It is the same phenomenon but with a differing inner structure. Mosca's concept of the social type supplies a tool for severing the common from the differing elements. It stops, however, one step short of Pareto's concept of group-persistence — persistence of relations between persons and things, which would be an hypothesis for investigating the basic psychological phenomena INTRODUCTION XXIX involved in human associations of whatever type. Parties, sects, religions, movements, nations, states, are still often regarded as separate phenomena. "Nationalism began with the French Revolution," writes an American historian. Actually nationalism began with Adam, in the sense that it rests upon a fundamental law of human nature, which can be seen at work in thousands of other manifestations. Mosca repeatedly emphasizes the historical utility of the social type as coordinating a multiplicity of wills and efforts for the achievement of common ends. ^On that basis it can be seen that history will be a play of two contrary forces, a trend toward unity and expansion, and a trend toward diversity and concen- tration. The Abyssinians, the Armenians and the Californians are Christians, and humanity surely profits in many ways from that advance toward world solidarity — group and even class isolation seem regularly to be elements in social fossilization and decline. On the other hand/the world has profited even more from particularity of social type — the existence of separate and powerful groups, all on the offensive and on the defensive, each struggling first for independence and then for domination, each living in a fever heat of life and death struggle in which the talents and moral traits of its individual members are stimulated and utilized to the utmost. Even within particular types a very considerable play of subtypes is an advantage, as implying multiplicity of social forces. This is just the reverse of the doctrine of 'Bossuet who viewed multiplicity of social types (or rather of political formulas) as disastrous. Bossuet wanted Europe to fossilize at the level of the Council of Trent. The prosperity, rising civilization level and world dominion of the Prot- estant countries after Bossuet 's time refute his thesis. Obviously questions of proportion are involved rThe social type must be large enough and compact enough in structure to survive in the struggle of types; it must be diversified enough, that is, tolerant enough, to utilize all its social forces and increase their number. The western world today threatens to fly to pieces from the vio- lence of its antagonisms. It would gain by a little more unity which a hackneyed democratic formula, with its disastrous doc- trine of minority determinations, seems unable to supply. The eastern world would surely gain, as it is in fact gaining, from more diversity. v The great civilizing force in Asia at present is nationalism. XXX INTRODUCTION In dealing with the relations between social type and political formula, Mosca halts on the brink of a great research. The external manifestation of the existence of a type, at least of the larger types, will be the acceptance of a given formula. ,Does the type create the formula or the formula the type? Mosca answers quite soundly with a theory of interdependence: The type partly creates the formula in that the latter is usually a dogma put forward by some seer or prophet — now Mahomet, now Rousseau, now Marx — in response to certain "demands" of the given era. Once the formula exists and is accepted, it helps powerfully in molding the type by formulating maxims and precepts to which individuals more or less necessarily and successfully conform. The formula normally contains a large amount of nonsense mixed in with a certain small amount of verifiable truth. Observing the same facts Bentham considered in some detail the specific case where politicians talk the non- sense involved in the formula for the purpose of swaying mobs (scientifically, one should say, for the purpose of utilizing the social type for a given purpose). Making this difficulty the center of a research and centering all his interest upon it, Pareto evolved his epoch-making theory of residues and derivations. VII. LEVEL OF CIVILIZATION Mosca is one of the few (if any) political theorists to take level of civilization frankly and squarely as a criterion of evaluation In not a few passages in the Elements he seems to assume that the desirability of high levels of civilization is self-evident, and that would be a very venial departure from the objective stand- point that he strives to maintain in his work. As a matter of fact relatively few people care very much about level of civiliza- tion— the great majority are interested in achieving some ideal — communism, democracy, peace, "happiness," "spirituality," "the salutary captivity of the faith," to quote Monsignor Moreau — regardless of the level at which civilization will find itself when those ideals are achieved or as a result of the effort to achieve them. The "nostalgic de la boue" is an organized human sentiment that snipes at the outposts of every free society when it is not slinking into the inner fortress under the guise of idealism and love of "higher things/' INTRODUCTION xxxi But subjective or metaphysical as this preference on Mosca's part may be, the concept of level of civilization nevertheless contributes, almost more than anything else, to maintaining the objective attitude in the Elements, It is a criterion that is definable to a high grade of approximation as multiplicity of activities; grade or quality of achievement in each; size and stability of social cohesion and, therefore, offensive and defensive power; standard of living and distribution of wealth; control of nature and utilization of that control; and so on — so on even to the "higher things" themselves. (Why be so disheartened over the number of our airplanes, telephones or bathtubs, when in addition to them we are producing humanists, neo-Thomists and even saints in fair abundance?) The methodological advantages of the concept are enormous: and prime among them is the need which the concept creates, and the analytical method which it supplies, for viewing the given historical phenomenon or appraising the given proposal in the light of the total social picture. The literature of science and the literature of opinion suffer continually from their very virtues of specialization. In restricting the field of fact with which they deal they often develop unilateral methodologies which end by establishing arbitrary relations between facts. If we consider the Christian unity, so called, of the Middle Ages and linger on the metaphysical or logical implications of medieval political formulas, we may get a very distorted view of the impor- * ance of Christian unity or even of unity itself. Any considera- tion of the general level of civilization in the Middle Ages would certainly correct that view. So, for that school of writers which magnifies Greek thought and art as though those were manifesta- tions of a heavenly state which mankind has lost forever. I So, for those orientalists who propound the sublimities of the wisdom of the East without remembering that the eastern peoples have for ages been a sort of herring on which the sharks of the world, domestic and foreign, have feasted at their will and leisured So, also, for those who regard literature, the arts, and philosophy as the distinctive representatives of level of culture. It is certain that arts, letters and metaphysical thinking can flourish among limited numbers of individuals in civilizations of very low level. It is also certain that when any great proportion of a nation's energies are devoted to arts, letters a1"1^ mAtfiiVhvQina. it« nnlf-nral xxxii INTRODUCTION level will decline. To be sure, it is just as certain that no highly diversified and intensely cultivated civilization will fail to show eminence in those activities* Level of civilization is a dynamic, not a static, level, and in no civilization are all activities at the sameTlevel, or even at a level where they can automatically meet all the needs of the given historical moment. The ancient world needed more physical science than it possessed, if it was to perpetuate its achievements in the political and social fields. As Mosca points but, the great political upheaval at the end of the eighteenth century became more drastic through a lag in historical science. Napoleon's empire collapsed for the reason, among others, that transporta- tion was in arrears both of industry and of military science — the steamboat and the railroad came a generation too late for the united Europe of which Napoleon dreamed. In our own time one may wonder whether the economic and social sciences will have attained a level to meet the great crises which our highly geared civilization periodically produces. One clings the more willingly to Mosca*s concept of level of civilization in that, on a subjective plane, it is optimistic as to man's future on earth. In spite of the tremendous forces of inner expansion and dis- gregation that are continually rocking the societies of our day, Mosca very soundly feels that, in view of the scientific and moral resources that our time has at its disposal, the man of the present is far better placed than any of his historical predecessors have been to deal with the destructive material, social and psycho- logical influences that have wrecked civilization so many times in the past and are threatening to wreck our own. VHL DEMOCRACY AND REPRESENTATIVE SYSTEM Mosca's theory of the ruling class enters a third stage of development with the 19£8 edition of the Elementi, which was enlarged by a "second part" (chaps. XII to XVII of the present translation). This second part contains a tentative history of the theory of the ruling class.1 It contains an outline of the 1 The first clear formulation of the theory Mosca recognizes in Saint-Simon. However, consideration of stress, as proposed above (§1), would probably minimize Saint-Simon's importance in this regard; whereas the role of Taine, especially in its direct bearing on Mosca's own theory, might have been enlarged upon. INTRODUCTION xxxiii rise of the modern state from the standpoint of types of riding classes and types of political organization. Interesting here especially is the essay on the rise of the bourgeoisie and the origins of the French Revolution. As for the classification of governments, which in Mosca's earlier works had been reduced to two types, the feudal and the bureaucratic, Mosca now tries out another order of distinctions — autocratic and liberal prin- ciples, democratic and aristocratic tendencies. This discussion gives him occasion to add some interestingly objective reflections on class or social circulation in its bearing on the prosperity and decadence of nations. But the most significant portions of the "second part" are a clarification, and first of all in Mosca's own mind, of the import of the criticism of democracy that he had made in the past and his impassioned appeal for a restoration of the representative system in Europe. Mosca was on safe ground in asserting that great human masses can be organized and utilized for the attainment of specific pur- poses only by uniting them around some formula that will contain a large measure of illusion. He was also right in asserting that one element in that fact is the further fact that human beings more readily defer to abstract principles that seem to have an abiding validity than to the will of individual persons, which not seldom functions capriciously, may be valid only case by case, and, in any event, may shock the self-respect of the plain man who has a right to feel that he is being overridden by brute force. But in this regard all systems of political metaphysic are in the same boat: The "will of God," the "will of the people," "the sovereign will of the State," the "dictatorship of the proletariat," are one as mythical as the other. Perhaps of the lot, the least mythical is the will of the people, if by it one agree to mean that resultant of sentimental pressures, beliefs, habits, prejudices, temperaments (the general will of Rousseau or Maclver), on which common action can be based, and almost always is based, in tyrannies as well as in republics. In refuting a metaphysical thesis, one may be left in a metaphysical position oneself if one attaches any great importance to the refutation, on the assump- tion that political action must be based on formulas that are " true." Mosca is well aware of that. He repeatedly emphasizes the fact that the historic role of xxxiv INTRODUCTION the scientific soundness of its dogmas. More directly to the point (he urges that statesmen should beware of trying to enforce all the apparent implications of metaphysical formulas. The Church would not last a week if it tried to live up to its doctrine of poverty) No democracy would endure if it followed the "will" of the ignorant peace-loving masses instead of the aggressive leadership of the enlightened few. So, he argues in the Teorica and again in the Elements, the mere fact that uni- versal suffrage follows from the premise of majority rule or the will of the people is in itself no recommendation for universal suffrage as a practical measure. Other considerations of a utilitarian character have to be introduced. Democratic metaphysics would require that the voting of budgetary expendi- ture be in the hands of the people's representatives, of Congress, let us say. In practice, it might easily be more satisfactory to have the budget in the hands of a responsible minister or president than in the hands of an irresponsible Congress. At least the sense of responsibility will be more active and effective in one conspicuous individual than in six hundred less con- spicuous individuals. But in spite of this very considerable consistency and objec- tivity, Mosca, in the Teorica and in Part I of the Elements, was undoubtedly swayed by certain prejudices of nationality, region and party and so lapsed into metaphysical errors. It is an error to argue that a limited suffrage is any sounder, theoretically, than, universal suffrage (an error arising in sentiments of liberal con- servatism). It is an error to argue that the history of a social system which is based on universal suffrage will necessarily follow the apparent logical implications of the theory of majority rule. Between the publication of the second and the third editions of the Elements the political equilibrium was upset in Europe — in Russia, in Italy, in Germany and Austria. In none of those cases did the upset occur because of the application of universal suffrage and the growth of the demagoguery required for governing by universal suffrage. The Fascist and jjom- munist regimes have come into being and have governed in joyous indifference to universal suffrage. The upset in Italy in particular did not come either from socialism or from the church. It came from those public-spirited young men whom Mosca was inclined to laud for their attacks on socialism, and INTRODUCTION XXXV those young men were working on a myth, not of democracy, but of nationalism. Far more fortunate were Mosca's prophecies when he stuck close to his theory of social forces and foresaw, in Russia, all the anarchy and horror that would follow from the attempt to establish communism by force, and in Italy all the consequences of the establishment of a single absolute formula to which absolute adherence would be forcibly required — -and the end is not yet. On the basis of the Teorica and the first form of the Elements it was easy to classify Mosca among those many Italian writers who have combatted the theory of democracy. The democratic system always had a stronger hold on the Italian head than on the Italian heart. Strong in all classes in Italy was the sense of social subordination (the sense of equality is more characteristic of France and the Protestant countries). Especially in rural Italy and on the Italian latifundia one still encounters many of the phenomena of class dependence that went with the older feudal world and, as Stendhal in his day perceived with a home- sick yearning for old times, were not without their charm.( The Italian intellectual and upper classes never embraced democracy wholeheartedly, j They never applied the theory of mass educa- tion with any peal conviction. One may therefore explain the antidemocratic intonation of Mosca's earlier works as partly a matter of fashion and partly a matter of youth. Democratic theory was generally accepted — it was original, therefore, to attack it. Democracy was unpopular, especially in south Italy. One was therefore swimming with the current in overstressing the corruption and inefficiency of parliamentary politicians and in waving the menace of socialism in the face of those who were eager to strengthen popular education and extend the suffrage. All the same, the defense of the representative system in the second part of the Elements is not a mere case of the "jitters of '££," nor is it exactly a palinode. It is a bona fide return to the implications of Mosca's theory of social forces, freed of meta- physical divagations. vA maturer contemplation of history" las convinced Mosca that, of all forms of political organization, ,he representative system has shown itself capable of embracing :he largest social units at incredibly high levels of civilization; and :hat, as compared with competing systems today, it gives promise >f allowing freest play to increasing numbers of social forces and xxxvi INTRODUCTION of providing more readily for that rapid social circulation which is essential to the stability of ruling classes and to reinforcing culture with tradition. / IX. MOSCA AND PABBTO This translation edition of the Elements of Mosca was planned in 19®8 as part of an enterprise for making the monuments of Italian Machiavellian thought available to English-speaking scholars. Normally it should have appeared, and but for diffi- culties associated with the crisis of *29 would have appeared, in advance of my American edition of Pareto's Trattato. That order of publication would have preserved the chronological sequence of the two works in their native language and given a more satisfactory inception to the problems of relationship that very evidently arise between them. As it is, we find ourselves confronted today with polemics which are echoes of polemics of thirty years ago; and there is already a line of Italian or Italo- American writers who, somewhat tardily to tell the truth, dis- cover Mosca in order to diminish Pareto, while there are again a few who disparage Mosca for the greater glory of Pareto. As a matter of fact, a question of indebtedness first raised by Mosca (1902, 1907) has been attenuated to a question of "unrecognized priority" (Luigi Einaudi, 1934, Sereno, Megaro, Salvemini, 1988) ; but both those questions, from any scientific standpoint, can be regarded only as irrelevant.1 There is no dialectical or historical connection between Pareto's theory of the Ilite and Mosca's theory of the ruling class. On the dialectical side, Mosca's theory of the ruling class derives from a criticism of the doctrine of majority rule and is, as we have seen, a generalization of the method of Taine. Pareto's theory of the 61ite derives from a, study of the relations of distribution of wealth to class differentiations in society and aims specifically at a correction of Ammon. On the historical side, Pareto had not seen Mosca's Teorica as late as 1906 (see Manuale> §97, 8). The publication of his Cours (1896, 1897) was contemporaneous with that of Mosca's Elementi to a matter of days and the work 1 For the literature of this quarrel see Renzo Sereno, "The Anti-Aristotelianism of Gaetno Mosca and Its Fate," Journal of Ethics, July 10S8, to which add Gaudence Megaro, Mussolini in the Making, Boston-New York, 1938, p. 116, and Gaetano Salvemini, review of Megaro, Nation, July, 1938. INTRODUCTION xxxvii must therefore have been written some months before the EUmenti appeared.1 Now the GOUTS contains the concept of the 61ite in virtually the form that it was to have in Chaps. XII and XIII of Pareto's TraUato (1916, 1923). As Pareto developed his theory in the course of the years (Application^ 1900, Sys- times, 1902), he began to cross positions of Mosca, without mention of Mosca's works. When he quotes Mosca it is in regard to other matter than the theory of the ruling class or the political formula. The reason for this silence is not certain — it was certainly not malice. In hi§ sarcastic rejoinder to Mosca in the Manuale Pareto implies that Mosca's views were either obvious or else accounted for in earlier literature. That is an unhappy contention if one considers the point of stress alluded to above (§1). Mosca was the one writer to have given the concept of the ruling class the importance that the concept of elite has in Pareto's Systdmes. On the other hand, the specific points of contact between Mosca's theories and Pareto's are of a minor significance and have no bearing on the originality or intrinsic interest of Pareto's use of the concept of the 61ite. The "moral" question, therefore, can easily be overworked, and has in fact been overworked; for any harm that may have been done to Mosca by Pareto's silence has long since been undone by historical criticism. With the questions of indebtedness and priority thus disposed of, we are in a position to consider the relations between the theories of Mosca and Pareto from another standpoint. It is a case of two authors who start with one same method, the histori- cal, and in the same objective spirit to prosecute two researches that run parallel to each other in many respects and pass many of the same landmarks. But similar as they are in method and spirit the two researches are vastly different in range and magni- tude. Pareto's research, based on an analysis of the social equilibrium, leads out to a comprehensive view of all society and results in a monument of gigantic architectural proportions — the 1 The Etertmtii* dated 1806, appeared " late in 1895. " Deposit of the copyright volume is noted in the fiollettino of Feb. $9, 1896. The preface of Vol. I of Pareto's Cours is dated January, 1896; Vol. II, dated 1897, is announced as received by the Journal des 6conomistes in its November number, 1896. There was therefore no interval of consequence between the writing of Vol. I and that of Vol. II. xxxviii INTRODUCTION Trattato, which is a culture and a manner of living rather than a book. In such a research the problems of political organization that Mosca sets out to solve are mere details, yet in solving them Mosca has to take account of many of the facts that are basic in Pareto's larger structure; and he does take account of them in the form of observations, asides, intuitions, remarks that delight and astound for their shrewdness and profoundness. Mosca, for a few examples, perceives that the concept of cause, as it was used by the older historians and is still used by many moderns, is inadequate — that the historical cause is often partly effect and the historical effect also partly cause. But with Mosca this perception remains a literary finesse. With Pareto it becomes a problem that requires and in a measure attains scientific formulation. And let there be no talk of priorities or plagiarisms, for Pareto could have derived the concept of inter- dependence from Spencer as well as from Mosca. It is very likely to occur to anyone who ponders history at all deeply and so is called upon to decide to what extent Rousseau, for instance, was a product or expression of his times and to what extent he influenced and shaped his times. So again Mosca sees that political formulas are invalid as "truth" but yet somehow deter- mine the exterior aspects, at least, of whole civilizations, of social types that are immensely populous. But that perception remains as a coloring of good-natured scepticism in the Elements. Pareto wrestles with it, instead, as a scientific problem, and the solution of it gives rise, on the one hand, to his theory of the role of the nonlogical in human society and human history, and, on the other, to his epoch-making classification of "derivations." And again let there be no talk of priorities or plagiarisms, for Pareto could just as well descend from Bentham, if he were not, in this as in every other respect, the child of his own genius. Mosca perceives that membership in the ruling class has a relation to human traits and he lingers, again in a mood of half-mirthful skepticism, on the traits that bring one "success in life." He fails to perceive, meantime, that that problem has an intimate bearing on the problem of the scientific classification of ruling classes toward which he was working. In Pareto the same perception leads to a masterly study of the belief that virtue has its rewards, and, further, to his now celebrated classification of ruling classes as "combinatienist" or "abstractionist" (pro- INTRODUCTION xxxix moters-believers). Mosca perceives that the manner in which ruling classes renew their membership has a vital significance for the prosperity of nations. That again is a shrewd intuition. In Pareto it becomes scientific hypothesis in a theory of social cycles, where social circulation is considered as one, merely, of the factors that determine social movement and where the problem of its relation to those other factors is formulated. All of this leads one to suspect that the real influence of Mosca on Pareto was of the type that one normally notes in the history of the sciences. By 1898, or thereabouts, Mosca's masterpiece was known to Pareto, and he could only be responsive to its various stresses. After the Elements, with its ruling class theory, Pareto was unlikely to overlook the fact that in the social equilibrium ruling-class traits far outweigh majority traits. After Mosca's stress on the humanitarian decadence of aris- tocracies it was unlikely that Pareto would overlook that same type of decadence. So for the doctrine of social crystallization or for the discussion of types of history, of the role of facts in scientific method, of the roles of force and propaganda in society, of theories of revolution and revolt. The anti-Paretans, in general, make a mistake in limiting the question of Pareto's indebtedness to Mosca to consideration of the concept of the ruling class. Really, and in the Trattato especially, Pareto holds in view all the major positions of Mosca, just as he holds in view the positions of dozens of other writers. The Elements are one of the foils that he uses to give a polemical development to some of his discussions. Characteristic here would be Pareto's criticism (Trattato, £566, note 3) of Taine's theory that ruling classes succumb because of neglecting their "duties" (a theory that Taine may have taken over from Tocqueville). One ele- ment in that painstaking refutation may easily have been the fact that Mosca takes over Taine's theory, ethical fallacies included, and makes it basic in his theory of the decline of ruling classes. In the same way one might compare Mosca's utilization of Salvian of Marseilles (on Roman morals) or Martin del Rio with the use that Pareto makes of those same authors. X. ON TRANSLATING MOSCA This translation edition of Mosca's Elements has aimed at a readable, organic presentation of Mosca's thought, quite apart xl INTRODUCTION from systematic literalism or any mechanical reproduction of the various devices by which Mosca adapted a text written in 1895 to the movement of science and history and to his own intellectual evolution. The Italian edition of 1928 shows two books moving side by side, one as text, the other as notes, with a third book added as a tail that is sometimes inclined to wag the dog. This irregularity of composition has been smoothed out by incor- porating the notes in the text at points where they fit organically, by breaking up the once ponderous Chapter X into two, by numbering the chapters consecutively and by some slight rearrangement of material. For instance, the criticism of Comte and Spencer has been moved from Chapter VI, where it hung loose in space, to Chapter III where it logically belonged. That discussion, moreover, seemed to be an independent article written during Spencer's lifetime under the shadow of the master's overpowering prestige. It has been rewritten to conform with the spirit of the book as a whole and, it is hoped, with some little gain in clarity. A half-century's time has of course borne heavily upon the critical apparatus of the old Elements of 1895 and upon certain discussions which Mosca retained as late as 1923. Mosca him- self has insisted on deleting the study of the Roman question from the American edition. In the spirit of that revision the editor has further deleted from the notes a number of antiquated bibliographies, several debates dealing with socialist metaphysics as propounded in the nineties by Labriola and others, and in general all notes that seemed for one reason or another to have lost interest. That such suppressions have been relatively few bespeaks, in the editor's opinion, the classic soundness of Mosca's text as it first appeared in 1895 or as he left it in 1928. In Mosca's early days parliamentary eloquence in Italy still remembered its Ciceronian origins in a slow-moving periodic sentence that piled modifiers on modifiers, dependent clauses on dependent clause. Mosca was still close enough to that style to wield it with force, clarity and elegance. No one in America has been able to make it seem probable since Henry James or W. C. Brownell — one might almost say, since Melville. Miss Kahn did wonders, in the editor's opinion, in transferring Mosca's period into English; but the editor finally decided to replace it with a more analytical paragraph, taking the risks of mistaking INTRODUCTION xli "slants" that such a method of translation often involves. As against the literalists, the editor will confess that he has always tried to live up to the three requisites in the translator that were once proclaimed by Joel Spingarn, the first being courage, the second courage, and the third courage. In this translation edition, Mosca's term "political class" is regularly rendered by the more usual English expression "ruling class/' on the basis of the permission extended in the Elements (chap. II, §1). It should never bfc forgotten, of course, that these two terms, which are interchangable in Mosca, function, subject to his definition of the political or ruling class, as the group of people who actually and directly participate in government or influence it. Mosca's "ruling class," therefore, covers a narrower field than Pareto's 61ite (the sum of outstanding talents) or the Marxian "ruling class" (the employer or property-holding class and its appendages, political or social). One might illustrate with the case of the American professor. Under some adminis- trations he is in Mosca's ruling class, as one can establish by giving an ear to the general clamor of disapproval. Under other administrations he is not in Mosca's ruling class — and the clamor is just as great but elsewhere directed. In Marxian theory he would always be a member of the ruling class, even if ignored in town and hen pecked at home, and for Pareto always a member of the 61ite. The editor is indebted to Senator Mosca for reading proof of this English edition and to many friends for assistance at one time or another in the furtherance of this enterprise : to Giuseppe Prezzolini, for a first personal contact with Senator Mosca in 19££; to Irene di Robilant and Gaudence Megaro, for the per- formance of a number of personal errands to Senator Mosca in Italy; finally to Mario Einaudi, who first interested the present publishers in the Mosca enterprise and who also made a number of much-appreciated suggestions on the proofs. ARTHTJB LIVINGSTON. NBW YORK, December, 1938. THE RULING CLASS CHAPTER I POLITICAL SCIENCE 1. During centuries past it has many times occurred to inmKers to consider the hypothesis that the social phenomena unwinding before their gaze might not be mere products of chance, nor yet expressions of some supernatural, omnipotent will, but rather effects of constant psychological tendencies determining the behavior of the human masses. Even in Aristotle's early day an effort was made to discover the laws that govern the operation of such tendencies and their manner of functioning, and the science devoted to that purpose was called "politics." During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many writers, particularly in Italy, applied themselves to "politics."1 Yet they — beginning with Machiavelli, the most famous of them all — were less concerned with determining constant trends in human societies than with the arts by which an individual, or a class of individuals, might succeed in achieving supreme power in a given society and in thwarting the efforts of other individuals or groups to supplant them. Those are two different things, substantially, though there may be points of contact between them, as an analogy will serve to show. Political economy studies the constant laws or tendencies that govern the production and distribution of wealth in human societies; but that science is by no means the same as the art of amassing wealth and keeping it. A very competent economist may be incapable of making a fortune; and a banker or a business- man may acquire some understanding from knowledge of economic laws but does not need to master them, and may, in fact, get along very well in his business even in utter ignorance of them.2 1 Ferrari, Corso sugli scnttyti politici italiani. 2 On the distinction between politics as the art of governing (Staatskunsf) and politics as the science of government (Staatstoitienschaft), see Holtzendorff, 1 « POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I 2. In our day the science founded by Aristotle has been sub- divided and specialized, so that we have not so much a science of politics as a group of political sciences. That is not all. Efforts have been made to synthesize and coordinate the results of such sciences, and this has given rise to the science of sociology. In interpreting legislation, or otherwise commenting upon public enactments, jurists and writers on public law are almost always carried on into investigations of the general tendencies that have inspired legislation. Historians, too, in telling the story of human vicissitudes, have frequently sought to deduce from a study of historical events the laws that regulate and determine them. That was the case with Polybius and Tacitus, among the ancients, with Guicciardini in the sixteenth century, with Macaulay and Taine in the century just past. Philosophers, theologians, jurists — all thinkers, in short, who, directly or indirectly, have written with a view to improving human society and have, therefore, examined the laws that regulate its organization — may be considered, under one aspect or another, to have been dealing with problems of political science. It turns out that a good half of the field of human thought, an immense portion of the intellectual effort that man has devoted to delving into his past, probing his future, analyzing his own moral and social nature, may be looked upon as devoted to political science. Among the political or social sciences one branch, so far, has attained such scientific maturity that through the abundance and the accuracy of its results it has left all the others far behind. We are thinking of political economy. Toward the end of the eighteenth century a number of men of great ability segregated the phenomena involved in the produc- tion and distribution of wealth from the mass of other social phenomena and, considering them apart from other data, suc- ceeded in determining many of the constant psychological laws or tendencies that they obey. This method of separating economic phenomena from other aspects of social activity, along with the habit that has grown up of considering them as inde- pendent of the other phenomena that affect the organization of political institutions, undoubtedly accounts for the rapid progress that political economy has made; but at the same time it may be Prinmpien der Politik, chaps. I-IL We touch on this matter again below, chap. VIII, §1. §3] POLITICAL SCIENCE 3 held chiefly responsible for the fact that certain postulates of the science of economics are still open to controversy. If, therefore, political economy could manage to coordinate its own obser- vations with what has been learned of other phases of human psychology, it might be able to make further and perhaps decisive progress. During the last thirty or forty years there has been a tendency to explain all political events in human history on the basis of economic considerations. In our opinion, this point of view is too one-sided and too exclusive. There are social and political phenomena (for example, the rise and spread of the great reli- gions, the renascence of certain ancient nationalities, the estab- lishment of certain powerful military monarchies) which cannot be explained solely by variations in the distribution of wealth, or by the conflict between capital and labor or between fixed and circulating capital. However, the tendencies that regulate the organization of political authority cannot be studied without taking into account the results that political economy, a sister science of more pre- cocious growth, has already obtained. To study the tendencies mentioned is the aim of the present work. We call this study "political science." We have chosen that designation because it was the first to be used in the history of human thought, because it has not yet fallen into disuse and because the term "sociology," which many writers have adopted since the day of Auguste Comte, still has no precise and sharply defined meaning (in common usage it covers all the social sciences, among them economics and criminology, rather than the science directly concerned with the study of the phenomena that are more specially and properly designated as "political").1 3. A science is always built up on a system of observations which have been made with particular care and by appropriate methods on a given order of phenomena and which have been so coordinated as to disclose incontrovertible truths which would not have been discovered by the ordinary observation of the plain man. 1 The term "political science" has been used, among other writers, by Holtzen- dorff, Bluntschli, Donnat, Scolari, Brougham, Sheldon Amos, De Parieu and Pollock. 4 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I The mathematical sciences furnish the simplest and readiest illustration of the development of the truly scientific procedure. In mathematics the axiom is the fruit of an observation that is accessible to everybody, and its truth is apparent even to the eyes of the plain man. Stating a number of axioms and coordinating them, we get proofs for the simpler theorems. Then, still further coordinating the truths derived from such theorems with the truths of the axioms, we get proofs for new and more difficult theorems, the truth of which could be neither guessed nor proved by any one untrained in the mathematical sciences. The pro- cedure in physics and the other natural sciences is quite the same, but in them the method begins to be complicated by new elements. To coordinate a number of simple observations often will not suffice to provide a demonstration of a truth that we may call "composite" — in other words, not apparent at first glance. In the majority of cases something corresponding to the axiom in mathematics is obtained only through experiment or pro- longed observation, both of which have their value when they are conducted by special and accurate methods and by individ- uals who have been properly trained in such methods. In the early days of the various sciences the sound procedure was almost always found as the result of lucky hypotheses, which were eventually substantiated by experiments and observations of fact and which in their turn explained many other observations, many other facts. A long period of empiricism, of imperfect or erroneous methods of observation, of mistaken theories that have hampered the useful coordination of data on individual phenom- ena, has almost always preceded the strictly scientific period in the given science. So for many centuries astronomy and chemistry floundered about in the errors and follies of astrology and alchemy. Only after human minds had long labored over given orders of phenomena did a wealth of accumulated data, better methods, better material instruments of observation, and the insight and unflagging patience of mighty intellects finally succeed in producing those fortunate hypotheses that have made real science possible. The mere use of observation and experience within a given order of phenomena does not of itself assure truly scientific results. Francis Bacon was mistaken as to the absolute capacity of the experimental method for discovering scientific truth, §8] POLITICAL SCIENCE 5 and many thinkers and writers in our day are harooqpg ro$ same illusion. As is well known, Bacon compared the j^kperittiental method, which for that matter had been in use long before his day, to a compass, which will allow the hand unpractised in drawing to trace perfect circles — in other words, to obtain accu- rate scientific results.1 As a matter of fact, if observation and experience are to yield sound results the condition that we have specified above are essential. Ill-used, and? ivith mistaken scientific procedures, they lead to false discoveries, or may even lend a semblance of plausibility to downright nonsense. After all, astrology and alchemy wei*e based on observation and experience, real or presumed; but the method of observation, or rather the point of view from which observations were conducted and coordinated, was profoundly mistaken. In his Disqui- sitiones magicae the notorious Martin Del Rio thought that he was relying on observations of fact in drawing his distinctions between love magic, hate magic and sleep-inducing magic and in revealing the wiles and ways of witches and sorcerers. Indeed he intended that his observations should help people to detect witches and sorcerers and guard against them. So economists before the day of Adam Smith thought that they were resting on observations of fact when they held that the wealth of a nation lay solely in its money and in the products of its soil; and Don Ferrante, the typical scientist of the seventeenth century, so effectively sketched by Manzoni,2 was arguing from facts and experiences that were universally accepted in his time when he showed, by a reasoning which was faultlessly logical and positive as far as appearance went, that the bubonic plague could not possibly be contagious. He reasoned as follows: In rerum natura there is nothing but substance and accident. Contagion cannot be an accident because an accident cannot pass from one body to another. It cannot be a substance because substances are terreous, igneous, aqueous and aeriform. If contagion were a terreous substance, it would be visible; if aqueous, it would be 1 Macaulay, "Lord Bacon*' in Critical and Historical Essays, vol. II, p. 254 [The passage reads: "His philosophy resembled a compass or a rule which equalizes all hands, and enables the most unpractised person to draw a more correct circle or line than the best draftsmen can produce without such aid." And see Novum organon, Preface and I, 122.] 2 / promessi sposi, chap. XXXVII. 6 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I wet; if igneous, it would burn; if aeriform, it would soar aloft to its propef sphere. 4, Even today political science has not yet entered upon its truly scientific period. Though a scholar may learn from it many things that escape the perception of the plain man, it does not seem to offer any body of incontrovertible truths that are accepted by all who are versed in its discipline, and much less to have acquired, so far, a trustworthy and universally accepted method of research. The causes of this situation are multiple, and for the present we cannot go into them. We may say simply that such causes are to be sought not so much in a lack of talent in the men who have pondered the subject of politics as in the great complexity of the phenomena involved in that subject and, especially, in the circumstance that, down to a few decades ago, it was virtually impossible to get accurate and complete information about the facts on which we are obliged to depend in trying to discover the constant laws or tendencies that determine the political organization of human societies. However fragmentary or defective we may consider the various methods or systems of ideas that have so far been brought to bear upon the field of political science, it is none the less our duty to make a rapid survey of them. Some of them have been, as they are still, little more than philosophical, theological or rational justifications of certain types of political organization which have for centuries played, and in some cases are still playing, a significant role in human history. As we shall presently see, one of the most constant of human tendencies is the tendency to justify an existing form of government by some rational theory or some supernatural belief. We have accord- ingly had a so-called political science at the service of societies in which belief in the supernatural still holds sway over the minds of men and in which, therefore, the exercise of political power finds its explanation in the will of God (or of the gods) ; and we have had, as we still have, another political science which justifies that power by representing it to be a free and spontaneous expression of the will of the people, or of the majority of the individuals composing the given society. Among all the various systems and methods of political obser- vation, we must concern ourselves more especially with two, JS] ENVIRONMENTAL THEORIES 7 which are more objective and universal in character than the others and which have designedly set out to discover the laws that explain the existence of all the various forms of government that appear in the world. The first of these two methods makes the political differentiation of the various societies dependent upon variations in external environment, and more particularly in climate; the other correlates it primarily with the physical, and therefore psychological, differences between the various races of men. The first method lays primary stress on the criterion of physical environment; the other, upon the eth- nological or somatic criterion. The two methods occupy such important places in the history of science and in contemporary science and are, as far as appearances go, so positive and experi- mental in character, that we cannot be excused from going into the matter of their actual scientific value, 5. From the days of Herodotus and Hippocrates down to the present century an enormous number of writers have assumed that climate has an influence on social phenomena in general and on political phenomena in particular. Many have tried to demonstrate that influence and have based whole scientific systems upon it. In the forefront among these stands Montes- quieu, who insists most emphatically upon the preponderant influence of climate on the moral and political systems of nations. "The closer one gets to the countries of the south," he writes,1 "the farther one seems to get from morality itself"; and he declares2 that liberty is incompatible with warm countries and never flourishes where the orange grows. Other writers concede that civilization may have been born in the warm countries but nevertheless maintain that its center of gravity has continu- ously crept northward and that the countries that are best organized politically today are located in the north.8 Now to begin with, the climate of a country is not entirely a matter of latitude but depends also on such factors as elevation above sea level, exposure, prevailing winds, and so on. Not all of the physical environment, moreover, is dependent on climate, 1 Esprit des lots, book XIV, chap. 2. * Ibid., book XVII 8 Mougeolle, Statique des civilisations and Les probtemes de I'histoire; and see Bluntschli, Pditik (da Wissenschqft. 8 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I in other words, on variations in temperature and rainfall. Other circumstances figure in it — for example, the greater or lesser population that a region may have, and consequently the degree of development its agriculture has attained and the kind of crops that are most commonly in use. The inhabitants of a sparsely populated and therefore pastoral or wooded territory live in a physical environment that is wholly different from that of people who inhabit a densely populated and therefore inten- sively cultivated territory. It is undeniable, furthermore, that the influence that climate may have on the life of a people as a whole and on its political organization in particular must steadily diminish with the growth of its civilization. The vegetable kingdom is undoubtedly most at the mercy of atomospheric and telluric conditions in that plants, unless they are raised in hothouses, are almost wholly destitute of means of reaction or defense against external influences. Animals are somewhat better off, since self-defense and reaction are not altogether impossible for them. Primitive or even savage man is still better situated, for his means of defense are at least superior to those of the animals. Best situated of all is civilized man. He is so rich in resources that he feels but scant effects from changes in climate — and he is perfecting his resources and increasing their number from day to day. Granting that premise, the following conception seems to us obvious and acceptable: that the first great civilizations arose in spots where nature offered the greatest and most numerous facilities, or the fewest and least serious obstacles; that, therefore, they flourished in broad valleys that were fairly mild in climate and well enough watered to permit easy cultivation of some sort of grain. A fair density of population is a condition that is almost indispensable to the rise of a civilization. Civilization is not possible where a hundred human beings are scattered over a thousand square miles of land. But if human beings are to live in large numbers in a relatively small area (say at least ten or twenty inhabitants per square mile), a grain culture is essential. In fact, we find that the rise of Chinese civilization was con- temporaneous with, or subsequent to, the cultivation of rice. The Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations were based on wheat, barley and millet, and the aboriginal American civili- zations on maize. In a few tropical countries certain fruits, such §6] NORDICS AND SOUTHERNERS 9 as the banana, or farinaceous roots such as manioc, may have taken the place of cereals. This induction is corroborated by history, which shows early civilizations in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, the Ganges, and the Yellow River, and on the Anahuac plateau — lands which present all the physical conditions that we have mentioned. But once man has succeeded in so marshaling his forces as to tame nature in some exceptionally favorable spot, he can go on to master her in other places where she is more recalcitrant. In our day — with the exception "of the polar regions, a few spots, possibly, about the equator, and certain areas where excessive aridness or the presence of malaria creates peculiarly unfavorable conditions — all the lands of the earth are, or can be made, capable of harboring civilized populations. 6. The principle that civilization always spreads from south to north, or rather from warm to cold areas, we regard as one of those oversimple formulas which attempt to explain extremely complicated phenomena by a single cause. It is based on a mere fragment of history — on the history of a single period in European civilization, and a history superficially studied at that. If one were to use this method in examining a map — a map of northern Germany, or of Siberia, let us say — ;one might deduce a law that all rivers flow from south to north, because that is true of those countries, which have highlands in the south and seas to the north. The rule might be reversed if one were studying southern Russia, while South America might furnish still a third law, namely, that rivers flow from west to east. The truth is that, with no reference whatever to latitude or longitude, rivers flow from high to low, from mountains or plateaus to seas or lakes. If one were to call lands offering the lesser resistance "lower" lands, one might say that the law that governs the expansion of civilization is the very same. The civilizing current flows indifferently from south to north and from north to south, but it flows by preference in the direction in which it encounters the least natural and social resistance — and by social resistance we mean the impact of other original civilizations developing in inverse directions. Chinese civilization arose in the central provinces of the empire. It was shut in on the north by the barren and frigid 10 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I plateaus of central Asia, while on the south it could flow not only into the southern provinces of China proper but into Indo- China as well. Hindu civilization, encountering the almost insurmountable chain of the Himalayas on the north, pressed from north to south, from northern India into the Deccan, and thence on to Ceylon and Java. Egyptian civilization crept northward until it met the powerful confederation of the Hittites, in other words the impact of another civilization, in northern Syria. On the other hand, it was in a position to expand more extensively to the south, and it in fact ascended the Nile from Memphis to Thebes and from Thebes to Mero§, It now seems certain that the earliest dynasties flourished at Tanis and Memphis, that Thebes came into prominence only after the invasion of the Shepherd kings and that Ethiopia was civilized by the Egyptians and did not become an independent realm until a very late date. Heir to the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, Persian civili- zation spread from east to west — in the direction in which it encountered fewest natural obstacles — until it collided with Greek civilization. Greco-Roman civilization embraced the whole basin of the Mediterranean. Arrested to the south by impassable deserts and toward the east by Oriental civilization in the form of the Parthian empire and then of the Persian, it spread northward until it came to the swamps and forests, at the time almost impassable, of northern Germany and Scotland. Mohammedan civilization was barred on the south by sea and desert and so was impelled towards the northwest. During the Middle Ages, European civilization was checked on the south by Arab civilization, which wrested the entire southern portion of the Mediterranean basin from it. It moved northward, accord- ingly, absorbing Scotland, northern Germany, Scandinavia and Poland. Today the civilization of Europe is stretching out in all directions, wherever there are sparsely populated lands that are easy to colonize, or decadent nations that are waiting for a conqueror. The center of a civilization, as the latter flows in one direction or another, seems to move in Conformity with the law we have just stated. The countries that lie on the frontiers of a type of human civilization are not as a rule the ones that are most advanced in it. When European civilization embraced the §7] NOEDICS AND SOUTHERNERS 11 whole Mediterranean basin, Greece proper and southern Italy were the hub of the civilized world, and they were the most vigorous, the most cultured, the most prosperous countries in it. When they became the most advanced outposts of civilization facing the Mohammedan world, they declined. In a given country, conditions being equal, the most civilized and prosperous district seems almost always to be the one that has the readiest means of communication with the lands that constitute the hearth, or radiation center, of the civilization to which the country itself belongs. As long as Sicily was part of the Hellenic world, which had its center to the east of Sicily, the most prosperous and highly civilized section of the island was the east coast.1 During the Arab period western Sicily was the most cultured, prosperous and thickly populated, being closest to Africa, whence Mohammedan civilization was radiating.2 Today the greatest population and wealth are concentrated on the north coast of the island, facing northern Europe. 7. It is also, in our opinion, a very rash hypothesis to ascribe .a superior morality to the peoples of the north as compared with the peoples of the south. Morality results from such complex qualities of mind and spirit, and the external circumstances within which human life unfolds play such a large part in positive or negative expressions of morality, that to determine whether a single individual is potentially more moral than another is in itself not a little difficult. Difficult indeed is that same judgment with respect to two societies, two human masses composed of many individuals. Statistical data on this subject cannot tell everything — often they fail even to tell enough. Personal impressions are almost always too subjective — on the whole they are less trustworthy than statistics. Generally speaking, it is the unfamiliar form of immorality that makes the greater impression, and so we are prone to judge people of another country as worse than people of our own. Moreover, we are com- monly given to considering as less moral than others the country in which we came first or most thoroughly to know and appraise certain vices and frailties which, really, are common to all men. 1Beloch, "La popolazione della Sicilia antica" and see: Die Bevdlkerung der Griechisch-Romischcn Welt, chap. VII, pp. 261-305. 1 Amari, Storia del Musulmani in Sicilia. 12 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I The vice most commonly attributed to southerners is lust, whereas northerners are more generally charged with drunken- ness. And yet it may be observed that Congo negroes become more disgracefully drunk than Russian peasants or Swedish laborers; and as for lust, it appears that folkways and the type of social organization that each people creates for itself as the result of a sequence of historical circumstances exert a prof ounder influence upon it than does climate. Before his conversion to Christianity, St. Vladimir (the czar who was canonized and became the patron saint of all the Russias) had more women in his harem than the caliph Harun-al-Rashid ever did. Ivan the Terrible emulated and outstripped in cruelty and lust Nero, Heliogabalus and the bloodiest sultans of the East. In our day there is perhaps more prostitution in London, Paris and Vienna than there ever was in ancient Babylon and Delhi. In present- day Europe, Germany leads in the number of sex crimes, and then follow, in descending order, Belgium, France, Austria and Hungary. Italy stands near the bottom of the list, and Spain comes last of all.1 Many criminologists assume a predominance of crimes of violence, or offenses against the person, in the south, whereas they credit the north with a larger quota of offenses against property.2 But Tarde and Colajanni have shown conclusively that such rela- tions as have been sought between climate and type of crime are rather to be ascribed to differences in social conditions such as may be encountered in various districts in a given country.3 It is true that in the United States, Prance and Italy crimes of violence regularly prevail in the south, while the northern Darts of those countries show a relatively higher frequency of crimes against property. But as Tarde himself well points out, in all those countries the southern districts are poorer in facilities of com- munication, are farther removed from the great industrial cities and from the centers of present-day civilization, than are the northern regions; and it is to be expected that violent forms of crime should predominate, irrespective of climate, in less advanced regions, and that crimes requiring skill and shrewdness should be more common in better educated ones. This, in fact, * Colajanni, La swmlogia criminate, vol. II, chap, 7. 1 Maury, Lombroso, Fern, Puglia. 8 Tarde, La Criminalitt comparSe, chap. IV. §8] NORDICS AND SOUTHERNERS 13 would seem to be the most adequate explanation of the phenome- non. The French departments that show the highest figures for crimes of violence (Ardeche and Lozere, in the eastern Pyrenees) lie, to be sure, in the south of Prance, but they are relatively cold regions because of the mountainous nature of the country. In Italy the Basilicata furnishes one of the highest percentages of crimes of violence, but it is a mountainous district and relatively cold — the peaks of the Matese, the Gargano and the Sila are snow- covered for most of the year as are the highlands that bear certain Sicilian towns notorious for enterprises involving blood and brigandage.1 8. Going on to the strictly political aspect of the question, we may note that before we can decide whether southerners are unfitted for liberty we must come to an understanding as to the exact meaning of the term "liberty." If we assume that the freest country is the country where the rights of the governed are best protected against arbitrary caprice and tyranny on the part of rulers, we must agree that political institutions that are regarded as superior from that point of view have flourished both in cold countries and in very temperate countries, such as Greece and Rome. Vice versa, systems of government based on the arbitrary will of rulers may be found in such very cold countries as Russia. The constitutional form of government had no more vigorous beginnings in foggy England than it had in Aragon, Castile and Sicily. If Montesquieu had extended his travels a little farther south he would have found, in Sicily, a political order under which, even in his day, the royal authority was much more limited than it was in France.2 Granting that in our time the various representative systems may be regarded as the least imperfect forms of government, we find them in force in northern and southern Europe equally, and, outside of Europe, they probably function as well in chilly Canada as they do at the Cape of Good Hope, where the climate, if not actually hot, is certainly very mild. The reason why southerners should be less well fitted for free and enlightened forms of government can only be this: that they 1 For other examples, see Colajanni, La sodologia criminale, vol. II, chap. 7. 2 On the importance and extensive development of the old Sicilian constitution see the two classic treatises by Gregorio, Introduzione allo studio del diritto 14 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I are possessed of less physical, and especially less moral and intellectual, vitality. It is, in fact, very commonly believed that in view of a superior energy, which expresses itself in indus- triousness, in war, in learning, northerners are destined always to be conquerors of the ineffectual southerners. But that view is even more superficial and contrary to fact than the ones we have just refuted. Actually, civilizations which arose and developed in hot or very mild climates have left behind them monuments that attest an advanced culture and an untold capacity for labor which are all the more astonishing in that the peoples in question did not have at their disposal the machines that tpday multiply man's resources a hundredfold. The capacity of a people for hard work seems to depend not so much on climate as on habits that are in large part determined by the vicissitudes of its history. In general, habits of application and industry are shown by peoples of very ancient civilization who have long since attained the agricultural level and have, moreover, long enjoyed tolerable political systems that assure the working man of at least some fraction of the fruits of his toil. On the other hand, peoples that have relapsed into a partial barbarism, or barbarous and semi- barbarous peoples that are accustomed to live to some extent by war and thieving, are usually indolent and sluggish apart from activities relating to fighting or hunting. In just such terms did Tacitus describe the ancient Germans. In our time the North American Indians and the Kalmuks of Asia are exceedingly lazy, though the former once lived, as the latter still live, in very cold countries. The Chinese of the southern provinces are a hard- working people, and the Egyptian fellah can toil with the utmost endurance. The absence of large-scale industry in the southern- most parts of Europe has created and continues to sustain the impression that their inhabitants are indolent workers, but any- one who knows these peoples well knows how little, on the whole, that reputation is deserved. Sicily may be taken as an example. That island, with an area of about 20,000 square miles, supports a population of over four million — in other words, about 180 people per square mile. There are no large industries and no great abundance of capital. The soil, largely mountainous, is rich in sunshine but poor in water. If a population is to live with any degree of comfort at all under such conditions, the soil must be tilled with untiring effort and with a certain amount of technical proficiency. §9] HIGHLANDERS VS. LOWLANDERS 15 If we assume that military superiority is a test of greater energy, it is hard indeed to decide whether northerners have defeated and conquered southerners more often than southerners have defeated and conquered northerners. The Egyptians were southerners, and in their heyday they swept in triumph over Asia as far as the mountains of Armenia. The Assyrian warriors lived in the mildest of climates, yet, however much we may deplore their brutality, we cannot but marvel at their indomi- table energy in war. The Greeks were southerners, but they managed to conquer all western Asia, and by force of arms, colonization, commerce and intellectual superiority they Hellen- ized the entire eastern portion of the Mediterranean basin and a considerable part of the basin of the Black Sea. The Romans, too, were southerners, and their legions overran the plains of Dacia, penetrated the inaccessible forests of Germany, and pursued the Picts and Caledonians into the deepest recesses of their bleak, wild mountains. The Italians of the Middle Ages were southerners, and they wrought miracles in war, industry and commerce. Southerners, too, were the Spaniards of the six- teenth century, those glamorous conquistadores who in less than half a century explored, overran and conquered most of the Americas. The Franco-Norman followers of William the Conqueror were southerners, as compared with the English, yet in a few years' time they were able almost entirely to dispossess the inhabitants of southern Great Britain and to drive the Angles, at the point of the sword, back to the old Roman wall. The Arabs were southerners in an absolute sense, yet in less than a century they imposed their conquest, and with their conquest their language, their religion and their civiliza- tion, upon as generous a portion of the world as the modern Anglo-Saxons have conquered and colonized in the course of many centuries. 0. Differences in social organization depending on land configuration or topography may be considered as secondary to those due to variations in climate, though they may perhaps be more important. Whether a country is more or less level or more or less mountainous, whether it is situated on the great highways of communication or remote from them, are factors that exert a far greater influence on its history than a few degrees more or less of mean temperature. The importance "of such factors must not 16 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I be exaggerated, however, to the point of making an inexorable law of them. Topographical features that are favorable under certain historical conditions may become very unfavorable under others, and vice versa. When all Europe was still in the Bronze and the early Iron Age, Greece found herself in an amazingly favorable situation for achieving leadership in her corner of the world, since she was better placed than any other country for absorbing infiltrations from Egyptian and Asiatic civilizations. But in modern times, down to the cutting of the isthmus of Suez, Greece was one of the least favorably situated of the countries of Europe, since she lay remote from the center of European culture and from the great highways of transatlantic and East Indian commerce. Another widespread opinion in such matters is that mountain- eers are usually superior to lowlanders and are destined almost always to conquer them. Certainly more can be said for that theory than for the ascription of marked superiority to peoples of the north. It may be questionable whether a cold climate is more salubrious than a temperate or warm climate, but it seems to be established that highlands are almost always more healthful than lowlands — and better health implies stronger physical constitution and therefore greater energy. But great energy is not always combined with strength of social structure, upon which, after all, decision as to whether a people is to rule or to be ruled depends. Now a sound political organism that unites and directs the energies of great masses of people arises and maintains itself more readily on plains than in mountainous countries. In fact we see, in Turkey and the Near East, that though the Circassian, Kurdish and Albanian mountaineers have frequently attained importance as individuals, and though bands of them in the service of bordering countries have often become forces to be reckoned with and feared, yet Albania, Circassia and Kurdi- stan have never, in historic times, become nuclei of great inde- pendent empires. On the contrary, they have always been drawn into the orbits of the great political organisms that touched their borders.1 The Swiss, too, have had great importance as individuals and as corps of mercenaries, but Switzerland as 1 Saladin was a Kurd. Mehemet Ali, the first khedive of Egypt, was an Albanian. The famous Mameluke beys* who ruled in Egypt for many centuries, were Circassians. §10] RACIAL THEORIES 17 a nation has never weighed perceptibly in the political scales of Europe. History shows, in general, that if intrepid bands of mountain- eers have often devastated, rather than conquered, lowlands, still more often have the organized armies of lowlanders crushed the disconnected efforts of highlanders and reduced them to per- manent submission. The Romans conquered the Samnites, while the Samnites were able to defeat the Romans only in an occasional battle. Bands of the Scottish highlanders did now and then overrun northern England and ravage it, but the low- land English more often defeated mountainous Scotland and ended by conquering it, taming its warlike impulses and assimilat- ing it completely. For that matter, lowland peoples are not necessarily destitute of energy, or even poorly endowed with it. One has only to think of the Dutch, the North Germans, the Russians, the English, who are in large part inhabitants of very low countries. 10. The method that ascribes the degree of progress and civilization that a nation has attained and the type of political organization that it has adopted to the race to which it belongs is much less ancient than the method which views climate as the arbiter of everything. That could hardly be otherwise. Anthro- pology and comparative philology, upon which the scientific classification of the races of mankind is based, are very recent sciences (Broca and Grimm lived in the nineteenth century), whereas approximative information as to climatic differences was available in the early day of Herodotus. However, newcomer as it may have been, the ethnological trend in the social sciences has been correspondingly aggressive; and the last decades of the nineteenth century witnessed an attempt to interpret all human history on the basis of racial differences and racial influences.1 A distinction was drawn between superior races and inferior races, the former being credited with civilization, morality and a capacity for organizing themselves into great political units, while for the latter was reserved the harsh but inevitable lot either of vanishing before the encroachment of the higher races or of being conquered and civilized by them. At the most it was 1 See, among others, Qua tref ages, Gumplowicz, Lapouge and Hellwald. Gobineau's Essai sur I'MgalitS des races humaines appeared in 18 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I granted that they might go on living in independence, but without ever attaining the degree of culture and the flawless social and political organization that were proper to peoples of the privileged stocks. Renan wrote that spiritual poetry, faith, liberty, honor, self- sacrifice appeared in the world only with the advent of the two great races which, in a sense, had fashioned humanity, the Aryan and the Semitic.1 For Gobineau the central point qf history is always located where the purest, strongest, most intelligent white group abides. Lapouge pushes the same doctrine to its extremest consequences. In his opinion not only is the race that is truly moral, truly superior in all things, the Aryan, but within the Aryan race itself those individuals excel who have kept the Aryan type in pule and uncontaminated forms — those who are tall, blond and dolichocephalic. Yet even among the nations that pass as Ipdo-Germanic, individuals of this type constitute only a small minority scattered about among a short, dark, brachycephalic majority. The true Aryans, there- fore, are fairly numerous in England and North America. They begin to dwindle in numbers in Germany, being encountered there only in the upper classes. They are very rare in France and become a virtually unknown commodity in the countries of southern Europe. Morselli espouses Lapouge's thesis, main- taining the superiority of blond strains over dark, because the most highly civilized nations are those in which blonds prevail in numbers and within any given country the most highly civilized region or province is always the one where blonds are most numerous.2 Along with this school which maintains the innate and inevita- ble superiority of certain races there is another, which, without being in absolute opposition to it, is more directly linked with Darwin's theories, so widely applied to the social sciences during the second half of the past century. Spencer is the best-known writer of this second school, which has many followers. Without 1 Vie de Jfous, chap. 1. In other works Renan speaks of the Semites in far from flattering terms. * Granting all this for the sake of argument, it would still be necessary to show that in the past the dark races had never been more highly civilized or more powerful than the fair. If at any time they were, the present superiority of nations and provinces where fair hair is the commoner could well be due to other causes. §11] RACIAL THEORIES 19 maintaining the inevitable and unbroken superiority of any one race over others, these scholars believe that all social progress has come about, and is still being made, by a process of organic, or superorganic, evolution, so-called. A continuous struggle, the struggle for existence, is always going on within every society. As a result, the stronger and better individuals, those who are best adapted to their environment, survive the weaker and less well adapted and propagate their kind in preference to the latter, passing on to their descendants as an inborn heritage the qualities, acquired by a slow process of education, which won them their victory. The same struggle goes on between societies themselves, and by it the more soundly constituted societies, those composed of the stronger individuals, conquer societies that are less advantageously endowed; the latter, driven to territories less favorable to human progress, are condemned to remain in a state of everlasting inferiority. It is not hard to find a fundamental difference between these two theories. Even if the monogenistic theory, that all the races of mankind derive from a common stock, be granted, the fact still remains that differentiating traits are certainly very ancient and must have been fixed in ages extremely remote, when man had not yet emerged from his savage stage and was therefore more prone to feel the influence of the natural agencies with which he came into contact. The aboriginal American race had the physical traits it now has in a fairly remote prehistoric epoch. In very ancient Egyptian bas-reliefs, which go back some twenty centuries before our era, figures of Negroes, Semites and native Egyptians show the physical characteristics that still distinguish them. Keeping to the strictly ethnological theory, therefore, the higher races must already have possessed their traits of superior- ity at the dawn of history and have retained them practically unaltered; whereas the evolutionary theory proper implicitly or explicitly assumes that the struggle for existence has had its practical effects more recently. To that struggle it ascribes the rise and fall of the various nations and civilizations during the historic period. 11. Before the question of racial superiority or inferiority can be considered the value of the word "race" has to be determined, for it is used sometimes in a very broad, sometimes in a very 20 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I narrow, sense. We speak of white, yellow and black races to designate varieties of the human species that not only differ in language but present fairly important and fairly palpable anatomical differences. We speak of the Aryan and the Semitic races to indicate two subdivisions of the white race, which differ, to be sure, in language, but which present very striking physical resemblances. We also say the Latin, the Germanic, the Slavic races, designating by the same term three subdivisions of the Aryan branch of the white race. Though these "races" speak different languages, it can nevertheless be proved, philologically, that they are bound together by a common origin, while their physical differences are so slight that a member of one group can be mistaken for a member of another. Now in this case, as in all others, confusion in terminology leads to confusion in ideas. The fact of racial difference is pressed into service as much to explain certain diversities in civilization and political organization between whites and Negroes as to account for similar diversities between Latins, Germans and Slavs, whereas in the first case the ethnological coefficient may have a real significance and in the second, hardly any at all. We must also bear in mind that in historic and prehistoric times race crossings and mixtures, particularly between closely related races, were frequent. In the latter case, since the physical differences between the crossed races are of scant importance, and not readily perceptible in any event, classifica- tion has been based upon philological affinities rather than upon anatomical traits. But the language criterion is anything but trustworthy and infallible. It may happen, and frequently does happen, that two groups which are closely related by blood speak languages that have only remote philological kinship, while peoples of different races may speak languages and dialects that are closely affiliated as to word roots and grammatical structure. However dubious that statement may seem at first glance, there are many examples that prove it and many historical situations that explain it. In general, conquered peoples who are less civilized than their conquerors adopt the laws, arts, culture and religion of the latter and often end by adopting their language. The languages and civilizations of the Greeks and Romans enjoyed a marvelous expansion through their adoption by §11] SUPERIOR AND INFERIOR RACES 21 barbarous peoples. In France the substratum of the population is still Cimbro-Celtic, but French is essentially a Neo-Latin language. In Spain Basque blood probably predominates in the north. In the south the admixture of Arabo-Berber blood must be very strong. In Italy there are appreciable ethnic differences between Italians of the north and Italians of the south and the islands, but the various dialects are all essentially Neo-Latin. Leaving the sphere of Latin, we find that the fellahs, who are descendants of the ancient Egyptians, have forgotten the ancient tongue of Mizraim and adopted Arabic, which, moreover, has become general throughout 'Irak-'Arabi and Syria, and is becom- ing more and more the spoken language of the African Berbers. As for India, dialects of Sanskrit origin are spoken by populations which in skin color and facial features show a strong admixture, and perhaps even a predominance, of Dravidic blood. In Silesia, Brandenburg, Pomerania and old Prussia, German is the language of populations that were partly Slavic or partly Lettish in origin. In our own day, finally, the Celts of Ireland and northern Scotland are adopting English more and more. These considerations are self-evident; yet people continue to make ethnographic classifications, especially of European peoples, with sole reference to philological criteria. To tell the truth, it may be said in defense of this system that similarity of language, engendering as it does a freer interchange of ideas and feelings between certain peoples, tends to give them a far stronger resemblance in intellectual and moral type than cus- tomarily results from mere blood relationship. Bearing all this in mind, it seems to us an established fact that the most primitive races, those which anthropologists call "lower" — the Fuegians, the Australians, the Bushmen, and so on — are physically and intellectually inferior to the others. Whether that inferiority is innate, whether it has always existed, or whether it is to be attributed to the barrenness of their habitats, to the meagerness of the resources that their sur- roundings offer and to the abject poverty resulting, is a question that it is neither easy nor essential for us to answer. After all, these races represent only a very minute fraction of mankind, and that fraction is rapidly dwindling before the expansion of the white race, which is being followed in its turn, in many places, by an infiltration from the yellow race. In strict justice we are 22 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I obliged to recognize that the prosperity of the white and yellow races in localities where the aborigines barely managed to subsist has not been wholly due to the organic superiority which the former boastfully claim. The newcomers bring with them knowledge and material means which enable them to reap an ample livelihood from soils that of themselves would yield prac- tically nothing. The Australian native for centuries upon cen- turies was content to track the kangaroo, bring down birds with his boomerang or, if worse came to worst, eat a lizard. But we must remember that he had no means of securing the seeds to grow grains or other edible plants, or the breeders for flocks of sheep, which the English colonists had at their disposal. It is still harder to come to any decision as to the inferiority of the native American and the black races. Those races have from time immemorial held possession of far-flung territories in which powerful civilizations might have developed. In America, populous empires arose in Mexico, Peru and a few other regions. We cannot determine the degree of their culture with any exact- ness, since it was their misfortune to crumble before the onslaught of a few hundred Spanish adventurers. In Africa, the blacks have managed to organize fairly extensive political units at one time or another, for example, in Uganda; but not one among such states ever attained by itself a degree of culture that could be compared with that of the most ancient empires founded by the white races, or of the Chinese, Babylonian and ancient Egyptian empires, where the civilizing races were not black. It would seem, accordingly, that a certain inferiority might also be attributed prima facie to both the American Indians and the Negroes, But when things have gone in a certain way, it is not always legitimate to assume that they necessarily and unfailingly had to go that way. It is doubtful whether man existed in the Tertiary period, but it has been scientifically proved that his antiquity goes back to the beginnings of the Quaternary period and that the age of man therefore has to be computed not in thousands of years but in hundreds and perhaps thousands of centuries. Now the races of man, as we noted above, must have been formed at a very remote epoch, and since such long periods are involved the fact that a race has attained a notable degree of culture thirty, forty, even fifty centuries before another is not an infallible §11] SUPERIOR AND INFERIOR RACES 23 proof of its organic superiority. External circumstances, often fortuitous — the discovery and utilization of a metal, which may happen more or less easily according to the region, the availability or absence of domesticable plants or animals — may accelerate or retard the progress of a civilization, or even alter its history. If the American Indians had known the use of iron — a hypothesis that is not in the least far-fetched, since they did know other metals, such as gold and copper — or if the Europeans had invented gunpowder two centuries later than they did, the Europeans would not so swiftly or go completely have destroyed the political organizations of the Indians. Nor should we forget that if a race that has attained a ripe civilization, on coming into contact with another race that is still in a state of barbarism, contributes to the latter a store of useful tools and knowledge, it nevertheless profoundly disturbs, if it does not altogether arrest, the spontaneous and original development of the primitive society. Not only, in fact, have the whites almost everywhere wiped out or subjugated the American Indians. For centuries and centuries, now with alcohol, now with the slave trade, they have brutalized and impoverished the Negro race. We are obliged to agree, therefore, that European civilization has not only hindered but actually thwarted any effort toward progress that Negroes and Indians might have made of their own accord. At various branches of the American Indian race, as well as at the Polynesians, the Australians and others of the less fortunate races of human beings, the charge has been leveled that they cannot survive contact with the white man but vanish rapidly before his advance. The truth is that the whites deprive the colored races of their means of livelihood before those races have time to accustom themselves to utilizing the new means of sub- sistence that are introduced by the whites. As a rule the hunting territories of the primitive tribes are invaded and the big game destroyed before the native can adapt himself to agri- culture. Moreover the civilized races communicate their dis- eases to the less civilized, while the latter are unable to take advantage of the preventive or curative measures that scientific progress and long experience have taught to the whites. Tuber- culosis, syphilis and smallpox would probably wreak as great havoc among us as they have wrought in certain primitive tribes 24 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I if we tried to forestall and cure them exclusively with the means that the savages have at their disposal — no means at all, in other words. Are Indians and Negroes on the whole inferior to whites as individuals? While most people would answer with a ready and emphatic yes, some few with equal promptness and resolve say no. As for us, we find it as hard to agree as to disagree in terms at all positive. Observers rarely fail to report, in strictly primi- tive groups of these races, individuals who are outstanding for qualities, now of mind, now of heart. Where the American aborigines have mingled with the whites and adopted their civili- zation, they have not failed to produce distinguished men in nearly all branches of human activity, and under identical condi- tions the Negroes can boast of a list of names almost as long. Nevertheless, one has to admit, as regards both these races, that the roster of conspicuous individuals is very brief as compared with the number of individuals who have been, and are, in a position to enjoy the advantages offered by civilized life. Some weight, however, has to be given to a remark that was made to Henry George by a scholarly Negro bishop,1 that Negro school children do as well as white children and show themselves just as wide-awake and intelligent up to the age of ten or twelve; but as soon as they begin to realize that they belong to a race that is adjudged inferior, and that they can look forward to no better lot than that of cooks and porters, they lose interest in studying and lapse into apathy. In a great part of America colored people are generally regarded as inferior creatures, who must inevitably be relegated to the lowest social strata. Now if the disinherited classes among the whites bore on their faces the indelible stamp of social inferiority, it is certain that few individuals indeed among them would have the energy to raise themselves to a social position very much higher than the one to which they were born. If some doubt may be raised as to the aptitude of Negroes and American Indians for the higher forms of civilization and political organization, all perplexity vanishes as regards the Aryans and the Semites, the Mongolian, or yellow, race and that dark Asiatic race which lives mixed with the Aryan stock in India and has fused with the yellow in southern China, in Indo-China and 1 Progress and Poverty, book X, chap. II, p. 2. §12] RACIAL THEORIES 25 perhaps in Japan. These races taken together make up more than three-fourths, and perhaps as much as four-fifths, of all mankind. We say nothing of the Polynesian race. It may well have superior capacities, but being scant in numbers and dis- persed over small islands, it has not been able to create any great civilization. The Chinese succeeded in founding a highly original civiliza- tion which has shown wondrous powers of survival and even more wondrous powers of expansion* Offshoots in large part of Chinese civilization are the cultures of Japan and Indo-China, and the Sumerian people which founded the earliest civilization in Babylonia seems to have belonged to a Turanian stock. The dark Asiatic race seems to have developed a very ancient civili- zation in Elam, or Susiana, and an autochthonous culture apparently existed in India before the coming of the Aryans. Egypt owes her civilization to a so-called sub-Semitic or Berber race, and Nineveh, Sidon, Jerusalem, Damascus and perhaps even Sardis belonged to the Semites. Reference to the more recent civilization of the Mohammedan Arabs seems to us superfluous. 12. While not holding to the absolute superiority or inferiority of any human race, many people believe that each race has special intellectual and moral qualities and that these necessarily corre- spond to certain types of social and political organization, from which the spirit, or, better, the peculiar "genius" of the race, will not permit it to depart. Now, making all due allowances for the exaggerations that gain ready admission to discussions of this subject, and taking account at all times of the great fund of human traits that is present in all peoples in all ages, it cannot be denied that — not to say every race — every nation, every region, every city presents a certain special type that is not uniformly definite and clear-cut everywhere but which consists in a body of ideas, beliefs, opinions, sentiments, customs and prejudices, which are to each group of human beings what the lineaments of the face are to each individual. This variation in type could safely be regarded as due to physical diversities, to racial variations, to the different blood that flows in the veins of each different nationality, did it not find its explanation in another fact, wfrich is one of the best 26 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I authenticated and most constant that observation of human nature affords. We refer to mimetism, to that great psycho- logical force whereby every individual is wont to adopt the ideas, the beliefs, the sentiments that are most current in the environ- ment in which he has grown up. Save for rare and rarely complete exceptions, a person thinks, judges and believes the way the society in which he lives thinks, judges and believes. We observe that aspect of things which is commonly noted by the persons about us, and the individual preferably develops those moral and intellectual attitudes which are most prevalent and most highly esteemed in the human environment in which he has been formed. In fact, unity of moral and intellectual type is found to be very strong in groups of persons having nothing special in common as regards blood or race. The Catholic clergy will serve as an example. Scattered the world over, it always preserves a singular uniformity in its beliefs, its intellectual and moral attitudes and its customs. The phenomenon is most striking in the various religious orders. Well known is the remarkable resemblance of an Italian Jesuit to a French, German or English Jesuit. A strong resemblance exists, too, in the military type that is common to almost all the great European armies, and a fairly constant intellectual or moral type may further exist within separate regiments, in military academies and even in secular schools — anywhere, in short, where a special environment has somehow been established, a sort of psychological mold that shapes to its own contour any individual who happens to be cast into it. We are not for the moment inquiring as to how the great national environments, and better still those great psychological currents that sometimes embrace a whole civilization or all the followers of a religion, have come into being, lived their lives and, often, vanished from the world scene. To launch out on such a study would involve retraversing the history of the whole civilized portion of mankind. But this much we can safely say: that historical circumstances peculiar to each of the great groups of mankind have in the main fashioned the special environments mentioned, and that new historical circumstances slowly modify, or even destroy, those environments. The role that blood relationship, that race, plays in the formation of the various §12] RACIAL THEORIES 97 moral and mental environments may, in certain cases at least, be slight and of difficult appraisal even when the ethnological factor seems at first glance to be preponderant. Apt to this point would be the example of the Jews, who have been dispersed among other peoples yet for centuries upon cen- turies have wondrously preserved their national type. But we must not forget, either, that the children of Israel have Always lived spiritually apart from the peoples among whom they dwelt, and therefore have always been in a special environment. As Leroy-Beaulieu well says,1 the modern Jew is a product of the isolation in which he has for centuries been kept by the Torah, the Talmud and the ghetto. The progeny of Jewish families that are converted to Christianity or to Islamism rarely retain the characteristics of their ancestors for any length of time — for many generations, that is; and the unconverted Jew best pre- serves his special type in countries where he keeps most to himself. A Jew from Little Russia or Constantinople is much more Jewish than his coreligionists who have been born and bred in Italy or France, where the ghetto is now just a memory. Chinese immigrants in America take over white civilization in many respects, but their mental type remains unchanged, while the Chinese in California and some other states always keep to themselves in a Chinese environment. In European and Asiatic Turkey, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Levantines live together in the same cities. They do not fuse nor are their races modified, for in spite of the fact that they live in material con- tact, they are spiritually separated, each group having its own special environment. The great tenacity with which the English national type maintains itself, as compared with other nation- alities of Europe, may be the result of the scant sociability that English settlers in foreign countries manifest toward natives, which inclines them to cluster together in a miniature British environment. Many cases might be mentioned where ethnic affinity between two peoples is a virtually negligible bond as compared with the ties that result from similarities in religion or from the fact of common histories and civilizations. Ethnolo- gists have discovered that a Magyar is more closely related to a Chinese or a Turk than to a Frenchman or a German. But who would claim that he is morally and intellectually closer to the 1 "Les Juifs et I'anti-a&nitisme." 28 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I two former than to the two latter? The Mohammedan Aryans of Persia and Hindustan certainly have closer moral affinities with the Arabs and Turks than with their European kinsmen; and Jews long settled in western Europe certainly feel spiritu- ally closer to the nations among whom they live than to the Arabs, who are blood relatives but who have adopted Oriental civilization. The so-called genius of a race, therefore, has nothing pre- destined or inevitable about it, as some people are pleased to imagine. Even granting that the various " higher " races — in other words races that are capable of creating original civiliza- tions of their own — differ organically from each other, it is not the sum of their organic differences that has exclusively or even principally determined the differences in the social type that they have adopted, but rather the differences in social contacts and in the historical circumstances to which every nation, every social organism — let alone every race — is fated to be subject. 13. The question of race would at this point be settled if everyone were in agreement that the organic and psychological changes by which a human race may be modified over an exten- sive period of history — for example, twenty or thirty centuries — are hardly appreciable and virtually negligible. But this is far from being a generally accepted belief. There is, in fact, a whole school of historical thinking that is founded on quite different postulates. Applying Darwin's doctrines about the evolution of species to the social sciences, this school holds that every human group can make considerable organic improvements in relatively brief periods of time, whence the possibility of political and social betterment. Now, without discussing or denying Darwin's theories about the transformation of species, and even granting man's descent from a hypothetical Anthropopithecus, one fact seems to us cer- tain, undebatable and obvious at first glance: that the famous struggle for existence, along with the natural selection that follows from it, as described for plants, animals and savage man, does not appear in human societies that have attained anything higher than a very elementary stage of civilization. The eager- ness to find such a struggle in human societies is in part due to the extraordinary success of the Darwinian hypothesis when §18] EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES 29 applied to the natural sciences. That success was bound to offer a strong temptation to systematic minds to extend the application of the hypothesis to other fields. But it is also due to a misapprehension, to a failure to distinguish between two facts that are basically different though apparently they have points of contact — and this confusion, too, is readily under- standable in minds that are strongly predisposed in favor of the evolutionary theory. To put the situation in a few words, the struggle for existence has been confused with the struggle for preeminence, which is really a constant phenomenon that arises in all human societies, from the most highly civilized down to such as have barely issued from savagery. In a struggle between two human societies, the victorious society as a rule fails to annihilate the vanquished society, but subjects it, assimilates it, imposes its own type of civilization upon it. In our day in Europe and America war has no other result than political hegemony for the nation that proves superior in a military sense, or perhaps the seizure of some bit of territory. But even in ancient times, when Greece was fighting Persia and Rome Carthage, the political organization, the national existence, of the vanquished peoples was sometimes destroyed, but indi- vidually, even in the worst cases, they were usually reduced to servitude rather than put to the sword. Cases like that of Saguntum and of Numantia, or like the taking of Tyre by Alex- ander the Great, or of Carthage by Scipio, have been at all periods of history altogether exceptional. The Assyrians in the ancient East and the Mongols in the Middle Ages were the peoples most given to the practice of systematically butchering the peoples they conquered. But even they used the practice rather as a means of frightening enemies into surrender than as an end in itself; and it cannot be said that a single people was ever exterminated root and branch by their frightful slaughters. As instances of complete destruction of peoples by conquerors the cases of the Tasmanians, the Australians and the American Indians are commonly mentioned. But actually those were primitive tribes with small populations scattered over large territories. They perished, or are perishing, chiefly because, as we have seen, agriculture and an encroaching civilization have reduced the supply of big game which was their principal means of subsistence. In a few regions where the Indians have been SO POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I able to adapt themselves to a crude sort of agriculture, they have escaped destruction. In Mexico and Peru the natives were numerous at the time of the Spanish conquest because they had reached the agricultural stage. In spite of the slaughters com- mitted by their Spanish conquerors they today form the great majority in Spanish American populations. In Algeria, too, a hard and bloody conquest by the French has not reduced the numerical strength of the natives. If we consider, rather, the inner ferment that goes on within the body of every society, we see at once that the struggle for preeminence is far more conspicuous there than the struggle for existence. Competition between individuals of every social unit is focused upon higher position, wealth, authority, control of the means and instruments that enable a person to direct many human activities, many human wills, as he sees fit. The losers, who are of course the majority in that sort of struggle, are not devoured, destroyed or even kept from reproducing their kind, as is basically charac- teristic of the struggle for life. They merely enjoy fewer material satisfactions and, especially, less freedom and independence. On the whole, indeed, in civilized societies, far from being gradu- ally eliminated by a process of natural selection so called, the lower classes are more prolific than the higher, and even in the lower classes every individual in the long run gets a loaf of bread and a mate, though the bread be more or less dark and hard- earned and the mate more or less unattractive or undesirable. The polygamy that is common in upper classes is the only point that might be cited in support of the principle of natural selection as applied to primitive and civilized societies. But even that argument is weak. Among human beings polygamy does not necessarily imply greater fertility. In fact, the preferably polygamous human societies have been the ones that have made least social progress. It would seem to follow, therefore, that natural selection has proved to be least effective in the cases where it has had freest play. 14. Then again, if the progress of a race or a nation depends primarily on organic improvement in the individuals who com- pose it, the world's story should present a far different plot from the one, we know* The moral and intellectual, and therefore the §14] EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES 31 social, progress of every people should be slower and more con- tinuous. The law of natural selection combined with the law of heredity should carry each generation a step, but only a step, ahead of the preceding generation; and we should not, as is frequently the case in history, see a people take a great many steps forward, or sometimes a great many steps backward, in the course of two or three generations. Examples of such rapid advances and giddy declines are so common as scarcely to require mention. A mere hundred and twenty years intervened between the day of Pisistratus and the day of Socrates; but during those years Hellenic art, Hellenic thought, Hellenic civilization made such measureless progress as to transform a nation of mediocre though ancient civilization into the Greece which traced the most glamorous, the most profound, the most unforgettable pages in the story of human progress. We do not mention the case of Rome because, to tell the truth, Hellenic influence played a large part in her meteoric passage from barbarism to civilization. The Italy of the Renaissance is chronologically only a little over a century removed from the Italy of Dante; but in that interval the artistic, moral and scientific ideal is transformed by an inner creative ferment of the nation and the man of the Middle Ages changes and is gone. Compare, for a moment, the France of 1650 and the France of 1750. Still alive in the former are men who can remember St. Bartholomew's Eve. The religious wars, the Holy League, the falling of two kings under the assassin's dagger, are facts which have not yet acquired the mystery of ancientness — eyewitnesses of them cannot be rare. Anyone who has passed early youth may easily have been present at the taking of La Rochelle, the closihg scene in the historic period referred to. Almost no one dares voice a doubt as to the existence of goblins and witches. A scant thirty-seven years have passed since the wife of Marshal d'Ancre was burned at the stake as a witch. A century later, Montesquieu is an old man, Voltaire and Rousseau are in their, prime, the Encyclopedia, if not published, has already ripened in the intellectual world. As far as ideas, beliefs, customs, are concerned, the revolution of '89 may be considered virtually complete. But without wandering far afield for other examples, why not take the chief countries of present-day Europe — England, Germany, Italy, Spain? Certainly if the intellectual 38 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I and spiritual revolution that has taken place in those countries in the course of the past century had had to depend on organic modifications in their populations, many dozens of generations at least would have been required. In certain regions, which for special causes had lagged behind the general trend in Europe, the transformation has been more rapid and, especially, more profound. Anyone superficially familiar with the histories of Scotland and Sicily can make a ready comparison between social conditions in Scotland in 1748 and the status that country had attained in 1848, and between social conditions in Sicily in 181£ and conditions there today.1 On the other hand, examples of swift declines in nations or whole civilizations are far from rare. There is a very general inclination to charge these to destructive barbarian invasions, but this is to forget that before a civilized country can fall prey to barbarians it must have lapsed into a state of great exhaustion and disorganization, which in turn must be due to moral and political decay. Greater civilization almost always presupposes greater population and the possession of more potent and effective resources for offense and defense. China has twice been con- quered by Mongols or Tatars, and India a number of times by Turks, Tatars and Afghans. But the Chinese and Hindu civili- zations had already entered upon periods of decline at the time of such invasions. That decline in civilized peoples is in certain cases spontaneous can be almost mathematically proved. All Orientalists know that the most ancient of all the Egyptian civilizations — the one that built the Nile canals, invented hieroglyphic writing and reared the great pyramids — fell to pieces of its own accord and vanished so completely that so far no one has been able to learn why. There were civil wars — that is all we know. Then came dark- ness and barbarism, from which, more than four centuries later, a new civilization just as spontaneously emerged. Says Lenormant: Beginning with the civil disturbances in which Nit-agrit lost his life, Egyptian civilization enters upon a sudden eclipse that has so far remained unexplainable. Manetho counts 436 years between the end of the Sixth Dynasty and the beginning of the Eleventh. During that 1 The rapid progress of the Scottish Highlanders has been studied by Colajanni in La sociologia criminale. §14] EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES 33 period the monuments are absolutely silent. It is as though Egypt had been stricken from the roster of nations, and when civilization reappears at the end of the long slumber it seems to begin without any tradition from the past.1 As a matter of fact, Lenormant does not deny that foreign invasions may have occurred during the period in question, but, in any event, over and above the fact that there is no trace of them in monuments and inscriptions, it is certain that they must have followed, not preceded, the decline of the earlier Egyptian civilization. Babylonia, for many centuries a center of civilization, was not destroyed by its conquerors — not by Cyrus, not by Darius, not by Alexander. It collapsed and disappeared from the world scene by slow decay, by automatic dissolution. The Roman Empire in the West is said to have been destroyed by barbarians. But anyone even moderately familiar with Roman history knows that the barbarians killed a mere corpse, that the decline in art, literature, wealth, public administration — in short, in all phases of Roman civilization — had been tremendous between the days of Marcus Aurelius and the days of Diocletian. During this period the barbarians made temporary raids into a few provinces, to be sure, but they gained a foothold nowhere within the empire and wrought no lasting harm. A great invasion by the Goths occurred under the Emperor Decius and was finally repulsed by Claudius II. It was, however, exceptional. It laid waste the eastern provinces of the empire, but Greco-Roman civilization was to survive for many, many centuries in those very districts. Without disturbances from any foreign invasion or other external forces, the Spain of the second half of the seventeenth century became a mere shadow of the country that a century earlier had been the Spain of Charles V, and half a century earlier had had a Cervantes, a Lope de Vega and a Quevedo. This rapid decline of the Iberian peninsula has been blamed on the expulsion of the Moors, which occurred for the most part in 1609, under Philip III. But the expulsion of the Moors injured only a few prov- inces, notably parts of Valencia and Andalusia, and these were the regions that suffered least in the general impoverishment of Spain. Portugal and Italy declined simultaneously with Spain, 1 Histoire ancienne de l'0rientt vol. II, chap^. II. 34 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I though to a less appreciable extent. Certainly they were not suffering from any expulsion of Moors. The theory of organic and superorganic evolution with natural selection explains all such facts very badly, or rather not at all. Keeping to that theory, a more highly civilized people should be progressively purified and improved by the struggle for existence and should through heredity acquire over others an advantage, which, so far as one can see, it should not lose in the race of the nations across the centuries. What we see, instead, is a nation, or a group of peoples, now leaping forward with irresistible impetus, then collapsing or lagging wretchedly behind. One may note, to be sure, a certain progressive movement which, in spite of interruptions and gaps, thrusts mankind farther and farther forward, and the present civilization of the Aryan race is in fact superior to all preceding civilizations. But we must bear in mind that every new people that has the good fortune to become civilized has a shorter road to travel and expends infinitely less effort, because it inherits the experience and the positive knowledge of all the civilizations that have preceded it. Certainly the Germans of Tacitus would never have succeeded in so few as eighteen centuries in forming such centers of culture as London, Berlin and New York if they had had to discover by themselves alphabetic writing, the fundamental principles of mathematics and all the immense store of knowledge that they gained from contact with the Greeks and Romans. Nor would Hellenic and Roman civilisations have made the progress they made without infiltrations from ancient Near Eastern civiliza- tions, to which they in fact owed the alphabet and the rudiments of the exact sciences. Human civilization progresses by scien- tific rather than by organic inheritance. The descendants of a civilized people may stagnate or may even relapse into barbarism, but the learning of their fathers may fertilize the nascent civili- zation of uncouth hordes that happen to find themselves favorably placed for receiving such beneficent germs. The modern Anglo- Saxons are not descendants of the Romans or the Greeks, or of the Semites of Syria among whom the religion that has left so deep an imprint on the people of Great Britain and its colonies origi- nated. They are not descendants of the Arabs to whom the world owes much of the physical and mathematical knowledge which the English and Americans of modern times have so §14] EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES 85 wondrously applied and made productive. What they have inherited is not the blood but the scientific and psychological achievements of the peoples mentioned. At times a people rising anew to civilization may avail itself of the intellectual and spiritual activity of ancestors who have regressed from civiliza- tion after once attaining it. That was the case with the ancient Egyptians and with the Italians of the Renaissance; but that very fact, if we choose to scrutinize it carefully, furnishes one more argument against the theory that social progress depends on organic heredity. Even the evolutionists recognize that other races attained civilization earlier than the Aryan race and earlier than the Germanic branch of that race in particular; but they add that those races declined or became stationary because they had aged — in other words, because they had exhausted all the intellectual and moral resources at their command. Really, this idea of the aging of races seems to us the product of a wholly specious analogy between the life of an individual and the life of a com- munity. But, to keep to the facts as we see them, for the very reason that the members of a community continuously reproduce themselves and each new generation has all the vigor of youth, a whole society can hardly grow old in the same sense in which an individual grows old when his powers begin to fail.1 So far as we know, furthermore, no organic difference has ever been found between the individuals in a progressing society and the individ- uals in a declining society. Societies in decline grow old because of changes in their type of social structure. At such times religious beliefs, customs, preju- dices, the traditions on which political and social institutions are grounded, grow old, or rather are gradually discredited. But these are all social elements, the changes in which come about through the interposition of new historical factors with which a people chances to come into contact, or even through a slow and automatic intellectual, moral and social evolution within the people itself. It is hazardous, therefore, very hazardous indeed, to assert that changes in the physical constitution of a race play any part in such things. It would be difficult to show that the brains of the Frenchmen of Voltaire's day were differently con- 1 We borrow this remark from Henry George, Progress and Poverty* book X, chap. I, last page. 86 POLITICAL SCIENCE stituted from the brains of their great-grandfathers who com- mitted the Massacre of St. Bartholomew and organized the League. It is very easy to show, on the other hand, that in a little over a century and a half the economic and- political situa- tion in France, and her intellectual atmosphere, had altered radically. The belief that all non- Aryan civilizations — the Egyptian, the Babylonian, the ancient and modern Chinese — have been, and still are, uniformly stationary seems to us to be due to nothing less than an optical illusion arising from the fact that we view them from so far away. So it is with the mountains of Sicily, which, viewed from afar off under that limpid, transparent sky, look like lovely azure walls closing the horizon with a uniform perpendicularity, but which from close at hand look altogether otherwise, since each comprises its own particular little world of ascents, descents and irregularities of every kind. Chaldean and Egyptian monuments have shown with a positiveness that can no longer be questioned that there were ups and downs, periods of decline and periods of renascence and progress in goodly number both on the banks of the Nile and on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris.1 As for China, its civilization has, to be sure, endured amazingly and without interruption for some thousands of years, but that is not saying that it was always the same. We know enough of Chinese history to be certain that the political and social organization of the Celestial Empire has undergone tremendous changes in the course of the centuries. China had her feudal period and, at least until very recently, she was ruled by a bureaucracy recruited by competitive examinations. Religion and property ownership have also under- gone most varied vicissitudes in China.2 15. In his Evolution de la morale, Letourneau attributes prog- ress in human societies to an organic process whereby a good action, which would be a useful action, leaves its mark on the brain and nerve centers of the individual who performs it. That mark, repeated over and over again, produces a tendency to reiterate the same act, and the tendency is in turn transmitted 1 Lenormant, Maspero, Brugsch. 2 Rousset, A travers la Chine; Mechnikov, La civilisation et les grands fleuves kistoriques; Clis6e R6clus, Nouvelle g&ographie universelle, vol. VII. §15] EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES 37 to the individual's descendants. In the first place, one might ask why bad — in other words, harmful — actions should not leave similar marks; and in the second place, as regards useful acts, one might ask, useful to whom ? To the individual who performs them or to society? The two utilities are only too separate and distinct, and it would seem necessary to have had very little experience of the world to maintain that an action that is useful to society is generally useful to the individual who performs it, and vice versa. But suppose we let Letourneau speak for himself : Just as phosphorescent bodies remember light, so the nerve cell remembers its intimate acts, but in ways that are infinitely more varied and persistent. Every act that has been performed at the instance of a nerve cell leaves on the cell a sort of functional residue that thencefor- ward will facilitate repetitions of the act and sometimes provoke it. Such reiteration, in fact, will become easier and easier and in the end will take place spontaneously, automatically. By that time the nerve cell has acquired an inclination, a habit, an instinct, a need.1 And again he says: Nerve cells are essentially impregnation mechanisms. Every cur- rent of molecular activity that runs through them leaves a more or less revivescent trace upon them. By sufficient repetition these traces become organic, fixed, and are even transmitted by heredity, and each of them has a corresponding tendency, a corresponding inclination, which will manifest itself in due time and contribute to the formation of what is called character. This general picture must be held in view if one would have any comprehension of the origin and evolution of morality. Further pursuing the same idea he adds: In their essential aspects ethics are utilitarian and progressive. However, once they have been formed, once they have been established in the nerve centers, moral or immoral inclinations fade as slowly as they have been clothed with flesh. Often also they reappear atavistically, and in such cases one suddenly sees moral specimens from the Stone Age rising in the full midst of a relatively civilized society, or heroic types in the flower of a mercantile civilization. These quotations should suffice to give a fairly accurate idea of the writer's basic conception. They will further suffice to give a 1 Evolution de la morale, chaps. II and XX. 38 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I fairly clear idea of the arguments of the whole school that bases its sociology on the anthropological sciences. But however attractive, however daring, hypotheses may be, they are of value in science only when they are supported by experience, in other words, by demonstrations based on fact. We have no intention of discussing here the genuineness of the complicated organic process that we find set forth in Letourneau's book with such definiteness and assurance. But facts are always facts. They have the same scientific value whether they are derived from studies of nerve cells, or of the hair color and cranial measurements of this race or that, from observations of animal societies or from studies of human history. The only classifica- tion in order of importance that is permissible is a classification that distinguishes carefully ascertained facts — facts, for example, that have not been discovered and championed by the same men who have spun theories about them — from dubious, inadequately tested facts that have been colored by the preconceptions of the observer. Now all history amply shows that the progress of human societies does not follow the course that it would follow if the theories of the anthropological school were sound. Before we can accept these theories, therefore, they at least have to be qualified. It has to be admitted that the civilized human being, or the human being capable of civilization, who is certainly no newcomer on the face of the earth, has experienced in his nerve cells so many and such varied moral impressions that he is able to adopt the most disparate tendencies and habits, both those which lead a society toward intellectual, moral and political betterment and those which carry it toward decline and ruin.1 16. But so qualified, the anthropological theory has no practi- cal value left. It does not, it cannot, tell us anything that we do not already know. It is more worth our while, therefore, to seek scientific results along some other road, however rough the 1 See Fouillee, "La Psychologic des peuples et Fanthropologie." This article supports practically the same thesis that we put forward here, with more or less similar arguments. Fouillee writes: "Ethnic factors are not the only factors, nor the most important ones, that figure in a national character. Uniform education, similar training, common beliefs more than make up for differences in racial stock." Colajanni and Mechnikov also vigorously and brilliantly combat writers who are inclined to exaggerate the importance of race as a social factor. §16] THE HISTORICAL METHOD 39 going may be. The truth is that just as the study of climatic differences has never been able to supply a general law to explain the organization of human societies and the variety of type that such societies present, so too no satisfactory law has been found on the basis of racial diversities; nor is it possible to ascribe the progress or the ruin of nations to organic improvements or organic degenerations in races. Anyone who has traveled a good deal ordinarily comes to the conclusion that underneath superficial differences in customs and habits human beings are psychologically very much alike the world over; and anyone who has read history at all deeply reaches a similar conclusion with regard to the various periods of human civilization. Dipping into the documents that tell us how people of other ages felt, thought and lived, we come always to the same conclusion: that they were very much like us. Psychological resemblance is always stronger among peoples who have attained approximately similar levels of civilization than it is among peoples closer to each other chronologically and ethnically. In his manner of thinking a modern Italian or German is nearer to a Greek of the time of Plato and Aristotle than he is to a medieval ancestor of his own. The literatures of the different epochs bear the most emphatic testimony to that fact. Such psychological resemblances, and the fact that the great races which constitute four-fifths of mankind have shown them- selves capable of the most varied vicissitudes of progress and decline lead us to advance a hypothesis which follows also from the negative investigations we have so far been making. We are inclined to think that just as human beings, or at least the great human races, have a constant tendency toward social grouping, so too they have equally constant and powerful psychological tendencies which impel them onward toward ever higher levels of culture and social progress. Such tendencies, however, operate with more or less vigor, or may even be stifled, according as they find physical environments — complexes of circumstances that might be called "chance" — which are more or less favorable; and according also as they are more or less hampered by social environments, in other words by psychological tendencies equally universal and constant.1 1 For proof that what we call "chance" — a chain of circumstances that escape human control and foresight — has its influence on the destinies of nations, 40 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I That, after all, is an organic process similar to what takes place in the whole animal and vegetable world, though far more com- plicated. A plant has a strong tendency to spread and multiply. The tendency may be seconded or thwarted by physical environ- ment, in other words by conditions of water supply and climate, by chance in the form of wind and birds which fertilize or scatter its seeds, and then again by traits of the plant itself, the greater or lesser resistance it offers to diseases that attack it. And a similar process goes on in that branch of social activity which has been so generally and so successfully studied — the production of wealth. Wealth production has a tendency to increase unlim- itedly, but the tendency is more or less hindered by physical obstacles; it is to an extent hindered by chance; and it is hindered, finally, by the ignorance, the consuming greed and the mental attitudes of human beings. Man neither creates nor destroys any of the forces of nature, but he can study their manner of acting and their interplay and turn them to his advantage. That is the procedure in agricul- ture, in navigation, in mechanics. By following it modern science has been able to achieve almost miraculous results in those fields of activity. The method surely cannot be different when the social sciences are involved, and in fact it is the very method that has already yielded fair results in political economy. Yet we must not disguise the fact that in the social sciences in general the difficulties to be overcome are enormously greater. Not only does the greater complexity of psychological laws (or constant tendencies) that are common to all human groups make it harder to determine their operation, but it is easier to observe the things that go on about us than it is to observe the things we ourselves do. Man can much more easily study the phenomena of physics, chemistry or botany than he can his own instincts and his own passions. One should think of the "divers prej- udices" which, according to Spencer, impede progress in the social sciences. Certainly the student of political science has to look objectively upon nationalities, religions, political parties, political doctrines, treating them merely as phenomena of the we need only reflect that in the past the fate of a nation has often hinged on the outcome of a single battle (for example, Plataea, Zama, J^rez, Poitiers, Hastings) and that, especially before wars came to be waged according to scientific prin- ciples, chance played a large part in the outcome of a battle. §17] THE HISTORICAL METHOD 41 human mind. But the precept is more easily given to others than applied by one's self. It must be confessed that the objec- tivity essential to the successful conduct of this type of observa- tion will always be the privilege of the limited number of indi- viduals who are endowed with special aptitudes and have under- gone special intellectual training. But then, even granting that such individuals can attain scientific results, it is highly problematical whether they can succeed in using them to modify the political conduct of the great human societies. What happens in economics is instructive. Free trade is unanimously regarded by unprejudiced experts in that science as a good thing, yet the most highly civilized nations are today turning to the fiercest protectionism. 17. Whatever practical value political science may have in the future, progress in that field will be based upon the study of the facts of society, and those facts can be found only in the history of the various nations. In other words, if political science is to be grounded upon the observation and interpretation of the facts of political life, it is to the old historical method that we must return. To that method a number of objections, more or less serious, are being raised and we must briefly consider them. It is said, in the first place, that any number of writers, from Aristotle down to Machiavelli, Montesquieu and the scholars of our own day, have used the historical method and that, though many of their incidental observations have been universally accepted as grounded upon fact and as truths scientifically acquired, no truly scientific system has as yet been found. But what we have already said of the positive method in general may be said of the historical method in particular: that to yield good results it has to be properly applied. Now before it can be properly applied an indispensable requirement is a wide and accurate knowledge of history, and that was not within the reach of Aristotle or Machiavelli or Montesquieu, or of any other writer who lived earlier than a century ago. Great syntheses can be essayed only after a vast body of facts have been accumu- lated and verified by the scientific method. Historical informa- tion was of course not lacking in centuries past, but it bore almost exclusively upon isolated periods. Down to the beginning of the last century, Greco-Roman civilization and the history of the 42 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I modern European nations were known perhaps after a fashion, but as for the past of the rest of the world nothing was available except the vaguest of legends and very untrustworthy traditions. Even within the limited portions of history just mentioned, such knowledge as was available was far from perfect. The critical sense was still undeveloped. There was none of that patient documentary research, of that minute and attentive interpreta- tion of inscriptions, which has not only drawn the general lines of the acts of great historical characters more accurately and clearly but has revealed details of social custom and political and administrative organization in the different peoples which are of far greater interest to the study of political science than the personal feats of great warriors and rulers. Exact knowledge of physical geography, ethnology and com- parative philology, which shed light on the origins and blood ties of nations; prehistory, which has revealed the ancientness of the human species and of certain civilizations; the interpretation of hieroglyphic, cuneiform and ancient Hindu alphabets, which has unveiled the mysteries of Oriental civilizations now extinct — all these were conquests of the nineteenth century. During the same century the mists that enveloped the history of China, Japan and other nations of the Far East were at least partially cleared away and the records of ancient American civilizations were in part discovered, in part more accurately studied. Finally during that century comparative statistical studies first came into general use, facilitating knowledge of conditions among faraway peoples. There can be no doubt about it: where the student of the social sciences could once only guess, he now has the means to observe and the instruments and the materials to demonstrate. Aristotle had but a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the great Asiatic monarchies. His information was probably limited to what Herodotus and Xenophon had written and to what he had been able to learn from Alexander's veterans, who had little understanding of the countries they conquered. The only political type he knew was the Greek city-state of the fourth and fifth centuries before our era. He could have learned little or nothing that was accurate about the rest of the world. Under those circumstances his Politics is an extra- ordinary intellectual feat, and his classification of governments §18] THE HISTORICAL METHOD 48 into monarchies, aristocracies and democracies (a classification that might now be judged superficial and incomplete) was cer- tainly the very best that the human mind could contrive in his day. *The only model for the state that Machiavelli had directly before him was the Italian commune of the late fifteenth century, with its alternatives of tyranny and anarchy, where power was won or lost in a game of violence and trickery, with the winnings to him who was the better liar or delivered the last dagger thrust. We can understand how such a model must so have impressed his mind as to make him write his Prince* The fact that his informa- tion was confined almost exclusively to such Roman history as could be learned in his day and to the history of the great modern monarchies which had risen a little before his time explains his commentary on Livy, his histories and his letters. Montesquieu had no way of knowing the history of the Orient very much better than Aristotle, or that of Greece and Rome any more profoundly than Machiavelli. His wider knowledge of the institutions and history of Prance, England and Germany, coupled with his little knowledge of other countries, explains his theory that political liberty would be possible only in cold countries. 18. Another objection is made to the historical method. If it is no sounder than the above objection, it is certainly more alluring, so much so that in the eyes of many it may seem to be very serious, if not insuperable. It relates to the scant relia- bility of historical materials. It is commonly alleged that, for all of their many efforts, historians often fail to discover the truth: that it is often hard to determine with any exactness just how things which have happened in our own towns within the year actually came to pass; so that it is virtually impossible to obtain accounts that are worthy of belief when faraway times and places are concerned. No one forgets to point to contradic- tions between the different historians, to the lie they often give each other, to the passions by which they are commonly swayed — the conclusion being that no certain inferences, no real science, can be derived from facts which are always very dubious, always very imperfectly known. It is not hard to answer such arguments. First of all, and incidentally, one might note that only when we have no interest 44 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I in learning the truth, or no means of doing so, or when contrary interests are opposed to our doing so, do we fail to learn the exact truth about contemporary happenings. If no such obstacles are present, anyone who is willing to spend the tiiffe and the money required can always, by a more or less intensive inquiry, discover in the maze of varying versions, gossipings and hearsays just how a given event came to pass. As regards historical facts, the older they are the fainter becomes the clamor of the interests that aim to distort etact knowledge regarding them, and we take it for granted that the historian has patience enough and time enough to disentangle the truth concerning them. Of far greater importance is a second observation that we must make in this connection. The historical facts which are and always will be shrouded in the greatest uncertainty are anecdotal, biographical facts, facts which may involve the vanity or profit of a man, a nation, a party. It is chiefly in regard to such facts that the passions of a writer may be the cause, be it unwittingly, of error. Fortunately that type of fact is of scant interest to the student of the political sciences. It makes little difference to him whether a battle has been won through the merit of one commander or lost through the fault of another, or whether a political assassination was more or less justifiable. On the other hand, there are facts that concern the social type and organiza- tion of the various peoples and the various epochs; and it is about such facts, which are of the greater interest to us, that historians, spontaneously and without bias, often tell the truth. At any rate, more enlightening than the historians are the documents themselves. We shall probably never know just when Homer lived, in what city he was born, what episodes marked his life. These problems may have a certain interest for the critic or the scholar, who would like to know the most minute details about the life of the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. They are of little interest to the political scientist, who is studying the psycho- logical and social world that the great poet describes, a world which, however much the bard's fancy may have embellished it, must actually have existed in an age but slightly anterior to his time. No one will ever know the breed of Alcibiades' dog, the color of Alexander's horse, what the exact faults and merits of §18] THE HISTORICAL METHOD 45 Themistocles were, just how the speeches of Pericles were delivered, whether Agesilaus was lame in his right leg or his left. But it has been established beyond possibility of doubt that from the sixth to the fourth century before our era there existed in Hellas a certain type of political organization, the different varieties and peculiarities of which we already know well (and shall know even better as inscriptions and monuments that are gradually being found are studied), along with the details of its administrative, economic and military structure. No one, probably, will ever know anything exact about the life of Cheops, the Egyptian king of the Fourth Dynasty, in spite of the great pyramid that he ordered raised as his tomb. No one will ever possess the biography of Ramses II, of the Nineteenth Dynasty, though Pentaur's poem in celebration of his victories, real or imaginary, still survives. But no one will doubt that thirty or forty centuries before our era there existed in the valley of the Nile an organized, civilized, very populous society, and that the human spirit must have made prodigious efforts of patience and originality to raise it from barbarism. No one can doubt that that society, ever changing with the revolv- ing centuries, had religious beliefs and scientific information and, at times, an administrative and military organization so remark- able that it might almost be compared with those of the most highly civilized states of our own time.1 We may doubt whether Tiberius and Nero were the rascals that Tacitus said they were and whether the feeblemindedness of Claudius, the lasciviousness of Messalina, Caligula's passion for his horse, may not have been exaggerated. But we cannot deny that the Roman empire existed and that its emperors had a power to commit crimes and follies which would not have been tolerated in other epochs and in other types of political organi- zation. Nor can we doubt that in the early centuries of our era a great civilization, embodied politically in a great state, embraced the whole Mediterranean basin. We already know well, and shall know better and better, the legislation and the highly perfected financial, administrative and military organi- zation of that state. We may go so far as to assume that Sakya 1 There were periods when public offices seem to have been awarded by exami- nations and when army officers were educated and trained in special military schools. 46 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I Muni was wholly a myth, that Jesus was never crucified or even that he never existed. But no one will ever deny the existence of Buddhism and Christianity, along with the dogmas and mor$l precepts on which they were founded; nor will anyone ever deny that since those two religions have spread abroad so widely and have so long endured they must satisfy emotions and psycho- logical needs that are widely prevalent in the human masses. 19. In conclusion, then, while the anecdote and the bio- graphical detail may have had their influence on the history of nations, they can be of little help in discovering the great psycho- logical laws that are manifested in the lives of the nations. Such laws reveal their operation, rather, in administrative and judicial institutions, in religions, in all the moral and political customs of the various nations; and it is therefore upon these la'st categories of facts that we must concentrate our attention. With regard to such facts, it seems to us difficult and scarcely worth our while to establish very rigid standards of preference. Any detail of information, be it historical or contemporary, which relates to the institutions of a people that is organized politi- cally— a people, in other words, that has consolidated in fairly populous masses and attained a certain degree of civilization, of whatever type — may be very interesting. If any recommenda- tion may be made in the matter, it is this : that we avoid deriving all our observations from a group of political organisms that belong to the same historical period or present the same, or not widely differing, types of civilization. For example, if the only history we considered were that of the Greek states in the age of Pericles, we might be led to believe that the history of the world comes down to a struggle between Hellenism and barbarism, or between democracy and aristocracy (or better, between two oligarchies, the one of a more limited, the other of a more inclusive membership). If we thought only of Europe between the year 1500 and the year 1600, we might conclude that the whole movement of humanity during that period came down to a conflict between Catholicism and Protes- tantism, or between European and Mohammedan civilizations. In his First Principles Spencer tried to forearm students of the social sciences against what he called "perversions of judgment" or "bias," against certain habits of the human mind whereby §20] THE HISTORICAL METHOD 47 the observer views the facts of society from a subjective, one- sided and limited point of view that is inevitably productive of erroneous results. Now to eliminate that pitfall it is not enough to warn anyone likely to fall into it that the pitfall exists. His mind has to be trained in such a way as to avoid it. Awareness of political prejudice, national prejudice, religious or anti- religious prejudice, does not prevent an individual, when he comes to a practical application of the Spencerian theories, from falling into one or more such prejudices if he has been reared in the belief that the adoption of a given form of government is enough to regenerate mankind, that his nation is the first in the universe, that his religion is the only true one or that human progress consists in destroying all religion. The real safeguard against that type of error lies in knowing how to lift one's judgment above the beliefs and opinions which are current in one's time or peculiar to the social or national type to which one belongs. That — to go back to a point on which we have already touched — comes with the study of many social facts, with a broad and thorough knowledge of history, not, certainly, of the history of a single period or a single nation but — so far as we possibly can — the history of mankind as a whole. £0. In our day there prevails, or at least down to a very recent day there prevailed, in social research a tendency to give special attention to the simpler and more primitive political organizations. Some scholars go as far back as possible and scrupulously analyze animal societies, tracking down in bee- hives, anthills and the lairs of quadrupeds and quadrumanes the earliest origins of the social sentiments that find their com- plete expression in the great political organisms of men. The majority keep to the organizations of savage tribes, and all circumstances relating to such peoples are noted and recorded. The narratives of travelers who have lived among savages have so acquired special importance, and quotations from them fill modern volumes on sociology. We do not say that such studies are useless — it is hard to find any application of the human intelligence that is completely unfruitful. But certainly they do not seem the best adapted to furnishing sound materials for the social sciences in general and for political science in particular. First of all, the narratives of 48 POLITICAL SCIENCE [CHAP. I travelers are as a rule more subjective, more contradictory, less trustworthy than the accounts of historians, and they are less subject to checking by documents and monuments. An indi- vidual who finds himself among people who belong to a very different civilization from the one to which he is accustomed generally views them from certain special points of view, and so may readily be misled. Herodotus was the greatest traveler of antiquity, and, as checking has now proved, he was a con- scientious and far from superficial observer. Nevertheless, he reported many things incorrectly, for the sole reason that he was steeped in a Greek civilization and so was poorly equipped to interpret certain phenomena of Near Eastern civilization. If one could check the reports of modern travelers on authentic documents, as has occasionally been possible in the case of Herodotus, we do not believe -that they would prove to be any more exact. If one is looking for light on the real social condi- tions of a given people, an authentic document such as the Laws of Manu, the fragments of the Twelve Tables or the Code of Rothari is worth much more than the reports of any number of modern travelers. We understand, however, that a traveler's account may prove very useful in providing illustration and com- ment for such documents. In the case of primitive peoples, of course, no documents whatever are available. In the second place, social facts can be gathered only in a human society, and by society we mean not a small group of a few families but what is commonly called a nation, a people, a state. Psychological social forces cannot develop, and cannot find scope, except in large political organisms, in aggregates, that is, where numerous groups of human beings are brought together in a moral and political union. In the primitive group, in the tribe of fifty or a hundred individuals, the political problem hardly exists, and therefore cannot be studied. Monarchy, for example, is easy enough to understand in a small tribe where the strongest and craftiest male readily imposes his will on a handful of comrades. But we must be in possession of very different elements before we can account for the estab- lishment of such an institution in a society of millions of indi- viduals, where a single man alone cannot force himself by physical strength upon all the others combined, and where, however crafty and energetic a man may be, he will readily find in the §20] THE HISTORICAL METHOD 49 masses about him hundreds of individuals who, at least poten- tially, are as talented and resourceful as he. So again we can easily see how a few dozen or even a few hundred individuals living together, and holding apart in moral if not material isola- tion from the rest of the world, should come to present a definite oneness of mental type and to have a lively sense of tribe and family. But to understand that is of little help when we come to explaining why a single moral type, an intense national feeling, should exist in human aggregations of tens and sometimes — as in the case of Russia and China — of hundreds of millions of persons, where individuals pass their whole lives far removed from most of their fellows, are for the most part cut off from any personal intercourse with them, and in their various groups face widely differing conditions of material living. The study of minute political units is said to be useful because they show in embryo all the social organs that gradually develop in larger and more advanced societies; and it is supposed to be much easier to study the manner of working of such organs when they are in their rudimentary forms than when they have grown more complex. But the comparing, now so frequent, of the organization of human societies with organizations of individual animal societies has never seemed to us less apt and less instructive than in this instance. It can easily be turned against the thesis in favor of which it was invoked. We do not believe that any zoologist would try to solve problems of anatomy and physiology in the warm-blooded vertebrates by studying the lower animals. It was not, certainly, from the observation of amoebas and polyps that the circulation of the blood was dis- covered and that the functions of the heart, brain and lungs in man and the other higher animals were finally determined. CHAPTER II THE RULING CLASS Among the constant facts and tendencies that are to be found in all political organisms, one is so obvious that it is appar- ent to the most casual eye. In all societies — from societies that are very meagerly developed and have barely attained the dawn- ings of civilization, down to the most advanced and powerful societies— two classes of people appear — a class that rules and a class that is ruled. The first class, always the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolizes power and enjoys the advantages that power brings, whereas the second, the more numerous class, is directed and controlled by the first; in a manner that is now more or less legal, now more or less arbitrary and violent, and supplies the first, in appearance at least, with material means of subsistence and with the instrumentalities that are essential to the vitality of the political organism. In practical life we all recognize the existence of this ruling class (or political class, as we have elsewhere chosen to define it).1 We all know that, in our own country, whichever it may be, the management of public affairs is in the hands of a minority of influential persons, to which management, willingly or unwill- ingly, the majority defer. We know that the same thing goes on in neighboring countries, and in fact we should be put to it to conceive of a real world otherwise organized — a world in which all men would be directly subject to a single person without relationships of superiority or subordination, or in which all men would share equally in the direction of political affairs. If we reason otherwise in theory, that is due partly to inveterate habits that we follow in our thinking and partly to the exagger- ated importance that we attach to two political facts that loom far larger in appearance than they are in reality. The first of these facts — and one has only to open one's eyes to see it — is that in every political organism there is one individual 1 Mosca, Teorica dei governi e governo parlamentare, chap. I. 50 §«] THE RULING CLASS 51 who is chief among the leaders of the ruling class as a whole and stands, as we say, at the helm of the state. That person is not always the person who holds supreme power according to law. At times, alongside of the hereditary king or emperor there is a prime minister or a major-domo who wields an actual power that is greater than the sovereign's. At other times, in place of the elected president the influential politician who has procured the president's election will govern. Under special circumstances there may be, instead of a single person, two or three who discharge the functions of supreme control. , The second fact, too, is readily discernible. Whatever the type of political organization, pressures arising from the dis- content of the masses who are governed, from the passions by which they are swayed, exert a certain amount of influence on the policies of the ruling, the political, class. But the man who is at the head of the state would certainly not be able to govern without the support of a numerous class to enforce respect for his orders and to have them carried out; and granting that he can make one individual, or indeed many individuals, in the ruling class feel the weight of his power, he certainly cannot be at odds with the class as a whole or do away with it. Even if that were possible, he would at once be forced to create another class, without the support of which action on his part would be completely paralyzed. On the other hand, granting that the discontent of the masses might succeed in deposing a ruling class, inevitably, as we shall later show, there would have to be another organized minority within the masses themselves to discharge the functions of a ruling class. Other- wise all organization, and the whole social structure, would be destroyed. £. From the point of view of scientific research the real superiority of the concept of the ruling, or political, class lies in the fact that the varying structure of ruling classes has a pre- ponderant importance in determining the political type, and also the level of civilization, of the different peoples. According to a manner of classifying forms of government that is still in vogue, Turkey and Russia were both, up to a few years ago, absolute monarchies, England and Italy were constitutional, or limited, monarchies, and France and the United States were 5£ THE RULING CLASS [CHAP. II classed as republics. The classification was based on the fact that, in the first two countries mentioned, headship in the state was hereditary and the chief was nominally omnipotent; in the second two, his office is hereditary but his powers and preroga- tives are limited; in the last two, he is elected. , That classification is obviously superficial. Absolutisms though they were, there was little in common between the man- ners in which Russia and Turkey were managed politically, the levels of civilization in the two countries and the organization of their ruling classes being vastly different. On the same basis, the regime in Italy, a monarchy, is much more similar to the regime in France, a republic, than it is to the regime in England, also a monarchy; and there are important differences between the political organizations of the United States and France, though both countries are republics. As we have already suggested, ingrained habits of thinking have long stood, as they still stand, in the way of scientific progress in this matter. The classification mentioned above, which divides governments into absolute monarchies, limited monarchies and republics, was devised by Montesquieu and was intended to replace the classical categories of Aristotle, who divided governments into monarchies, aristocracies and democ- racies. What Aristotle called a democracy was simply an aristocracy of fairly broad membership. Aristotle himself was in a position to observe that in every Greek state, whether aristocratic or democratic, there was always one person or more who had a preponderant influence. Between the day of Polyb- ius and the day of Montesquieu, many writers perfected Aris- totle's classification by introducing into it the concept of "mixed " governments. Later on the modern democratic theory, which had its source in Rousseau, took its stand upon the concept that the majority of the citizens in any state can participate, and in fact ought to participate, in its political life, and the doctrine of popular sovereignty still holds sway over many minds in spite of the fact that modern scholarship is making it increasingly clear that democratic, monarchical and aristocratic principles function side by side in every political organism. We shall not stop to refute this democratic theory here, since that is the task of this work as a whole. Besides, it would be hard to destroy in a few pages a whole system of ideas that has become firmly rooted §4] MILITARISM 53 in the human mind. As Las Casas aptly wrote in his life of Christopher Columbus^ it is often much harder to unlearn than to learn. 3. We think it may be desirable, nevertheless, to reply at this point to an objection which might very readily be made to our point of view. If it is easy to understand that a single individual cannot command a group without finding within the group a minority to support him, it is rather difficult to grant, as a con- stant and natural fact, that minorities rule majorities, rather than majorities minorities. But that is one of the points — so numerous in all the other sciences — where the first impression one has of things is contrary to what they are in reality. In reality the dominion of an organized minority, obeying a single impulse, over the unorganized majority is inevitable. The power of any minority is irresistible as against each single individual in the majority, who stands alone before the totality of the organ- ized minority. At the same time, the minority is organized for the very reason that it is a minority. A hundred men acting uniformly in concert, with a common understanding, will triumph over a thousand men who are not in accord and can therefore be dealt with one by one. Meanwhile it will be easier for the former to act in concert and have a mutual understanding simply because they are a hundred and not a thousand.^It follows that the larger the political community, the smaller will the proportion of the governing minority to the governed majority be, and the more difficult will it be for the majority to organize for reaction against the minority?) (^However, in addition to the great advantage accruing to them from the fact of being organized, ruling minorities are usually so constituted that the individuals who make them up are dis- tinguished from the mass of the governed by qualities that give them a certain material, intellectual or even moral superiority; or else they are the heirs of individuals who possessed such qualities. In other words, members of a ruling minority regu- larly have some attribute, real or apparent, which is highly esteemed and very influential in the society in which they live. 4. In primitive societies that are still in the early stages of organization, military valor is the quality that most readily 54 THE RULING CLASS [CHAP. II opens access to the ruling, or political, classr. In societies of advanced civilization, war is the exceptional condition. It may be regarded as virtually normal in societies that are in the initial stages of their development; and the individuals who show the greatest ability in war easily gain supremacy over their fellows — the bravest become chiefs. The fact is constant, but the forms it may assume, in one set of circumstances or another, vary considerably. As a rule the dominance of a warrior class over a peaceful multitude is attributed to a superposition of races, to the con- quest of a relatively unwarlike group by an aggressive one. Sometimes that is actually the case — we have examples in India after the Aryan invasions, in the Roman Empire after the Germanic invasions and in Mexico after the Aztec conquest. But more often, under certain social conditions, we note the rise of a warlike ruling class in places where there is absolutely no trace of a foreign conquest. As long as a horde lives exclu- sively by the chase, all individuals can easily become warriors. There will of course be leaders who will rule over the tribe, but we will not find a warrior class rising to exploit, and at the same time to protect, another class that is devoted to peaceful pursuits. As the tribe emerges from the hunting stage and enters the agricultural and pastoral stage, then, along with an enormous increase in population and a greater stability in the means of exerting social influence, a more or less clean-cut division into two classes will take place, one class being devoted exclusively to agriculture, the other class to war. In this event, it is inevitable that the warrior class should little by little acquire such ascend- a^jicy over the other as to be able to oppress it with impunity. 5 Poland offers a characteristic example of the gradual meta- morphosis of a warrior class into an absolutely dominant class. Originally the Poles had the same organization by rural villages as prevailed among all the Slavic peoples. There was no dis- tinction between fighters and farmers — in other words, between nobles and peasants. But after the Poles came to settle on the broad plains that are watered by the Vistula and the Niemen, agriculture began to develop among them. However, the neces- sity of fighting with warlike neighbors continued, so that the tribal chiefs, or voivodes, gathered about themselves a certain number of picked men whose special occupation was the bearing §4] MILITARISM AND PLUTOCRACY 55 of arms. These warriors were distributed among the various rural communities. They were exempt from agricultural duties, yet they received their share of the produce of the soil, along with the other members of the community. In early days their position was not considered very desirable, and country dwellers sometimes waived exemption from agricultural labor in order to avoid going to war. But gradually as this order of things grew stabilized, as one class became habituated to the practice of arms and military organization while the other hardened to the use of the plow and the spade, the warriors became nobles and masters, and the peasants, once companions and brothers, became villeins and serfs. Little by little the warrior lords increased their demands to the point where the share they took as members of the community came to include the community's whole produce minus what was absolutely necessary for sub- sistence on the part of the cultivators; and when the latter tried to escape such abuses they were constrained by force to stay bound to the soil, their situation taking on all the charac- teristics of serfdom pure and simple, j In the course of this evolution, around the year 1333, King Casimir the Great tried vainly to curb the overbearing insolence of the warriors. When peasants came to complain of the nobles, he contented himself with asking whether they had no sticks and stones. Some generations later, in 1537, the nobility forced all tradesmen in the cities to sell such real estate as they owned, and landed property became a prerogative of nobles only. At the same time the nobility exerted pressure upon the king to open negotiations with Rome, to the end that thenceforward only nobles should be admitted to holy orders in Poland. That barred townsmen and peasants almost completely from honorific posi- tions and stripped them of any social importance whatever.1 We find a parallel development in Russia. There the warriors who formed the druzhina, or escort, of the old knezes (princes descended from Rurik) also received a share in the produce of the mirs (rural peasant communities) for their livelihood. Little by little this share was increased. Since land abounded and workers were scarce, the peasants often had an eye to their advantage and moved about. At the end of the sixteenth century, accordingly, 1 Mickiewicz, Les Slaves, vol. I, legon XXIV, pp. 876-880; Histoire populaire de Pologne, chaps. I-II. 56 THE RULING CLASS [CHAP, II the czar Boris Godunov empowered the nobles to hold peasants to their lands by force, so establishing serfdom. However, armed forces in Russia were never composed exclusively of nobles. The muzhiks, or peasants, went to war as common soldiers under the droujina. As early as the sixteenth century, Ivan the Terri- ble established the order of strelitzes which amounted practically to a standing army, and which lasted until Peter the Great replaced it with regiments organized along western European lines. In those regiments members of the old druzhina, with an intermixture of foreigners, became officers, while the muzhiks provided the entire contingent of privates.1 (Among peoples that have recently entered the agricultural stage and are relatively civilized, it is the unvarying fact that the strictly military class is the political, or ruling, class. Some- times the bearing of arms is reserved exclusively to that class, as happened in India and Poland. More often the members of the governed class are on occasion enrolled — always, however, as common soldiers and in the less respected divisions. So in Greece, during the war with the Medes, the citizens belonging to the richer and more influential classes formed the picked corps (the cavalry and the hoplites), the less wealthy fought as peltasts or as slingers, while the slaves, that is the laboring masses, were almost entirely barred from military service. We find analogous arrangements in republican Rome, down to the period of the Punic Wars and even as late as the day of Marius; in Latin and Germanic Europe during the Middle Ages; in Russia, as just explained, and among many other peoples. Caesar notes repeatedly that in his time the backbone of the Gallic armies was formed by cavalrymen recruited from the nobility. The Aedui, for example, could not hold out against Ariovistus after the flower of their cavalry had been killed in battle. 5. Everywhere — in Russia and Poland, in India and medieval Europe— the ruling warrior classes acquire almost exclusive ownership of the land. Land, as we have seen, is the chief source of production and wealth in countries that are not very far advanced in civilization. But as civilization progresses, revenue from land increases proportionately. With the growth of population there is, at least in certain periods, an increase in 1 Leroy-Beaulieu, L* Empire dea tzars et Us Rusws, vol. I, pp. 838 f. §5] MILITARISM AND PLUTOCRACY 57 rent, in the Ricardian sense of the term, largely because great centers of consumption arise — such at all times have been the great capitals and other large cities, ancient and modern. Even- tually, if other circumstances permit, a very important social transformation occurs. Wealth rather than military valor comes to be the characteristic f eature of the dominant class: the people who rule are the rich rather than the brave. f The condition that in the main is required for this transforma- tion is that social organization shall have concentrated and become perfected to such an extent that the protection offered by public authority is considerably more effective than the protection offered by private force. In other words, private property must be so well protected by the practical and real efficacy of the laws as to render the power of the proprietor himself superfluous. This comes about through a series of gradual alterations in the social structure whereby a type of political organization, which we shall call the "feudal state," is transformed into an essentially different type, which we shall term the "bureaucratic state." We are to discuss these types at some length hereafter, but we may say at once that the evolution here referred to is as a rule greatly facilitated by prog- ress in pacific manners and customs and by certain moral habits yhich societies contract as civilization advances!. Once this transformation has taken place, wealth produces political power just as political power has been producing wealth. In a society already somewhat mature — where, therefore, indi- vidual power is curbed by the collective power — if the powerful are as a rule the rich, to be rich is to become powerful. And, in truth, when fighting with the mailed fist is prohibited whereas fighting with pounds and pence is sanctioned, the better posts are inevitably won by those who are better supplied with pounds and pence. There are, to be sure, states of a very high level of civilization which in theory are organized on the basis of moral principles of such a character that they seem to preclude this overbearing assertiveness on the part of wealth. But this is a case — and there are many such — where theoretical principles can have no more than a limited application in real life. In the United States all powers flow directly or indirectly from popular elections, and suffrage is equal for all men and women in all the states of the 58 THE RULING CLASS [CHAP. II Union. What is more, democracy prevails not only in institu- tions but to a certain extent also in morals. The rich ordinarily feel a certain aversion to entering public life, and the poor a certain aversion to choosing the rich for elective office. But that does not prevent a rich man from being more influential than a poor man, since he can use pressure upon the politicians who control public administration. It does not prevent elections from being carried on to the music of clinking dollars. It does not prevent whole legislatures and considerable numbers of national congressmen from feeling the influence of powerful corporations and great financiers.1 In China, too, down to a few years ago, though the govern- ment had not accepted the principle of popular elections, it was organized on an essentially equalitarian basis. Academic degrees gave access to public office, and degrees were conferred by examination without any apparent regard for family or wealth. According to some writers, only barbers and certain classes of boatmen, together with their children, were barred from competing for the various grades of the mandarinate.2 But though the moneyed class in China was less numerous, less wealthy, less powerful than the moneyed class in the United States is at present, it was none the less able to modify the scrupulous application of this system to a very considerable extent. Not only was the indulgence of examiners often bought with money. The government itself sometimes sold the various academic degrees and allowed ignorant persons, often from the lowest social strata, to hold public office.3 In all countries of the world those other agencies for exerting social influence — personal publicity, good education, specialized training, high rank in church, public administration, and army — are always readier of access to the rich than to the poor. The rich invariably have a considerably shorter road to travel than the poor, to say nothing of the fact that the stretch of road that the rich a.re spared is often the roughest and most difficult. 1 Jannet, Le istituzioni politiche e sociali degli Stati Uniti d>Americat part IIf chap. X f . 2 Rousset, A travers la Chine. 8 Mas y Sans, La, Chine d Us puissances ckrMiennes, vol. II, ppf 332-334; Hue, U Empire chinois. §6] THEOCRACIES 5» 6* In societies in which religious beliefs are strong and min- isters of the faith form a special class a priestly aristocracy almost always arises and gains possession of a more or less important share of the wealth and the political power. Conspicuous examples of that situation would be ancient Egypt (during cer- tain periods), Brahman India and medieval Europe. Often- times the priests not only perform religious functions. They possess legal and scientific knowledge and constitute the class of highest intellectual culture. Consciously or unconsciously, priestly hierarchies often show a tendency to monopolize learning and hamper the dissemination of the methods and procedures that make the acquisition of knowledge possible and easy.) To that tendency may have been due, in part at least, the painfully slow diffusion of the demotic alphabet in ancient Egypt, though that alphabet was infinitely more simple than the hieroglyphic script. The Druids in Gaul were acquainted with the Greek alphabet but would not permit their rich store of*sacred literature to be written down, requiring their pupils to commit it to memory at the cost of untold effort. ; To the same outlook may be attrib- uted the stubborn and frequent use of dead languages that we find in ancient Chaldea, in India, and in medieval Europe. Sometimes, as was the case in India, lower classes have been explicitly forbidden to acquire knowledge of sacred books.) Specialized knowledge and really scientific culture/ purged of any sacred or religious aura, become important political forces only in a highly advanced stage of civilization, and only then do they give access to membership in the ruling class to those who possess them] But in this case too, it is not so much learning in itself that has political value as the practical applications that may be made of learning to the profit of the public or the state. Sometimes all that is required is mere possession of the mechani- cal processes that are indispensable to the acquisition of a higher culture. This may be due to the fact that on such a basis it is easier to ascertain and measure the skill which a candidate has been able to acquire — it is easier to "mark" or grade him. So in certain periods in ancient Egypt the profession of scribe was a road to public office and power, perhaps because to have learned the hieroglyphic script was proof of long and patient study. In modern China, again, learning the numberless characters in 60 THE RULING CLASS [CHAP. II Chinese script has formed the basis of the mandarin's education.1 In present-day Europe and America the class that applies the findings of modern science to war, public administration, public works and public sanitation holds a fairly important position, both socially and politically, and in our western world, as in ancient Rome, an altogether privileged position is held by lawyers. They know the complicated legislation that arises in all peoples of long-standing civilization, and they become especially powerful if their knowledge of law is coupled with the type of eloquence that chances to have a strong appeal to the taste of their contemporaries./ There are examples in abundance where we see that long- standing practice in directing the military and civil organization of a community creates and develops in the higher reaches of the ruling class a real art of governing which is something better than crude empiricism and better than anything that mere individual experience could suggest. In such circumstances aristocracies of functionaries arise, such as the Roman senate, the Venetian nobility and to a certain extent the English aristocracy. Those bodies all stirred John Stuart Mill to admiration and certainly they all three developed governments that were distinguished for carefully considered policies and for great steadfastness and sagacity in carrying them out. This art of governing is not political science, though it has, at one time or another, anticipated applications of a number of the postulates of political science. However, even if the art of governing has now and again enjoyed prestige with certain classes of persons who have long held possession of political functions, knowledge of it has i^ever served as an ordinary criterion for admitting to public offices persons who were barred from them by social station. The degree of mastery of the art of governing that a person possesses is, moreover, apart from exceptional cases, a very diffi- cult thing to determine if the person has given no practical demonstration that he possesses it. 7 \In some countries we find hereditary castes. In such cases the governing class is explicitly restricted to a given number of 1 This was true up to a few years ago, the examination of a mandarin covering only literary and historical studies — as the Chinese understood such studies, of course. §7] HEREDITARY ARISTOCRACY 61 families, and birth is the one criterion that determines entry into the class or exclusion from it. Examples are exceedingly com- mon. There is practically no country of long-standing civiliza- tion that has not had a hereditary aristocracy at one period or another in its history. We find hereditary nobilities during certain periods in China and ancient Egypt, in India, in Greece before the wars with the Medes, in ancient Rome, among the Slavs, among the Latins and Germans of the Middle Ages, in Mexico at the time of the Discovery and in Japan down to a few years ago. / In this connection two preliminary observations are in point. In the first place, all ruling classes tend to become hereditary in fact if not in law. All political forces seem to possess a quality that in physics used to be called the force of inertia. They have a tendency, that is, to remain at the point and in the state in which they find themselves. Wealth and military valor are easily maintained in certain families by moral tradi- tion and by heredity. Qualification for important office — the habit of, and to an extent the capacity for, dealing with affairs of consequence — is much more readily acquired when one has had a certain familiarity with them from childhood. Even when academic degrees, scientific training, special aptitudes as tested by examinations and competitions, open the way to public office, there is no eliminating that special advantage in favor of certain individuals which the French call the advantage of positions d6j& prises. In actual fact, though examinations and com- petitions may theoretically be open to all, the majority never have the resources for meeting the expense of long preparation, and many others are without the connections and kinships that set an individual promptly on the right road, enabling him to avoid the gropings and blunders that are inevitable when one enters an unfamiliar environment without any guidance or support. ; The democratic principle of election by broad-based suffrage would seem at first glance to be in conflict with the tendency toward stability which, according to our theory, ruling classes show. But it must be noted that candidates who are successful in democratic elections are almost always the ones who possess the political forces above enumerated, which are very often hereditary. In the English, French and Italian parliaments we 62 THE RULING CLASS [CHAP. II frequently see the sons, grandsons, brothers, nephews and sons- ii^-law of members and deputies, ex-members and ex-deputies.! f In the second place, when we see a hereditary caste established in a country and monopolizing political power, we may be sure that such a status de jure was preceded by a similar status de facto. Before proclaiming their exclusive and hereditary right to power the families or castes in question must have held the scepter of command in a firm grasp, completely monopolizing all the political forces of that country at that period. Otherwise such a claim on their part would only have aroused the bitterest protests and provoked the bitterest struggles. Hereditary aristocracies often come to vaunt supernatural origins, or at least origins different from, and superior to, those of the governed classes. Such claims are explained by a highly significant social fact, namely that every governing class tends to justify its actual exercise of power by resting it on some universal moral principle. This same sort of claim has come for- ward in our time in scientific trappings. A number of writers, developing and amplifying Darwin's theories, contend that upper classes represent a higher level in social evolution and are there- fore superior to lower classes by organic structure. Gumplowicz we have already quoted. That writer goes to the point of main- taining that the divisions of populations into trade groups and professional classes in modern civilized countries are based on ethnological heterogeneousness.1 Now history very definitely shows the special abilities as well as the special defects — both very marked — which have been displayed by aristocracies that have either remained absolutely closed or have made entry into their circles difficult. The ancient Roman patriciate and the English and German nobilities of modern times give a ready idea of the type we refer to. Yet in dealing with this fact, and with the theories that tend to exag- gerate its significance, we can always raise the same objection — that the individuals who belong to the aristocracies in question owe their special qualities not so much to the blood that flows in their veins as to their very particular upbringing, which has brought out certain intellectual and moral tendencies in them in preference to others. 1 Der Rassenkampf. This notion transpires from Gumplowicz's whole volume. It is explicitly formulated in book II, chap. XXXIII. §7] HEREDITARY ARISTOCRACY 68 Among all the factors that figure in social superiority, intel- lectual superiority is the one with which heredity has least to do. The children of men of highest mentality often have very medio- cre talents. That is why hereditary aristocracies have" never defended their rule on the basis of intellectual superiority alone, but rather on the basis of their superiorities in character and wealth. I It is argued, in rebuttal, that education and environment may serve to explain superiorities in strictly intellectual capacities but not differences of a moral order — will power, courage, pride, energy. The truth is that social position, family tradition, the habits of the class in which we live, contribute more than is commonly supposed to the greater or lesser development of the qualities mentioned. If we carefully observe individuals who have changed their social status, whether for better or for worse, and who consequently find themselves in environments different from the ones they have been accustomed to, it is apparent that their intellectual capacities are much less sensibly affected than their moral ones. Apart from a greater breadth of view that education and experience bring to anyone who is not altogether stupid, every individual, whether he remains a mere clerk or becomes a minister of state, whether he reaches the rank of sergeant or the rank of general, whether he is a millionaire or a beggar, abides inevitably on the intellectual level on which nature has placed him. And yet with changes of social status and wealth the proud man often becomes humble, servility changes to arrogance, an honest nature learns to lie, or at least to dis- semble, under pressure of need, while the man who has an ingrained habit of lying and bluffing makes himself over and puts on an outward semblance at least of honesty and firmness of character. It is true, of course, that a man fallen from high estate often acquires powers of resignation, self-denial and resourcefulness, just as one who rises in the world sometimes gains in sentiments of justice and fairness. In short, whether a man change for the better or for the worse, he has to be exceptionally level-headed if he is to change his social status very appreciably and still keep his character unaltered. Mirabeau remarked that, for any man, any great climb on the social ladder produces a crisis that cures the ills he has and creates new ones that he never had before.1 1 Correspondance entre le comte de Mirabeau et le comte deLa Marck, vol. II, p. 228, 64 THE RULING CLASS [CHAP. II Courage in battle, impetuousness in attack, endurance in resistance — such are the qualities that have long and often been vaunted as a monopoly of the higher classes. Certainly there may be vast natural and — if we may say so — innate differences between one individual and another in these respects; but more than anything else traditions and environmental influences are the things that keep them high, low or just average, in any large group of human beings. We generally become indifferent to danger or, perhaps better, to a given type of danger, when the persons with whom we daily live speak of it with indifference and remain cool and imperturbable before it. Many mountaineers or sailors are by nature timid men, yet they face unmoved, the ones the dangers of the precipice, the others the perils of the storm at sea. So peoples and classes that are accustomed to warfare maintain military virtues at the highest pitch. So true is this that even peoples and social classes which are ordinarily unaccustomed to arms acquire the military virtues rapidly when the individuals who compose them are made members of organizations in which courage and daring are tradi- tional, when — if one may venture the metaphor — they are cast into human crucibles that are heavily charged with the senti- ments that are to be infused into their fiber. Mohammed II recruited his terrible Janizaries in the main from boys who had been kidnapped among the degenerate Greeks of Byzantium. The much despised Egyptian fellah, unused for long centuries to war and accustomed to remaining meek and helpless under the lash of the oppressor, became a good soldier when Mehemet Ali placed him in Turkish or Albanian regiments. The French nobility has always enjoyed a reputation for brilliant valor, but down to the end of the eighteenth century that quality was not credited in anything like the same degree to the French bour- geoisie. However, the wars of the Republic and the Empire amply proved that nature had been uniformly lavish in her endowments of courage upon all the inhabitants of France. Proletariat and bourgeoisie both furnished good soldiers and, what is more, excellent officers, though talent for command had been considered an exclusive prerogative of the nobility. Gum- plowicz's theory that differentiation in social classes depends very largely on ethnological antecedents requires proof at the very least. Many facts to the contrary readily occur to §8] SOCIAL STABILITY AND CHANGE 65 among others the obvious fact that branches of the same family often belong to widely different social classes. 8. Finally, if we were to keep to the idea of those who maintain the exclusive influence of the hereditary principle in the formation of ruling classes, we should be carried to a conclusion somewhat like the one to which we were carried by the evolutionary princi- ple: The political history of mankind ought to be much simpler than it is. If the ruling class really belonged to a different race, or if the qualities that fit it for dominion were transmitted primarily by organic heredity, it is difficult to see how, once the class was formed, it could decline and lose its power. The peculiar qualities of a race are exceedingly tenacious. Keeping to the evolutionary theory, acquired capacities in the parents are inborn in their children and, as generation succeeds generation, are progressively accentuated. The descendants of rulers, therefore, ought to become better and better fitted to rule, and the other clashes ought to see their chances of challenging or supplanting them become more and more remote. Now the most commonplace experience suffices to assure one that things do not go in that way at all. What we see is that as soon as there is a shift in the balance of political forces — when, that is, a need is felt that capacities different from the old should assert themselves in the manage- ment of the state, when the old capacities, therefore, lose some of their importance or changes in their distribution occur — then the manner in which the ruling class is constituted changes also. If a new source of wealth develops in a society, if the practical importance of knowledge grows, if an old religion declines or a new one is born, if a new current of ideas spreads, then, simultane- ously, far-reaching dislocations occur in the ruling class. One might say, indeed, that the whole history of civilized mankind comes down to a conflict between the tendency of dominant elements to monopolize political power and transmit possession of it by inheritance, and the tendency toward a dislocation of old forces and an insurgence of new forces; and this conflict produces an unending ferment of endosmosis and exosmosis between the upper classes and certain portions of the lower, f Buling classes decline inevitably when they cease to find scope f oi* the capacities through which they rose to power, when they can no longer 66 THE RULING CLASS [CHAP. II render the social services which they once rendered, or when their talents and the services they render lose in importance in the social environment in which they live. So the Roman aristocracy declined when it was no longer the exclusive source of higher officers for the army, of administrators for the commonwealth, of governors for the provinces. So the Venetian aristocracy declined when its nobles ceased to command the galleys and no longer passed the greater part of their lives in sailing the seas and in trading and fighting. In inorganic nature we have the example of our air, in which a tendency to immobility produced by the force of inertia is continuously in conflict with a tendency to shift about as the result of inequalities in the distribution of heat. The two tendencies, prevailing by turn in various regions on our planet, produce now calm, now wind and storm. In much the same way in human societies there prevails now the tendency that produces closed, stationary, crystallized ruling classes, now the tendency that results in a more or less rapid renovation of ruling classes. I The Oriental societies which we consider stationary have in reality not always been so, for otherwise, as we have already pointed out, they could not have made the advances in civiliza- tion of which they have left irrefutable evidence. It is much more accurate to say that we came to know them at a time when their political forces and their political classes were in a period of crystallization. The same thing occurs in what we commonly call " aging" societies, where religious beliefs, scientific knowledge, methods of producing and distributing wealth have for centuries undergone no radical alteration and have not been disturbed in their everyday course by infiltrations of foreign elements, mate- rial or intellectual. In such societies political forces are always the same, and the class that holds possession of them holds a power that is undisputed. Power is therefore perpetuated in certain families, and the inclination to immobility becomes general through all the various strata in that society. ' f So in India we see the caste system become thoroughly entrenched after the suppression of Buddhism. The Greeks found hereditary castes in ancient Egypt, but we know that in the periods of greatness and renaissance in Egyptian civilization political office and social status were not hereditary. We possess an Egyptian document that summarizes the life of a high army §8] SOCIAL CHANGE 67 officer who lived during th6 period of the expulsion of the Hyksos, He had begun his career as a simple soldier. Other documents show cases in which the same individual served successively in army, civil administration and priesthood.1 [The best-known and perhaps the most important example of a society tending toward crystallization is the period in Roman history that used to be called the Low Empire. There, after several centuries of almost complete social immobility, a division between two classes grew sharper and sharper, the one made up of great landowners and high officials, the other made up of slaves, farmers and urban plebeians. What is even more striking, public office and social position became hereditary by custom before they became hereditary by law, and the trend was rapidly generalized during the period mentioned.2 On the other hand it may happen in the history of a nation that commerce with foreign peoples, forced emigrations, discoveries, wars, create new poverty and new wealth, disseminate knowledge of things that were previously unknown or cause infiltrations of new moral, intellectual and religious currents. Or again — as a result of such infiltrations or through a slow process of inner growth, or from both causes — it may happen that a new learning arises, or that certain elements of an old, long forgotten learning return to favor so that new ideas and new beliefs come to the fore and upset the intellectual habits on which the obedience of the masses has been founded. The ruling class may also be vanquished and destroyed in whole or in part by foreign invasions, or, when the circumstances just mentioned arise, it may be driven from power by the advent of new social elements who are strong in fresh political forces. Then, naturally, there comes a period of renovation, or, if one prefer, of revolution, during which indi- vidual energies have free play and certain individuals, more passionate, more energetic, more intrepid or merely shrewder than others, force their way from the bottom of the social ladder to the topmost rungs. Once such a movement has set in, it cannot be stopped imme- diately. The example of individuals who have started from nowhere and reached prominent positions fires new ambitions, 1 Lenormant, Maspero, Brugsck 2 Marquardt, Manuel des antiquiUs romaines; Fustel de Coulanges, Nouvettes recherches sur quelquea probtimes d'histoire. 68 THE RULING CLASS [CHAP. II new greeds, new energies, and this molecular rejuvenation of the ruling class continues vigorously until a long period of social stability slows it down again. We need hardly mention examples of nations in such periods of renovation. In our age that would be superfluous. Rapid restocking of ruling classes is a frequent and very striking phenomenon in countries that have been recently colonized. When social life begins in such environments, there is no ready-made ruling class, and while such a class is in process of formation, admittance to it is gained very easily. Monopolization of land and other agencies of production is, if not quite impossible, at any rate more difficult than elsewhere. That is why, at least during a certain period, the Greek colonies offered a wide outlet for all Greek energy and enterprise. That is why, in the United States, where the colonizing of new lands continued through the whole nineteenth century and new indus- tries were continually springing up, examples of men who started with nothing and have attained fame and wealth are still frequent — all of which helps to foster in the people of that country the illusion that democracy is a fact. Suppose now that a society gradually passes from its feverish state to calm. Since the human being's psychological tendencies are always the same, those who belong to the ruling class will begin to acquire a group spirit. They will become more and more exclusive and learn better and better the art of monopolizing to their advantage the qualities and capacities that are essential to acquiring power and holding it. Then, at last, the force that is essentially conservative appears — the force of habit. Many people become resigned to a lowly station, while the members of certain privileged families or classes grow convinced that they have almost an absolute right to high station and command. A philanthropist would certainly be tempted to inquire whether mankind is happier — or less unhappy — during periods of social stability and crystallization, when everyone is almost fated to remain in the social station to which he was born,x*r during the directly opposite periods of renovation and revolution, which permit all to aspire to the most exalted positions and some to attain them. Such an inquiry would be difficult. The answer would have to take account of many qualifications and exceptions, and might perhaps always be influenced by the personal prefer- ences of the observer. We shall therefore be careful not to §8] SOCIAL CHANGE 69 venture on any answer of our own. Besides, even if we could reach an undebatable conclusion, it would have a very slight practical utility; for the sad fact is that what the philosophers and theologians call free will — in other words, spontaneous choice by individuals — has so far had, and will perhaps always have, little influence, if any at all, in hastening either the ending or the beginning of one of the historical periods mentioned. CHAPTER III FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS I. As we have just seen, in fairly populous societies that have attained a certain level of civilization, ruling classes do not justify their power exclusively by de facto possession of it, but try to find a moral and legal basis for it, representing it as the logical and necessary consequence of doctrines and beliefs that are generally recognized and accepted. So if a society is deeply imbued with the Christian spirit the political class will govern by the will of the sovereign, who, in turn, will reign because he is God's anointed. So too in Mohammedan societies political authority is exercised directly in the name of the caliph, or vicar, of the Prophet, or in the name of someone who has received investiture, tacit or explicit, from the caliph. The Chinese mandarins ruled the state because they were supposed to be interpreters of the will of the Son of Heaven, who had received from heaven the mandate to govern paternally, and in accordance with the rules of the Confucian ethic, "the people of the hundred families." The complicated hierarchy of civil and military func- tionaries in the Roman Empire rested upon the will of the emperor, who, at least down to Diocletian's time, was assumed by a legal fiction to have received from the people a mandate to rule the commonwealth. The powers of all lawmakers, magis- trates and government officials in the United States emanate directly or indirectly from the vote of the voters, which is held to be the expression of the sovereign will of the whole American popple. { This legal and moral basis, or principle, on which the power of tie political class rests, is what we have elsewhere called, and shall continue here to call, the "political formula." (Writers on the philosophy of law generally call it the "principle of sover- eignty/'1) The political formula can hardly be the same in two 1 Mosca, Teorica dei governi e governo parlamentare, chap. I; see also Mosca, Le costituzioni moderne. 70 §2] POLITICAL FORMULAS 71 or more different societies; and fundamental or even notable similarities between two or more political formulas appear only where the peoples professing them have the same type of civiliza- tion (or — to use an expression which we shall shortly define — belong to the same social type). According to the level of civilization in the peoples among whom they are current, the various political formulas may be based either upon supernatural beliefs or upon concepts which, if they do not correspond to posi- tive realities, at least appear to be rational/) We shall not say that they correspond in either case to scientific truths. A conscientious observer would be obliged to confess that, if no one has ever seen the authentic document by which the Lord empow- ered certain privileged persons or families to rule his people on his behalf, neither can it be maintained that a popular election, however liberal the suffrage may be, is ordinarily the expression of the will of a people, or even of the will of the majority of a people. ( And yet that does not mean that political formulas are mere quackeries aptly invented to trick the masses into obedience); Anyone who viewed them in that light would fall into grave error. < The truth is that they answer a real need in man's social nature; and this need, so universally felt, of governing and knowing that one is governed not on the basis of mere material or intellectual force, but on the basis of a moral principle, has beyond any doubt a practical and a real importance. / Spencer wrote that the divine right of kings was the great super- stition of past ages, and that the divine right of elected assemblies is the great superstition of our present age. ) The idea cannot be called wholly mistaken, but certainly it does not consider or exhaust all aspects of the question. It is further necessary to see whether a society can hold together without one of these "great superstitions" — whether a universal illusion is not a social force that contributes powerfully to consolidating political organization and unifying peoples or even whole civilizations. / 2X Mankind is divided into social groups each of which is set apart from other groups by beliefs, sentiments, habits and inter- ests that are peculiar to it. The individuals who belong to one such group are held together by a consciousness of common brotherhood and held apart from other groups by passions and tendencies that are more or less antagonistic and mutually 72 FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS [CHAP. Ill repellent. As we have already indicated, the political formula must be based upon the special beliefs and the strongest senti- ments of the social group in which it is current, or at least upon the beliefs and sentiments of the particular portion of that group which holds political preeminence, (This phenomenon — the existence of social groups each of which has characteristics peculiar to itself and often presumes absolute superiority over other groups (the boria nazionale, the national conceit, that Vico talks about !) — has been recognized and studied by many writers, and particularly by modern scholars, in dealing with the principle of nationality. Gumplowicz, for instance, pointed to its importance in political science, or in sociology if you will. We should be quite ready to adopt the word that Gum- plowicz uses to designate it — syngenism — did the term not imply, in conformity with the fundamental ideas of that writer, an almost absolute preponderance of the ethnological element, of community of blood and race, in the formation of each separate social group.1 We do think that, in a number of primitive civilizations, not so much community of blood as a belief that such community existed — belief in a common ancestor, often arising, as Gumplowicz himself admits, after the social type had been formed — may have helped to cement group unities. But we also think that certain modern anthropological and philological doctrines have served to awaken between social groups and between fractions within one group antipathies that use racial differences as mere pretexts. Actually, moreover, in the forma- tion of the group, or social type, many other elements besides a more or less certain racial affinity figure — f or example, community of language, of religion, of interests, and the recurring relation- ships that result from geographical situation. It is not necessary that all these factors be present at one and the same time, for community of history — a life that is lived for centuries in com- mon, with identical or similar experiences, engendering similar moral and intellectual habits, similar passions and memories — often becomes the chief element in the development of a conscious social type.2 Once such a type is formed, we get, to return to a metaphor which we have earlier used, a sort of crucible that fuses all indi- 1 Gumplowicz, Der Rassenkampf, book II, chap. XXXVII. »Mosca, "Fat tori della nazionalita." §3] SOCIAL TYPE 73 viduals who enter it into a single alloy. Call it suggestion, call it imitation or mimetism, call it education pure and simple, it, nevertheless comes about that a man feels, believes, loves, hates, according to the environment in which he lives. With exceed- ingly rare exceptions, we are Christians or Jews, Mohammedans or Buddhists, Frenchmen or Italians, for the simple reason that such were the people among whom we were born and bred.1 3. In the early dawn of history each of the civilized peoples was virtually an oasis in a desert of barbarism, and the various civilizations, therefore, had either scant intercourse with one another or none whatever. That was the situation of ancient Egypt during the early dynasties and of China down to a day far less remote. Under these circumstances, naturally, each social type had an absolute originality that was virtually unaffected by infiltrations and influences from outside.2 And yet, though this isolation must have contributed considerably to strengthening the tendency that every social type manifests to consolidate into a single political organism, nevertheless even in those early days that tendency prevailed only sporadically. To keep to the examples mentioned : China, in the day of Confucius, was broken up into many quasi-independent feudal states; and in Egypt the various hiqs, or viceroys, of the individual nomes often acquired full independence, and sometimes upper Egypt and lower Egypt were separate kingdoms. Later on, in highly advanced and very complex civilizations such as the Hellenic, we see an opposite tendency coming more prominently to the fore, a tendency on the part of a social type to divide into separate, and almost always rival, political organ- isms. The hegemony that one Greek state or another tried to impose on the other Hellenic peoples was always a concept far removed from what we moderns think of as political unity; and the attempts of Athens and Sparta, and later on of Macedonia, to establish such a hegemony in a permanent and effective form never quite succeeded. 1 Cf. above, chap. I, §12, and, incidentally, chap. II, §2. 2 We are thinking here of moral and intellectual influences. Physical mixtures with neighboring barbarians must always have occurred, if only for the reason that outsiders were hunted for the purpose of procuring slaves. 74 FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS [CHAP. Ill The trait that is truly characteristic of many ancient peoples, and in general of civilizations that we may call primitive because foreign elements have exerted hardly any influence upon them, is the simpleness and unity of the whole system of ideas and beliefs on which a people's existence and its political organization are based. |Among ancient peoples the political formula not only rested upon religion but was wholly identified with it. Their god was preeminently a national god. He was the special protector of the territory and the people. He was the fulcrum of its political organization. A people existed only as long as its god was strong enough to sustain it, and in his turn the god survived only as long as his people did.) ^The ancient Hebrews are the best-known example of a people organized according to the system just described. We must not assume, however, that the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were any exception in the periods in which they flourished. The role that Jehovah played in Jerusalem was played by Chemosh at Moab,1 by Marduk (Merodach) at Babylon, by Ashur at Nineveh, by Ammon at Thebes. Just as the God of Israel commanded Saul, David and Solomon to fight to the bitter end against the Ammon- ites and the Philistines, so Ammon ordered the Egyptian Pharaohs to smite the barbarians to east and west and Ashur incited the sovereigns of Nineveh to exterminate all foreigners and assured them of victory. The speech that the Assyrian ambassador, Rab-shakeh, addressed to the Jews assembled on the walls of Jerusalem, illustrates the conceptions mentioned.2 " Yield to my Lord," he argues, "for just as other gods have been powerless to save their peoples from Assyrian conquest, so will Jehovah be powerless to save you." In other words, Jehovah was a god, but he was less powerful than Ashur, since Ashur's people had con- quered other peoples. The Syrians of Damascus are said to have once avoided joining battle with the Kings of Israel in the moun- tains because they believed that Jehovah fought better on a mountainous terrain than their god did^l But little by little contacts between relatively civilized peoples became more frequent. Vast empires were founded, and these 1 See the famous stele of Mesha, king of Moab. A translation of it may be found in Lenormant. *IIKmgsl8:10f. 8 1 Kings £0:28: "The Lord is God of the hills." §4] RELIGION AND SOCIAL TYPE 75 could not always be based upon complete assimilation and destruction of vanquished peoples. The conquerors often had to rest content with merely subduing them. In such cases the victor often found it politic to recognize and worship the god of the vanquished. The Assyrian kings who conquered Babylon paid homage to Marduk, and Cyrus seems to have done the same. Alexander the Great sacrificed to Ammon, and in general to all the deities of the peoples he conquered. The Romans admitted all conquered deities into their pantheon. At that point in history, long interludes of peace, and the lulling of national rivalries that follows upon the establishment of great political organisms, had prepared the ground for a relatively recent phenomenon — the rise of great religions which were humanitarian and universal and which, without distinction of race, language or political system, sought to extend the influence of their doctrines indiscriminately over the whole world. ^4. Buddhism, Christianity and Mohammedanism are the three great humanitarian religions that have so far appeared in history.1 Each of them possesses a complete body of doctrine, the basis being predominantly metaphysical in Buddhism and dogmatic in Christianity and Mohammedanism. Each of them claims that its doctrine contains the absolute truth and that it offers a trust- worthy and infallible guide to welfare in this world and salvation in the next. C Common acceptance of one of these religions constitutes a very close bond between most disparate peoples who differ widely in race and language. It gives them a common and special manner of viewing morality and life and, more than that, political customs and private habits of such a nature as to cause the formation of a real social type with conspicuous character- istics that are often so profound as to become virtually indelible. From the appearance of these great religions dates a clean-cut distinction between social type and national type that had scarcely existed before. There had once been Egyptian, Chal- dean and Greek civilizations, but no Christian or Mohammedan 1 The Jewish religion, parent of Christianity and Mohammedanism, has also become preponderantly humanitarian through a long process of evolution that can be traced as far back as the Prophets. Judaism, however, has never had any very wide following. There may have been humanitarian tendencies in the religion of Zoroaster, though that was just a national religion in origin. 76 FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS [CHAP. Ill civilization— in other words, there had never been aggregations of peoples who were different in language and race and were divided into many political organisms but were nevertheless united by beliefs, sentiments and a common cultur^j. Of all religions Mohammedanism is the one, perhaps, that leaves its imprint most deeply on individuals who have embraced it, or better, who have been born into a society over which it has secured control. Christianity, and Judaism too, have been and still are forms that are exceedingly well adapted to molding the soft clay of the human spirit in accordance with certain definite patterns. The influence of Buddhism is more bland, but it is still effective. It is to be noted, however, that if (these great religions, with their closely knit doctrines and their strongly organized religious hierarchies, do serve wonderfully to bind their cobelievers together in brotherhood and assimilate them to a common type, they also act as estranging forces of great potency between populations that cherish different beliefs. They create almost unbridgeable gulfs between peoples who are otherwise close kin in race and language and who live in adjoining territories or even within one countryA Differences in religion have rendered any fusion between the populations inhabiting the Balkan peninsula almost impossible, and the same is true of India. ( In India? as is hiown, the religions prevailing at present are Mohammedanism and Brahamanismi The latter is not a humanitarian rellgidn, but it is strongly organized. Minute precepts create cases of impurity at the least contact between persons of different castes. The caste, therefore, becomes a powerful estranging force, and greatly hamBfiia^jaBy ferment of impulses toward social assimi- Amazing indeed is the skill that the Romans showed in assimilating subject peoples, in the face of the very considerable obstacles that arose from differences in race, language and level of civilization. They might not have succeeded so well had they encountered the resistance of hostile, exclusive and strongly organized religions, Druidism in Gaul and Britain had a very rudimentary organization, but it offered a certain amount of resistance nevertheless. The Jews allowed themselves to be killed and dispersed, but they were never assimilated. In North Africa, Rome succeeded in Latinizing the ancestors of the modern §5] RELIGION AND SOCIAL TYPE 77 Moors, Arabs and Kabyles and in converting them to her civiliza- tion, at least up to a certain point; but she never had to deal with the Mussulman religion, as the French and Italians of our day arc obliged to do. Jugurtha and Tacfarinas could not appeal to religious passions as Abd-el-Kader and Bou-Maza have done in our time. As Karamzin so aptly remarks, the Christian religion saved Moscow from becoming wholly Asiatic under the long dominion of the Mongols. On the other hand, though the Russians in their turn are efficient assimilators, and though Finnish and Mongol blood are blended in large proportions with the Slavic in White Russia, the units of Mohammedan Tatars in Kazan, Astrakhan and the Crimea have never been absorbed. Either they have emigrated or else they have stayed on as a people apart, subject, to be sure, but sharply distinguished from the rest of the Russian people.1 The children of the Celestial Empire have been fairly successful in assimilating the inhabitants of the southern provinces, alien by race and language, but they have not succeeded so well with the Roui-Tze, descendants of Turkish tribes who have dwelt for a thousand years or more in provinces in the northwest of China proper. These have taken on the language and the external appearance of the real Chinese, and mingle with the latter in the same cities, but they have been kept in spiritual isolation by Mohammedanism, which their fathers had embraced before passing the Great Wall. The Turkish tribes in question established themselves in the provinces of Shensi and Kansu under the Tang dynasty, on being summoned thither to check invasions by the Tibetans. In 1861 the antip- athies that had always existed between the Mohammedans and their Buddhist fellow countrymen gave rise to a terrible insurrec- tion, in which the Mohammedans waged a war of extermination against the Buddhists. After the provinces mentioned had been reduced to ghastly desolation, the civil war became localized in the Kashgar, beyond the Great Wall. It did not end until 1877, when the Mohammedan leader, Jakoub-beg, was assassinated.2 With the appearance of the great universal religions, the history of mankind becomes complicated by new factors. We have already seen that even before those religions arose, a social 1 Leroy-Beaulieu, E 'Empire des tmrs et les Russes, 2 Rousset, A tiravers la Chine, 78 FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS [CHAP. Ill type, in spite of its tendency toward unity, might split up into different political systems. With the advent of the great religions, this fact becomes more general and less avoidable.) and the ground is prepared for the emergence of a phenomenon which, as regards Europe, is called the struggle between church and state. ipThe complication arises primarily from the fact that the tendency of the social type toward unity remains but is hampered by far stronger forces. The political organization still tries to justify its own existence by the tenets of the prevailing religion, but the religion, on its side, is always trying to obtain control of, and to identify itself with, political power in order to use the latter as an instrument for its own ends and propaganda^ TJ^ljffjnn fljid. -.pn|jftjfifi ft^e most closely united in Mohammedan countries. The head of a Mohammedan state has almost always Seen the high priest of one of the great Islamic sects, or else has received Els investiture from tEe liands of a high priest. In past centuries this investiture was often an empty formality which the caliph, by that time stripped of temporal power, could not with- hold from the powerful. / In the period between the fall of the Abbassids of Bagdad and the rise of the great Ottoman Empire Mussulman fanaticism was less violent than it is today. Even a superficial familiarity with the history of the Mohammedan countries convinces one of that. Heirs of the Persian civilization of the age of the Sassanids, and thanks to their study of ancient Greek authors, the Mussulmans were for several centuries during the Middle Ages much less prejudiced than the Christians of the same period.1 j It is certain, moreover, that almost every great revolution in tlie Mohammedan world, the birth of almost every state, is accompanied and justified by a new religious schism. So it was in the Middle Ages, when the new empires of the Almora- vides and the Almohades arose; and that was also the case in the nineteenth century with the insurrection of the Wahabis and the revolt led by the Mahdi of Omdurman. In China, Buddhism lives meekly on under the protection of the state, the latter showing that it recognizes and fosters the creed as a gesture of deference toward the lower classes, which really believe in it. Down to a few years ago the Grand Lama, who is the high authority of the Buddhists in Tibet, Mongolia and * Anaari. St&ria dei Musulmani in Sidlia. §5] RELIGION AND SOCIAL TYPE 79 certain provinces of China proper, scrupulously followed the suggestions of the Chinese resident at Lhasa. The bonzes, who are scattered over the greater part of China, have no centralized organization — in a way they are the Protestants of Buddhism. The government tolerates them and often spends a certain amount of money on Buddhist festivals in order to humor popular beliefs, f The higher classes in China follow the agnostic posi- tivism of Confucius, which is not clearly distinguishable from a vague sort of deism.) In Japan the same religion is tolerated, but the government has of late been trying to rehabilitate the ancient national cult of Shinto. (The various Christian sects have met widely varying conditions in Europe. In Russia the czar was the head of the orthodox religion and the church authority was practically one with the state authority. In the eyes of a loyal Russian a good subject of the czar had to be an orthodox Greek Catholic.1 In Protestant countries, too, the dominant sect often has a more or less official character. Since the fall of the Roman empire, Catholicism has had greater independence) In the Middle Ages it aspired to control over lay authority in all the countries that had entered the Catholic orbit, and there was a time when the pope could reason- ably hope that a realization of the vast papal project of uniting all Christianity — in other words a whole social type — under his more or less direct influence was near at hand. Today the pope gets along by compromises, lending his support to secular powers and receiving theirs. In one country or another he is in open conflict with them. But^a political organism, which has a population that follows one of the universal religions, or is divided among several sects of one of them, must have a legal and moral basis of its own on which the ruling class may take its stand. It must, therefore, be founded on a national feeling, on a long tradition of independence, on historic memories, on an age-old loyalty to a dynasty — on something, in short, that is peculiar to itself *) Alongside of the general humanitarian cult, there must somehow be a, so to say, national cult that is more or less satisfactorily reconciled and coordinated with the other. The duties of the two cults are often simultaneously observed by the same individuals, for human beings are not always strictly consistent in reconciling the various 1 Leroy-Beaulieu, IS Empire des tzars et Us 80 FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS [CHAP. Ill principles that inspire their conduct. In practice one may be a good Catholic and at the same time a good German, or a good Italian, or a good Frenchman, or a loyal subject of a Protestant sovereign, or a good citizen of a republic that makes official profession of anticlericalism. Sometimes, as frequently hap- pened in an older Italy, one can be a good patriot and an ardent socialist at the same time, though socialism, like Catholicism, is in essence antagonistic to national particularisms. These compromises occur, however, when passions are not very keen. In point of strict consistency, the eighteenth century English were right when they thought that, since the king was the head of the Anglican Church and every good Catholic owed his prime obe- dience to the pope, no good Catholic could be a good Englishman. ^J When there is a more or less masked antagonism between a doctrine, or a creed, that aspires to universality, and the senti- ments and traditions that support the particularism of a state, what is really essential is that those sentiments and traditions should be really vigorous, that they should also be bound up with many material interests and that a considerable portion of the ruling class should be strongly imbued with them and should propagate and keep them alive in the masses. If, in addition, this element in the ruling class is soundly organized, it can resist all the religious or doctrinary currents that are exerting an influence in the society that it rules. But if it is lukewarm in its sentiments, if it is feeble in moral and intellectual forces, if its organization is defective, then the religious and doctrinary cur- rents prevail and the state ends by becoming a plaything of some one of the universal religions or doctrines — for example of Catholicism or of social democracy. J 6. Before we proceed any further, it might be wise to linger briefly on the two types into which, in our opinion, all political organisms may be classified, the feudal and the bureaucratic. This classification, it should be noted, is not based upon essen- tial, unchanging criteria. It is not our view that there is any psychological law peculiar to either one of the two types and therefore alien to the other. It seems to us, rather, that the two types are just different manifestations, different phases, of a single constant tendency whereby human societies become less simple, or, if one will, more complicated in political organization, §6] FEUDAL SYSTEMS 81 as they grow in size and are perfected in civilization. Level of civilization is, on the whole, more important in this regard than size, since, in actual fact, a literally huge state may once have been feudally organized. At bottom, therefore, a bureaucratic state is just a feudal state that has advanced and developed in organization and so grown more complex; and a feudal state may derive from a once bureaucratized society that has decayed in civilization and reverted to a simpler, more primitive form of political organization, perhaps falling to pieces in the process. By "feudal state" we mean that type of political organization in which all the executive functions of society — the economic, the judicial, the administrative, the military—are exercised simul- taneously by the same individuals, while at the same time the state is made up of small social aggregates, each of which possesses all the organs that are required for self-sufficiency. The Europe of the Middle Ages offers the most familiar example of this type of organization — that*4s why we have chosen to designate it by the term "feudal"; but as one reads the histories of other peoples or scans the accounts of travelers of our own day one readily perceives that the type is widespread. Just as the medieval baron was simultaneously owner of the land, military commander, judge and administrator of his fief, over which he enjoyed both a pure and a mixed sovereignty, so the Abyssinian ras dispensed justice, commanded the soldiery and levied taxes^ — or rather extorted from the farmer everything over and aboVe the bare necessaries of subsistence. In certain periods of ancient Egypt the hiq, or local governor, saw to the upkeep of the canals, super- vised agriculture, administered justice, exacted tribute, com- manded his warriors. This was more especially the case during the earliest known periods and under some of the more recent dynasties, jit must not be forgotten that the history of ancient Egypt covers about thirty centuries, a period long enough, in spite of the alleged immobility of the East, for a society to pass back and forth between feudalism and bureaucracy any number of times.; So too the curaca of Peru, under Inca rule, was the head of his village, and in that capacity administered the collec- tive rural property, exercised all judiciary functions and, at the request of the Son of the Sun, commanded the armed quotas that the village contributed. China also passed through a feudal period, and in Japan that type of organization lasted down to the 8$ FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS [CHAP. Ill end of the sixteenth century, its last traces not vanishing till after the revolution of 1868. Afghanistan is still feudally organized, and so was India to a great extent at the time of the European conquest. We may go so far as to say that every great society must have passed one or more times through a feudal period. Sometimes religious functions also are exercised by the leader who has charge of other social activities. This was true of Europe in medieval times, when abbots and bishops were holders of fiefs. {A feudal order may exist, furthermore, even when land, the almostPexclusive source of wealth in societies of low-grade civilization, is not by law the absolute property of the governing class. Even granting that the cultivators are not legally vassals and slaves, or indeed are nominally owners of the soil they culti- vate, the local leader and his satellites, having full power to exact tribute and require forced labor, will leave the workers of the land no more than is indispensable for a bare subsistence^ Even small political units, in which the production of wealth rests not upon agriculture but upon commerce and industry, sometimes show markedly feudal characteristics, exhibiting a concentration of political and economic management in the same persons that is characteristically feudal. The political heads of the medieval communes were at the same time heads of the craft and trade guilds. The merchants of Tyre and Sidon, like the merchants of Genoa and Venice, Bremen and Hamburg, managed banks, superintended the trading posts that were established in barbarian countries, commanded ships which served now as merchantmen, now as war vessels, and governed their cities. That was the case especially when the cities lived by maritime commerce, in the exercise of which anyone who commanded a vessel readily combined his functions as a merchant with political or military leadership. In other places, in Florence for example, where a large part of the municipal wealth was derived from industry and banking, the ruling class soon lost its warlike habits and therewith direction of military affairs. To that fact may have been partly due the troubled career of the commercial oligarchy in Florence after the expulsion of the Duke of Athens and down to the time of Cosimo dei Medici. The year 1325 saw the last of the cavallate, or military expeditions, in which the nobles and wealthy merchants of Florence personally participated.1 1 Capponi, Storia delta Repubblica di Firms®. §7] BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS 8S 7. In the bureaucratic state not all the executive functions need to be concentrated in the bureaucracy and exercised by it. One might even declare that so far in history that has never been the case. The main characteristic of this type of social organization lies, we, believe, in the fact that, wherever it exists, the central power conscripts a considerable portion of the social wealth by taxation and uses it first to maintain a military establishment and then to support a more or less extensive number of public services. The greater the number of officials who perform public duties and receive their salaries from the central government or from its local agencies, the more bureaucratic a society becomes. In a bureaucratic state there is always a greater specialization in the functions of government than in a feudal state. The first and most elementary division of capacities is the withdrawal of administrative and judiciary powers from the military element. The bureaucratic state, furthermore, assures a far greater disci- pline in all grades of political, administrative and military service. To gain some conception of what this means, one has only to compare a medieval count, hedged about by armed retainers and by vassals who have been attached for centuries to his family and supported by the produce of his lands, with a modern French or Italian prefect or army general, whom a telegram can suddenly shear of authority and even of stipend. The feudal state, there- fore, demands great energy and a great sense of statesmanship in the man, or men, who stand on the top rung of the social ladder, if the various social groups, which would otherwise tend to dis- organization and autonomy, are to be kept organized, compact and obedient to a single impulse. So true is this that often with the death of an influential leader the power of a feudal state itself comes to an end. Only great moral unity — the presence of a sharply defined social type — can long save the political existence of a people that is feudally organized. Nothing less than Chris- tianity was required to hold the Abyssinian tribes together amid the masses of pagans and Mohammedans that encircled them, and to preserve their autonomy for over two thousand years. But when the estranging force is feeble, or when the feudal state comes into contact with more soundly organized peoples, then such a state may very easily be absorbed and vanish in one of the frequent periodical crises to which its central power is irremedi- ably exposed — the example of Poland comes immediately to 84 FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS [CHAP. Ill mind. OB the other hand, the personal qualities of the supreme head exert relatively little influence on the destinies of a bureau- cratic state. A society that is bureaucratically organized may retain its freedom even if it repudiates an old political formula and adopts a new one, or even if it subjects its social type to very far- reaching modifications. This was the case with the Roman Empire. It survived the adoption of Christianity in the West for a century and a half, and in the East for more than eleven centuries. So our modern nations have nearly all shifted at one time or another from a divine-right formula to parliamentary systems of government. 8. Bureaucratic organization need not necessarily be central- ized, in the sense commonly given to that expression. Often bureaucratization is compatible with a very liberal provincial autonomy, as in China, where the eighteen strictly Chinese provinces preserved broad autonomous privileges and the capital city of each province looked after almost all provincial affairs.1 States of European civilization — even the most decentralized of them — are all bureaucratized. As we have already indicated, the chief characteristic of a bureaucratic organization is that its military functions, and other public services in numbers more or less large, are exercised by salaried employees. Whether salaries are paid exclusively by the central government or in part by local bodies more or less under the control of the central government is a detail that is not as important as it is often supposed to be. History is not lacking in cases of very small political organisms which have accomplished miracles of energy in every branch of human activity with the barest rudiments of bureaucratic organ- ization or with practically none at all. The ancient Hellenic cities and the Italian communes of the Middle Ages are examples that flock to mind. But when vast human organisms, spreading over huge territories and comprising millions and millions of individuals, are involved, nothing short of bureaucratic organiza- tion seems capable of uniting under a single impulse the immense treasures of economic power and moral and intellectual energy with which a ruling class can in a measure modify conditions within a society and make its influence effective and powerful beyond its own frontiers. Under a feudal organization the 1 Hue, Reclus, Rousset. §8] BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS 85 authority which a given member of the ruling class exerts over individuals of the subject class, few or many, may be more direct, oppressive, and arbitrary. Under a bureaucratic organization society is influenced less by the given individual leader than by the ruling class as a whole. Egypt was bureaucratized in the golden ages of the seventeenth and eighteenth dynasties, when the civilization of the Pharaohs had one of its most lustrous periods of renascence, and the Egyp- tian battalions pushed their conquests from the Blue Nile to the foothills of the Caucasus. In ancient Egypt, as in China, the coinage of precious metals was unknown. Taxes therefore were collected in kind or were calculated in precious metals, which were weighed out on scales. This was no inconsiderable obstacle to the functioning of the bureaucratic system. The difficulty was overcome by a complicated and very detailed system of book- keeping. It is interesting also to note, on the psychological side, that with social conditions equal, man is always the same, even in little things, through the ages. Letters surviving from those days1 show Egyptian officers detailing the hardships of their faraway garrisons in Syria, and functionaries who are bored in their little provincial towns soliciting the influence of their superiors to procure transfers to the gayer capital. Such letters could be drawn from the archives of almost any department in any modern European government. The Roman empire was a highly bureaucratized state, and its sound social organism was able to spread Greco-Roman civiliza- tion and the language of Italy over large portions of the ancient world, accomplishing a most difficult task of social assimilation. Another bureaucracy was czarist Russia, which, despite a number of serious internal weaknesses, had great vitality and carried its expansion deep into the remote fastnesses of Asia. In spite of these examples, and not a few others that might readily occur to one, we should not forget a very important fact to which we have already alluded: namely, that history shows no instance of a great society in which all human activities have been completely bureaucratized. This, perhaps, is one of the many indications of the great complexity of social laws, for a type of political organization may produce good results when applied up to a certain point, but become impracticable and harmful 1 Texts and translations by Lenormant and Maspero. 86 FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS [CHAP. Ill when it is generalized and systematized. Justice is quite gener- ally bureaucratized, and so is public administration. Napoleon I, great bureaucratizer that he was, succeeded in bureaucratizing education and even the Catholic priesthood. We often see bureaucracies building roads, canals, railways and all sorts of public works that facilitate the production of wealth. But production itself we never see entirely bureaucratized. It would seem as though that very important branch of social activity, like so many other branches, lends itself ill to bureaucratic regulation, individual profit being a far more effective spur to the classes engaged in production than any government salary could be. -What is more, we have fairly strong evidence that the extension of bureaucratic control to the production and distribution of wealth as a whole would be fatal. We are not thinking here of the economic evils of protectionism, of governmental control of banking and finance, of the overdevelopment of public works. We are merely pointing to a well-established fact. In a bureau- cratic system both the manager of economic production and the individual worker are protected against arbitrary confiscations on the part of the strong and powerful, and all private warfare is sternly suppressed. Human life and property are therefore relatively secure. Under a bureaucratic regime, the producer pays over a fixed quota to the social organization and secures tranquil enjoyment of the rest of his product. This permits an accretion of wealth, public and private, that is unknown to bar- barous or primitively organized countries. But the amount of wealth that is absorbed and consumed by the class that fulfills other than economic functions may become too great, either because the demands of the military class, and of other bureau- crats, are excessive, or because the bureaucracy tries to perform too many services, or because of wars and the debts thai result from wars. Under these circumstances the taxes that are levied upon the wealth-producing classes become so heavy that the profit that an individual can earn in the field of production is markedly reduced. In that event production itself inevitably falls off. As wealth declines, emigration and higher death rates thin out the poorer classes, and finally the exhaustion of the entire social body ensues. These phenomena* are observable whenever a bureaucratic state declines. We see them in the epoch that followed upon the maximum development of bureau- §0] COMTE'S CLASSIFICATION 87 cracy in ancient Egypt, and more strikingly still during the decay of the Roman Empire. At the end of the long reign of Ramses II, with which the decline of the third Egyptian civilization begins, taxes had become intolerable, as is attested by numbers of private documents that have been deciphered by Maspero, Lenormant and others. We know that the real reason for the decline of the Roman Empire was a f alling-off in population and wealth, which in turn must have been caused in the main by the burden of taxes and the unthinking greed with which they were collected.1 In France, too, population and wealth dwindled at the end of the long reign of the Great King. They were put into good condition again under the administration of the peace- loving Cardinal de Fleury. 9. It would take us too far afield to respond seriatim to all the theories and doctrines that diverge from our point of view concerning the classification of governmental types in human societies. Among such doctrines, however, two are so important, in view of the vogue that they are having today, that we can hardly ignore them. We allude to the closely related theories of Comte and Spencer. Large numbers of writers on the social and political sciences make the concepts of those famous sociolo- gists the cornerstones of their reasonings and their systems. Comte, as is well known, stressed three stages in the evolution of human intelligence, the theological, the metaphysical and the positive, with three different types of social organization cor- responding to them, the military, the feudal and the industrial. Little fault need be found with this classification of the intel- lectual processes of man in general. Man may, in fact, explain to himself all phenomena in the organic and inorganic universe, even social phenomena, by attributing them to supernatural beings, to the intervention of God or of gods or of spirits bene- ficent or maleficent, whom he takes to be the authors of victory and defeat, of abundance and famine, of good health and pes- tilence; and if one assumes that there was a stage in history in which man reasoned exclusively in this fashion, the stage may well be called theological. Man may also explain the same phenomena by ascribing them to prime, or first, causes which are products of his imagination or of a superficial or fanciful observa- 1 Marquardt, Organisation financiere chez let Ro mains. 88 FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS [CHAP. Ill tion of facts, as when he believed that the destinies of individuals and nations depended upon the motions and conjunctions of the planets, or that the health of the human body depended upon combinations of humors, or that the wealth of nations corre- sponded to the quantities of precious metals that they possessed. In this case man may well be said to be in a metaphysical, or aprioristic stage. Finally, man can give up trying to discover the prime causes of phenomena and try instead, with rigorous methods of observation, to formulate the natural laws with which phenomena conform and so enable himself to take all possible advantage of them. In this frame of mind man can be said to be in a scientific or positive stage. Objections to Comte's system begin when he sets out to ascribe the three processes mentioned to definite historical periods and then to classify human societies by assigning them to one or another of the periods so obtained. All three intellectual processes go on in all human societies, from the maturest down to those which are still, so to speak, in the savage state. Ancient Greece gave us Hippocrates and Aristotle, and Rome Lucretius. Modern European civilization has given us physics, chemistry and political economy. It has invented the telescope and the microscope. It has tamed electricity and discovered the bacteria that cause epidemics and diseases. Yet we cannot help recogniz- ing that in Athens as in ancient Rome,Jn Paris as in Berlin, in London as in New York, the majority of individuals were and are in the full midst of the theological stage, or at best in the metaphysical stage. Just as there was no time in classical antiquity when soothsayers and oracles were not consulted, or when sacrifices were not offered and omens believed, so revealed religions continue to play important roles in the lives of our contemporaries, and wherever religion weakens we witness growths of spiritualistic superstitions or of the absurd meta- physics of social democracy. On the other hand the savage who sees a fetish in a plant or a stone, or who believes that his tribe's medicine man produces rain and makes the lightning, could not live in this world if he did not possess a certain amount of soundly positive information. When he studies the habits of the animals he hunts, when he learns to identify their tracks and takes account of the direction of the wind in order to surprise and capture them, he is utilizing observations that have been accumu- §9] COEXISTENCE OF STAGES 89 lated and systematized by himself and his fathers, and is acting therefore in accord with the dictates of sound science.1 But that is not all. • Comte's three intellectual processes go on simultaneously — to use his curious language, his three periods coexist — not only in one historical epoch and in one people, but also in one individual. We may say, with examples by the hundreds before our eyes, that this is the general rule and that the contrary is the exception. What Italian, in fact, has not known some God-fearing ship's captain who in religion believes in the miracles of Our Lady of Lottrdes or of the Madonna of Pompeii, who in politics or in economics believes in universal suffrage or in the class struggle, but who, when it comes to running his ship, handles his tiller according to the compass and trims his sails according to the direction of the wind? All, or virtually all, physicians down to two centuries ago believed in religion and so did not deny the efficacy of prayer and votive offerings in the treatment of the sick. As regards the function- ing of the different organs in the human body and the virtues of certain simples, they held various metaphysical beliefs, derived in large part from Galen or from Arab doctors. But at the same time they were not without a certain fund of scientific information that went back to Hippocrates and which, slowly enriched by the experience of many centuries, permitted rational treatments in some few cases. So "prayers for victory and Te Deums of thanksgiving were offered in Europe to the Most High long after Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne and Montecuccoli had begun to fight wars on scientific principles. To mention one other case: When Xenophon believed that a dream was a warning from the gods he was in a full theological period. As to the shape of the earth and the composition of matter he had ideas that the geogra- phers and chemists of our day would characterize as metaphysical. But, in leading the famous retreat of the Ten Thousand, he found it necessary to protect his main column, which was marching with the baggage train, from continuous raids by the Persian cavalry. He flanked it with two lines of light-armed troops — so guiding himself by principles which, given the arma- 1 This objection to Comte's theory was seen by Comte himself, for he wrote: "This ephemeral coexistence of the three intellectual stages today is the only plausible explanation for the resistance that outdated thinkers are still offering to my law." Sy*t$met vol. Ill, p. 41. 90 FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS [CHAP. Ill ments then in use, a modern tactician would judge thoroughly scientific and positive. In the Cyropaedia Xenophon is primarily theological and metaphysical. He turns positive again in his treatise on the art of horseback riding. On this topic he draws his precepts, as any modern writer would, from study of the nature of the horse. 10. The truth is that, in this as in so many other cases, over- simplification is not well suited to the sciences that deal with the psychology of man. Man is an exceedingly complex animal, full of contradictions. He is not always considerate enough to be logical and consistent and so, even when he believes and hopes that God is going to interfere in his behalf, he is careful to keep his powder dry — careful to take advantage, in other words, both of his own and of other people's intelligence and experience. The one really valid argument that can be adduced in favor of Comte's classification is that although the three intellectual stages coexist in all human societies and can be detected in the majority of individuals who compose those societies, they may, according to the case, be very unequally distributed. A people may have an equipment of scientific knowledge that is unques- tionably superior to that of another people, and in the various periods of its history it may progress or decline greatly in respect of scientific knowledge; and it is just as certain that metaphysical doctrines and supernatural beliefs generally have a stronger hold on scientifically backward nations and individuals and exert a greater influence on them. But subjected to those limitations Comte's theory comes down to something like the rather com- monplace doctrine that the farther a society progresses in scientific thinking, the less room it has left for aprioristic or metaphysical thinking, and the less influence the supernatural has upon it. "Natio est omnium Gallorum admodum dedita religionibus (the whole race of Gauls is extraordinarily devoted to religious rites)," wrote Caesar — a judgment that an individual belonging to a more civilized people always makes of a less civilized people.1 It is a curious fact that if believers in revealed religions have a certain amount of scientific training they are careful not to attribute everything that happens in this world to the con- 1 De beUo Gallico, VI, Id. §10] COMTE'S CLASSIFICATION 91 tinuous interference of supernatural beings, as cruder peoples and more ignorant individuals usually do. But the ideas of the father of modern sociology seem to go even wider of the mark in the matter of the parallel that he sets up between his three intellectual stages and his three types of political organization, the military, the feudal and the industrial, the first corresponding to the infancy, the second to the adoles- cence, the third to the maturity of human societies. The military function, in other words the organization of an armed force for the defense of a people at home and abroad (and, for that matter, for offense too, according as human interests, prejudices and passions chance to determine) has so far been a necessity in all human societies. The greater or lesser predominance of the military element in political life depends partly upon factors which we have already examined — on whether the military element is a more or less indispensable and comprehensive political force, and whether it is more or less balanced by other political forces — and partly on other factors which we shall not fail to consider in due course. For the time being we see no necessity for the indissoluble union that Comte insists on establishing between the predominance of militarism in political life and the prevalence of the theological period in the intellectual and moral worlds. We can even go on and say that we do not consider it in any way proved that the type of organization that Comte calls military can prevail only in societies that are in the first stage of their development, or, to use the language of the modern positivists, in a state of infancy. Hellenic society, after Alexander the Great, was evidently organized according to a pattern that any sociologist would define as military. After the Macedonian conquest the repub- lican leagues of Greece proper had only a very limited political importance. Down to the Roman conquest they were always in the position of clients or vassals to the great Hellenized kingdoms of Egypt, Syria and, particularly, Macedonia, which were real military absolutisms based on the support of armies. Yet those were the days when Greek society was in anything but a state of infancy, or a theological period. The philo- sophical schools that represent the greatest effort of Hellenic thought in the direction of positive science had been formed shortly before and were flourishing at that time. The same thing 92 FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS [CHAP. Ill may be observed in Roman society when, after Caesar, an imperial absolutism resting on the praetorian guards and the legions came to be established. When religious beliefs are widespread and a people has ardent faith in them we inevitably get a political predominance of the priestly classes. Now those classes and the military classes are not always one and the same, nor do they always have the same sentiments and interests. The union of throne and altar that took place in Europe early in the nineteenth century, after the Holy Alliance, was due to the peculiar circumstance that both throne and altar were directly threatened by the same rationalistic and revolutionary currents. But far from consti- tuting a general rule which might be taken as a universal law, that case is to be regarded rather as one of the many transitory phenomena that develop in history. There is no lack of exam- ples to the contrary — the case of India, for instance, where, at one time, the Brahman caste found itself in conflict with the warrior caste. In Europe there is the celebrated struggle between papacy and empire. Going on, we can find no justification in fact whatever for that portion of Comte's doctrine which correlates the predomi- nance of the feudal system in political organization with the predominance of metaphysics in human thought. In Comte's system, medieval monotheism and medieval ontology represent a transition between polytheism — in other words a full-fledged theological period — and modern science, just as feudalism, which Comte regards as a defensive type of militarism, is a bridge between the military and industrial periods. "In fact," he says, "monotheism fits in with defense as well as polytheism fits in with conquest. The feudal lords formed just as complete a transition between military commanders and industrial leaders as ontology formed between theology and science."1 Now to hold that monotheism is best adapted to defense, just as poly- theism is best adapted to conquest, is to take no account what- ever of large portions of the world's history — the history of the Mussulman world, for example. We have already seen (chap. Ill, §6) that what is commonly called feudal organization is a relatively simple political type that is often encountered in the early stages of great human 1 Systime, vol. Ill, p. 66, §10] FEUDALISM AND METAPHYSICS 98 societies and appears again as great bureaucratic states degener- ate. Political progress and scientific progress do not always go hand in hand, as is shown by the history of Italy in the Renais- sance. We may nevertheless grant, with reservations, that periods of general ignorance and intellectual prostration cor- respond on the whole to primitive stages in political life or to periods of political decadence and dissolution. But what we cannot see is why such periods should be characterized by the prevalence of metaphysical rather than theological thinking — any more than we can see that there can necessarily be no scientific activity during the flowering of a feudal organization. Confucius lived in a period when China was feudally organized, and he certainly was no metaphysician. On the other hand the trivium and the quadrivium are unknown to the Afghans and Abyssinians of our day — as well, for that matter, as anything more than the very elementary forms of culture* Comte bases his argument largely upon the example of medie- val Europe, and that period undoubtedly had its great meta- physicians, as did classical antiquity. But to think of medieval thought as a sort of bridge between ancient theology and modern scientific thought is a mistake, just as it is a mistake to imagine that feudalism was an organically intermediary political form between the ancient hieratic empires and the modern state. One has only to read a medieval writer — a writer, preferably, who is somewhat posterior to the fall of the western Empire and not too close to the Renaissance — to perceive at once how much more profoundly, how much more basically theological, medie- val thinking was than the thinking of antiquity. Medieval writers and the people about them are immensely more remote, immensely more different, from us, than the contemporaries of Aristotle or Cicero ever were. And the feudal order developed and flourished in the very centuries when continuous fear of famine and pestilence, and frequent apparitions of celestial and infernal beings tormented and utterly moronized the human mind; when terror of the devil was a permanent mental state in wretched souls in whom reason had languished for want of any cultural sustenance, and to whom the marvelous and the super- natural were elements as familiar as the air they breathed. One of the most characteristic writers of the period was the monk Raoul Glaber (Radulfus) who wrote a chronicle that comes 94 FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS [CHAP. Ill down to almost the middle of the eleventh century.1 Accord- ing to that monk the ancient classical writers, Vergil included, appeared to their readers in the guise of devils. Glaber's faith is steadfast but unwarmed by brotherly love, and in it fear of the Evil One probably plays a larger role than love and worship of the good, the merciful God of the Christians. In Glaber's eyes, Satan is at all times present and has a finger in everything that happens to human beings. There is perhaps no living person who has not seen him. In spite of an energetic piety and zealous compliance with the rule of his order, Glaber himself has seen the Devil three or four times. Not all writers of that era, to be sure, show the same derange- ment of the intellectual faculties, but no one is altogether immune to it. A Norman, Goffredo Malaterra, tells the story of Count Roger's conquest of Sicily from the Saracens with considerable discernment and balance of judgment, and at times he evinces a certain capacity for observing human events with an unpreju- diced eye. Yet in describing a battle that was fought at Cerami between the Count and the infidels, he ascribes the victory of the Christians to the direct interposition of St. George, who fought in person in the ranks of the Normans. In proof of the miracle Malaterra records that a white flag emblazoned with a cross was seen to appear on the lance of the Christian leader and flutter in the wind. The epidemic of demonolatry even spread to the Byzantine East. Georgius Cedrenus and the chronicler Constantine Por- phyrogenitus relate that the capture of Syracuse by the Saracens was known in the Peloponnesus long before any refugees arrived, because some demons were chatting together in a wood one night and were overheard recounting the details of that disaster. In justification of his theory Comte writes: "Noteworthy as characterizing the true spirit of Catholicism is the fact that it reduces theological life to the domain of the strictly necessary."2 But that is failing to take account of the fact that the super- natural is "reduced to the strictly necessary" not only in Catholi- cism but in all monotheistic religions when they are professed by civilized peoples who possess broad scientific cultures — the modern English for instance. No such reduction occurs when 1 fimile Gebhart, "L*£tat d'ame d'ua moine de Fan 1000," e, vol. Ill, p. 484. §11] SPENCER 95 monotheistic religions are professed by barbarous peoples of low cultural levels. In such cases the sway of the supernatural over the minds of men may be much greater than it is among polytheistic peoples of higher levels of civilization. 11. The third necessary correspondence that Cointe sets up, the relation between the industrial system and positive science, is also fallacious. We may dispense with proof of that because, in this third section of Comte's political positivism, his ideas have had no great resonance, being too divergent from the ideas that are now most in vogue among our contemporaries, and not offering sufficient leverage for justifying with a semblance of scientific method the passions and interests that have so far been most to the fore in our day. Comte regarded industrialism as a type of social organization that would be realized in a remote future when the managerial functions of society would be entrusted to a priesthood of positivistic scientists and to a patriciate of bankers and businessmen, to which, it would seem, the members of the lower classes were not to gain ready admit- tance. Foreseeing that this question might arise, Comte did not forget to write that "the priesthood will prevail upon the proletarians to scorn any temptation to leave their own class as contrary to the majesty of the people's function and fatal to the righteous aspirations of the masses, who have always been betrayed by deserters from their ranks."1 Another fundamental idea of Comte's is that the entire intellectual and political move- ment at the end of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth was a revolutionary movement that resulted in moral and political anarchy because the feudal monotheistic system had been destroyed and nobody had been able to find a substitute for it. In line with this idea Comte severely con- demned the parliamentary system as a manifestation of the anarchic period (in which we are still living) ; and the representa- tive function itself, whereby inferiors choose their superiors, Comte defined as a revolutionary function.2 It will be more to our purpose to dwell on the second theory mentioned (§9), that is to say, on the modification that Spencer, and a host of modern sociologists after him, made in Comte's * Ibid., vol. IV, p. 83. 8 IMd.t vol. IV, chap. 5, especially pp. 368, 382, 808-94. 96 FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS [CHAP. Ill doctrines. Spencer divided human societies into two types, the militant (i.e., military), based upon force, and the industrial, based upon contract and the free consent of the citizens. This dual classification is propounded more especially in Spencer's Principles of Sociology, but it is regularly assumed in most of his other writings, as well as in the works of his numerous followers. Any classification has to be based upon distinctive traits that are clear and definite, and Spencer, in fact, does not fail to serve warning at the outset that, although "during social evolution there has habitually been a mingling of the two types [the militant and the industrial], we shall find that, alike in theory and in fact, it is possible to trace with due clearness these opposite characters which distinguish them in their respective complete developments/'1 Spencer's fundamental criterion is that the militant society is based on status, on "regimenta- tion," "the members standing towards one another in successive grades of subordination,"2 and on the supervision, therefore, and the coercion, which the governors exercise over the governed. His industrial society is based upon contract, upon the free consent of its members, in exactly the same way as a literary society, or an industrial or commercial partnership, is based on the free consent of the associated members and could not exist without such consent. Now, for a first general objection, this classification is based upon eminently aprioristic assunfptions which do not stand the test of facts. Any political organization is both voluntary and coercive at one and the same time — voluntary because it arises from the very nature of man, as was long ago noted by Aristotle, and coercive because it is a necessary fact, the human being finding himself unable to live otherwise. It is natural, therefore, and at the same time indispensable, that where there are men there should automatically be a society, and that when there is a society there should also be a state — that is to say, a minority that rules and a majority that is ruled by the ruling minority. 1 Principles of Sociology* vol. II, chap. XVtl ("The Militant Type of Society"), §547, p. 568. "The Industrial Type of Society" is discussed in chap. XVIII. Chapter XIX, "Political Retrospect and Prospect," relates to the past and future of the two types. vol. II, chap. XVII, §553. §11] SPENCER AND ASSENT 97 It might be objected that, although the existence of a social organization is natural and necessary wherever human groups or multitudes form, there are states that receive the assent, or at least the tacit acquiescence, of the great majority of the individuals who belong to them, and states that do not attain that condition. We do not deny that things stand exactly that way, but still we do not see why the former should be called industrial states and the latter militant states, in the sense that Spencer attaches to the terms. The majority of a people consents to a given governmental system solely because tjie system is based upon religious or philosophical beliefs that are universally accepted by them. To use a language that we prefer, the amount of consent depends upon the extent to which, and the ardor with which, the class that is ruled believes in the political formula by which the ruling class justifies its rule. Now, in general, faith of that kind is certainly greater not in Spencer's industrial states but in states that Spencer classifies as militant, or which present all the characteristics that he attributes to militant states — states where an absolute and arbitrary government is based on divine right. In the monarchies of the Near East there are often con- spiracies against the persons of sovereigns, but down to a few years ago attempts to set up new forms of government were very rare. Among all the nations of modern Europe before the World War, Turkey and Russia were the ones where govern- mental systems were most in harmony with the political ideals of the great majority in their populations. Only small educated minorities were systematically opposed to the rule of the czar and the sultan. In all barbarous countries populations may be dissatisfied with their rulers, but ordinarily they neither conceive of better political systems nor desire any. We can hardly agree, either, with certain applications that Spencer makes of his categories to particular cases. Spencer seems to have thought of an industrial state as a sort of demo- cratic state, a state, at any rate, in which government is based on representation, or in which there is at least a tendency not to recognize any authority as legitimate unless it emanates from some public assembly. He says: "Such control as is required under the industrial type can be exercised only by an appointed agency for ascertaining and executing the average will; and a 98 FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS [CHAP. Ill representative agency is the one best fitted for doing this."1 He therefore classifies the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona with societies of the industrial type because, "sheltering in their walled villages and fighting only when invaded, they . . . united with their habitually industrial life a free form of government: . . . *the governor and his council were annually elected by the people/ "2 Now Spencer could not have been unaware how widely common the elective system was in the republics of ancient Greece, in Rome, and even among the ancient Germans, who chose their leaders by acclamation, raising them on high on their shields. Nevertheless, all those peoples, according to Spencer's own criteria, would be classified as militant peoples. On the other hand, we should hardly be able to call them industrial peoples, in Spencer's sense. The fact that a people participates in electoral assemblies does not mean that it directs its government or that the class that is governed chooses its governors. It means merely that when the electoral function operates under favorable social conditions it is a tool by which certain political forces are enabled to control and limit the activity of other political forces. 12. Spencer finds certain distinguishing characteristics in his militant and industrial types that seem to us exceedingly vague and indefinite. He writes that as militarism decreases and industrialism increases proportionately, a social organization in which the individual exists for the benefit of the state develops into another organization in which the state exists for the benefit of the individual.3 That is a subtle distinction. It reminds one of the debate as to whether the brain exists for the benefit of the rest of the body or the rest of the body for the benefit of the brain. Spencer elsewhere finds that the militant state is "positively regulative," in the sense that it requires the performance of certain acts, while the industrial state is "negatively regulative only,"4 since it confines itself to specifying acts that must not be performed, and he gives his blessing to states of the negatively 1 lUd.> §566, p. 508. * im.> vol. II, chap. XVIII, §513, p. 616. »/&«£., chap, XVIIL «JN&, §12] SPENCEE 99 regulative variety. As a matter of fact, no social organization has ever existed in which control is not simultaneously positive and negative. Furthermore, since human activity has its limits, multiplication of negative injunctions is almost as bad, as regards fettering individual initiative, as excessive regulation in a positive sense. Spencer relates to his two types of state traits that we would explain and classify otherwise. In ancient Peru, for instance, public officials superintended agriculture and distributed water (probably for purposes of regular irrigation or else in areas and at times of extreme drought). Spencer finds that trait char- acteristic of militant states. We should think of it simply as a phenomenon of over-bureaucratization. Then again, Spencer, quoting Brant6me, finds the practice of the private vendetta still common in France in the late Middle Ages, even among the clergy, and he regards the institution as a symptom of militancy. We, for our part, should expect to find such phenomena as the vendetta conspicuous in peoples among whom social authority is weak, or recently has been weak — peoples, in other words, who are in the period of crude and primitive organization which we defined as feudal, or who have recently emerged from it. Wherever the vendetta flourishes, and therefore among almost all barbarous peoples, or peoples whose social organization has greatly decayed, it is natural that personal courage should be a much esteemed quality. In fact, the same thing occurs in any society which, for one reason or another, has had to fight many wars of defense and offense. It is natural that bravery and bombast should be the attributes that confer prestige and influence in barbarous societies, the low level of culture not permitting aptitudes for science or for the production of wealth to develop and to win esteem. Spencer believes that militant societies are protectionist societies and vice versa. He finds in them a tendency to live on their own economic resources with the least possible resort to international exchange. In our opinion that tendency is, more than anything else, a consequence of crudeness and isolation in primitive peoples. In modern civilized nations it results from popular prejudices that are exploited in the interests of a few individuals, who are expert in the arts of serving their own advantage at the expense of the many. It is very probable 100 FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS [CHAP. Ill that the tribes which are so often mentioned by Spencer as typical of primitive industrial societies profited very little from exchange with other tribes; and in our day protectionist doctrines have, alas, no less influence in "industrial" North America than in "militant" Germany. It would be a mistake, according to Spencer, to identify industrial societies by the degree of economic development that they attain, or militant societies by the energy they develop and the success they achieve in war. Now superficial as such criteria might be, they would have the advantage of being very simple and easily applied. But Spencer himself directly or indirectly warns that they are to be rejected. With regard to the first, he notes that "industrialism must not be confounded with industriousness " and that "the social relations which characterize the industrial type may coexist with but very moderate productive activities."1 As regards the second, Spencer would allow one to assume that the Roman Republic was less militant than the Near Eastern empires which were subdued by Rome, and following the same reasoning, the English would be less advanced toward the industrial type than the Hindus whom they conquered in India. Despite these objections and still others that might be urged against Spencer's classification, it cannot be denied that with its aid he glimpsed a great truth — but as through a cloud, so to speak, of misunderstanding. If we follow not so much Spencer's criteria of classification as the mass of his incidental assertions, and especially the spirit that animates his work as a whole, we cannot fail to see that by a "militant state" he means a state in which juridical defense has made little progress and by an "indus- trial state" another type of society in which justice and social morality are much better safeguarded. The misunderstanding that kept Spencer from going farther than he went in the discovery of a great scientific principle lay in this: impressed by the fact that material violence has been, as it still is, one of the greatest obstacles to progress in juridical defense, he believed that war and the need of military organi- zation were the causes of all violence. But to view the problem in that light is to confuse the cause with one of its effects. It means taking war as the sole origin of the tendency in human 1 Ibid., §502, pp. 603-604. §12] VOLUNTEER ARMIES 101 nature to tyrannize over one's fellows, whereas war is just one of the many manifestations of that tendency. Now in the external relations between people and people, that tendency can be curbed only by the greater and greater prevalence of material interests rightly understood. The curb operates only among peoples that have attained high economic and scientific levels, because it is only under highly civilized conditions that war infallibly harms, though still in varying degrees, both victors and vanquished. In internal relations between individual members of one people the tendency in question can be to an extent neutralized, as we have seen, only by a multifarious inter- play of such political forces as are able to assert themselves in a society, and by the control they are able to exercise over one another reciprocally. How is it that among the various ruling cliques, among the various political forces, the section that represents material force, in other words the army, is not always upsetting, the juridical equilibrium in its own favor and forcing its will system- atically upon the state? Certainly the possibility that that may occur is a standing danger to which all societies are exposed. It is a danger especially to societies that are rapidly rejuvenating their political forces or hastily overhauling their political formu- las. We are, therefore, obliged to examine the relations that obtain between military organization and juridical defense in order to discover, if possible, the best methods for dealing with that danger. It is a most important subject, and we shall later go into it in some detail. For the present we might simply remark that the foregoing criticism of Spencer's conception of war and military power was made from a theoretical point of view. But neither can we approve of his doctrine in respect of a number of practical applications that he more or less directly suggests. Of the various forms of military organization Spencer shows a pre- dilection for forms in which the soldier, "volunteering on specified terms, acquires in so far the position of a free worker"; and he thinks that such an organization is best suited to a society "where the industrial type is much developed."1 That means, in other terms, that those elements in a society which have a* greater inclination toward the bearing of arms ought 1 Ibid., §562, p. 603. 102 FEUDAL AND BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEMS [CHAP. HI voluntarily to assume responsibility for military defense both at home and abroad, for a compensation which, in the military trade as in any other, would be fixed by market conditions. Now it seems to us — and so it seemed to Machiavelli and to many others after him — that, apart from special and exceptional circumstances, that is the system that yields the positively worst results among peoples of high cultural levels. It is the one that develops most readily in the military class the tendency to oppress other classes, while it deprives the latter of any chance of effective resistance and strips them of any protection. CHAPTER IV RULING CLASS AND SOCIAL TYPE 1. We have just seen thatM&very social type has a tendency to concentrate into a single political organism. We must now add that the political organism, in expanding, almost always aims at spreading its own social type, and often succeeds in doing s^. f We find this aspiration in remotest antiquity. It was satisfied in very early days by gross, violent and barbarous means, which were, however, effective. The Assyrians were accustomed to transplant conquered peoples. Torn by force from their native soils, these were scattered about among groups that were Assyrian in spirit and nationality, and in the end were absorbed by them)1 Assyrian colonists were often settled in their turn in conquered territories. The Incas of Peru were likewise given to trans- planting en masse the savage tribes they conquered, the more readily to tame them to Peruvian ways and assimilate them to the other subjects of the Son of the Sun. In the Middle Ages, after wiping out the Saxons in large part, Charlemagne trans- ferred numerous colonies of Franks to their lands, and the district thus settled afterward came to be called Franconia. Some cen- turies later the Teutonic Knights spread the German tongue and the Christian religion from the banks of the Elbe to the mouths of the Vistula and the Niemen by similar means — that is, by deci- mating the native populations and settling numerous German colonies on the conquered lands. The chief inspirer and executive of this policy of far-reaching colonization was the Grand Master Hermann von Salza. Similar methods were used on occasion by the Romans, but not as a regular policy. For example, they were never applied to the highly civiliaed populations of the East, and even in Gaul, Spain and Britain the empire assimilated the barbarians princi- pally by establishing the Latin language and Roman law and 1 As must have happened, in large part, to the flower of the Ten Tribes of Israel, which were transported beyond the Euphrates. 103 104 RULING CLASS AND SOCIAL TYPE [CHAP. IV spreading Greco-Latin literature and learning — in short, by extending the benefits of an admirably organized public admin- istration and a superior civilization.1 On the whole, religious propaganda and the offering of a higher level of culture are the most effective means of assimilating subject peoples. By those means Mexico, Peru and many other countries in South America took the imprint of Spanish and Portuguese civilization in the course of a few centuries, though the populations of those countries were to remain largely non- Iberian in blood. 2. (But oftentimes a differing social type will survive, for some centuries at least, in spite of the fact that the hegemony or dominion of a conquering people weighs heavily upon the elements that belong to it. In the ancient Persian empire the fire-worship- ing Medo-Persians were in the ascendant. Their sovereign was King of Kings and commanded all other sovereigns within his vast empire. But the subject populations, ruled by satraps or even by their old native dynasties, kept their beliefs, habits and customs intact. They did not forsake their own social type in favor of the Medo-Persian type} In the case of certain tribes, which lived in the very middle of the empire but were protected by their warlike habits and by the natural strength of their positions, subjection was more apparent than real. The fact appears very clearly from Xenophon's account of the retreat of the Ten Thousand — for instance, the stories of Syennesis, king of Cilicia, and of the march through the lands of the Karduchians, the Mosynaecians and other peoples along the south shore of the Black Sea. In spite of this the court of Susa was able to rule a huge straggling empire for almost two centuries, and from the end of the reign of Darius, son of Hystaspes, down to the invasion of Alexander the Great there were no very troublesome rebellions, except possibly in Egypt. One should note, however, that the empire crumbled at the first fairly serious shock. There was no real cohesion between the subject and the dominant peoples, nor were their social forces unified and cemented by sound administra- tive and military systems. The neo-Persian empire of the Sassanids was much smaller than the old, but the peoples within it were held together in common brotherhood by the teachings 1 Mommsen, The Provinces of the Roman Empire. {*] MIXTURES OF SOCIAL TYPES 105 of the Avesta. It rode out more violent storms than the old Persian empire had suffered, and more numerous ones. It lasted for more than four centuries. We find differing social types existing side by side even in modern states. Turkish cities used to have their Greek, Arme- nian and Jewish quarters, and in the Balkan country Osmanli villages often adjoined Greek and Bulgarian villages. In India, Brahmans, Mohammedans, Parsees and Europeans live side by side.\^00ne peculiar thing about the Orient, indeed, is that it seems to be a sort of museum for collecting and preserving the loose ends and tags of social types that are elsewhere absorbed and vanish. This comes about either because the governments of the Orient possess fewer social forces, and therefore less power of assimilation, than European states, or else because there is more real tolerance in the East than there is among us. One need only recall how completely the many prosperous Moham- medan colonies in Sicily and Spain vanished within a century or so after losing their political dominion. More recently, in the Balkan Peninsula, the moment a country escaped from the sultan's rule, its Mohammedan population dwindled rapidly and sometimes disappeared altogether. ^^i^When a state is made up of a mixture of social types, the ruling class should be recruited almost entirely from the dominant type; and if that rule is not observed, because the dominant type is too weak either in numbers or in moral and intellectual energies, then the country may be looked upon as a sick country that stands on the brink of serious political upheavals, y/ This was the case in the Turkey of the surfan during the century just past. On coming into intimate contact, and into conflicts of interests, with European civilization, Turkey had to use large numbers of Greeks, Armenians and even Europeans in her ruling class. Now, as has been soundly observed, that policy provided her with some of the resources of a superior civilization; but it deprived the Turkish ruling class of much of its savage vigor, and in fact did not save the sultan from losing considerable portions of his territory. (In India, the British conquerors have so far been vastly superior to the Hindus in civilization, but being few in number, they are accepting the assistance of natives in public administration, in the courts and in the army. If the share assigned to these native elements in public functions 106 RULING CLASS AND SOCIAL TYPE [CHAP. IV becomes so large as to make it possible to dispense with Euro- peans, it is doubtful whether European rule can very long endure in that country) I When a number of differing social types are mixed together in o&e state, a directing, if not strictly a ruling, class almost inevi- tably develops within the types that are in subjection. Some- times this class is the first to be absorbed by the ruling type. The Gallic aristocracy, for instance, became rapidly Romanized. It acquired the classical and juridical culture of the Latins within a few generations and was soon clamoring for Roman citizenship, which was readily granted. So, after the battle of Kossovo, the begs of Bosnia went over to Islamism in order to save theif possessions and avoid dropping to the level of the downtrodden raias. But the aristocracies in question in both these cases had no great culture and, more important still, they were not heirs to any particular memories of an ancient and glorious national past. More often, traditions of an ancient greatness, a sense of group superiority, along with an instinctive repugnance to the intruding social type, are strong enough to overcome personal interests, and then the upper strata in the vanquished classes become the most unassimilable element. Members of the noble Fanariot families in Constantinople have rarely been known to accept conversion to Islamism. The Copts of today follow pro- fessions as scribes and public clerks and seem to descend in a direct line from the lettered class which made up the aristocracy in ancient Egypt. They remain Christian, though the mass of peasants, or fellahin, have been Mohammedans for centuries. The Ghebers of today, who still maintain fire worship, seem to descend from the old Persian aristocracy. In India the highest castes have supplied fewest converts to Islamism. Now we come to a social phenomenon that is less apparent to the eye but is perhaps more important. The case where several social types coexist in guises more or less masked within a single political organism may be noted In countries that present all the appearances of strong social unity. This situation arises whenever the political formula, on which the ruling class in a given society bases its dominion, is not accessible to the lower classes, or when the complex of beliefs and moral and philosophical principles that underlie the formula have not sunk deeply enough §3] SUBTYPE AND POLITICAL FORMULAS 107 into the consciousness of the more populous and less well educated strata of society. The same thing occurs when there is any con- siderable difference between the customs, culture and habits of the ruling class and those of the governed classes,,^ A few examples will make this clearer. In Rome and ancient Greece the slave was kept wholly outside the "city," considered as a political body, a moral community. He did not share in the national education. He was not co-interested either materi- ally or spiritually in the welfare of the state. The Indian pariah is regarded as outside every caste. He is not allowed even to have the same gods as his oppressors. Isolated completely from the rest of the population, he represents a class of individuals that is spiritually alien to the social type within which it lives. The Hebrews, on the other hand, and other peoples of the ancient Orient, regarded the laborer and the slave, once they had been, so to say, nationalized, as sharers in the sentiments of the society to which they belonged. The idea of carefully cultivating the sentiments, beliefs and customs of the lower classes by suitable catechization was one of the great merits of Christianity and Islamism. These religions have been more or less effectively imitated in that respect by modern European nations. As a rule it is the very ancient political formulas, complexes of beliefs and sentiments which have the sanction of the ages, that succeed in making their way into the lowest strata of human societies. On the other hand^^when rapid flows of ideas agitate the higher classes, or the more active intellectual centers, which are generally located in large cities, the lower classes and the outlying districts of a state are likely to be left behind, and differing social types tend to form inside the society. p*/ Greater or lesser spiritual unity among all social classes explains the strength or weakness that political organisms exhibit at certain moments. However grievously the governing class in Turkey may have sinned on the side of corruption, inefficiency and negligence — army, navy, and finance were completely dis- organized in the domains of the Sublime Porte — nevertheless, at certain definite moments, when the Crescent seemed to be in danger, the Turkish people displayed a fierce energy that gave pause to Europe's strongest military states. The reason was that the poor nizam, ragged and barefoot, who fearlessly went to his death in a trench, the redif who left his hut at the sultan's 108 RULING CLASS AND SOCIAL TYPE [CHAP. IV summons, really felt the political formula which they were called upon to serve and stood ready to give their last para and even their lives to support it. The Turkish peasants in Rumelia and Anatolia believed sincerely and deeply in Islam, in the Prophet, in the sultan as the Prophet's vicar, and the beliefs for which they were asked to make the utmost sacrifices were the beliefs that ordinarily filled their lives and made up their moral and intellectual worlds. This analysis bears on events prior to 1895, yet we cannot see that they require any great modification in the light of the events of 1912-1913, or the events connected with the World War or the rise of Kemal Atatiirk. The Turkish disasters in the Balkan and World Wars were due to the disorganization and incapacity of the Turkish ruling class, intensified by thirty years of Hamidian despotism and by four years of rule by the Young Turks. But in the World War, Kut-el-Amara showed that the Turkish soldier could fight and die for the faith that was in him; and we say nothing of the tremendous Turkish uprising of 19£0 that over- threw the Treaty of Sevres, swept the Greeks from Asia Minor and set up the present Angora regime. In spite of the talents of men like Kutuzov, Barclay de Tolly, Benningsen, Doktorov and Bagration, no one can deny that the average training and capacity of the Russian generals with whom Napoleon had to deal was decidely inferior to Austrian of Prussian standards. The famous Suvarov knew his Russian soldier well and had a way of leading him to the most daring enterprise. But Suvarov was after all a courageous leader rather than an able one. The Russian soldier was the adversary that Napoleon most feared. In the famous Moscow campaign the failure of the invading army was caused not so much by cold, hunger or desertion as by the hatred that gathered about the French and harried them from Vitebsk on — in other words, from the time they entered strictly Russian territory. It was this hatred that inspired the sinister fury of the Russians to the point of destroying all provisions along the path of the enemy and burning all tow*ns and villages between Smolensk and Moscow. It gave Rostopchin the courage to burn Moscow itself. For the Russian muzhik God, the czar, Holy Russia, formed an integral unit in the beliefs and sentiments that he had begun to absorb on §3] UNITY AND SOCIAL CLASSES 109 the day of his birth and which he had learned by home tradition to revere. This same moral unity holds the secret of other successful and quasi-miraculous cases of resistance, just as lack of it yields the secret of certain shameful demonstrations of weakness. The Vendee was strong in the wars of the Revolution because nobles, priests and peasants had the same beliefs, the same desires, the same passions. Spain was strong in 1808 because the Spanish grandee and the lowliest Spanish shepherd were alike filled with hatred for the French invader (whom they regarded as a godless unbeliever), with loyalty to their sovereign, with pride in being a self-respecting, independent nation. This unanimity of senti- ment, in spite of the incapacity of the Spanish generals and the utter worthlessness of the Spanish regular armies, accounts for the miracles of Saragossa and Tarragona and for the final victory that crowned the Spanish wars for independence. Never would the most ragged peasant consent, under whatever threat, to show the roads to the French. The regular Spanish army was com- posed largely of raw recruits and it had no experienced officers. Its ineffectual ness is attested not only by French writers but by letters of the Duke of Wellington and other English officers.1 On the other hand, Spain showed the utmost weakness during the French Legitimist invasion of 18££. At that time only a small portion of the upper classes had any comprehension of, or devotion to, the principle of constitutional monarchy which was at issue. That principle was incomprehensible to the majority ot4he upper classes and to the vast bulk of the nation. The kingdom of Naples showed weakness in the years 1798 and 1799 in spite of many acts of desperate valor on the part of individuals or groups. The mass of the population, to be sure, and a majority of the middle and upper classes hated the French Jacobins and revolutionary ideas in general. They were fanati- cally loyal to the legitimate monarchy and still more so to the Catholic faith. However, a small minority in the upper classes, scant in number but strong in intelligence, enthusiasm and daring, despised the sentiments of their fellow countrymen and had warm sympathies for the French gospel of freedom. Trea- lSee the histories of Thiers (book XLVI, vol. XV) and Toreno, and the M$moire9 militoirea of O^nel Vigo de Boussillon. 110 RULING CLASS AND SOCIAL TYPE [CHAP. IV son, therefore and, more than treason, the unending suspicion of treason, paralyzed all resistance, disorganized the regular army, which was a poor army to begin with, and diminished the effec- tiveness of a spontaneous popular resistance which, save for treasonable understandings, real or imagined, with the invaders, might have triumphed. As is well known, Championnet's army had halted before Capua but was invited and encouraged by the Neapolitan republicans to attack Naples. This attack would not have been made, and in any case would probably have failed, had it not been for the treasonable surrender of Castel Sant' Elmo and a rear attack on the defenders of the Capuan gate — both acts by Neapolitan republicans. Those acts explain the terrible reprisals, not only royal but popular, that followed the collapse of the ephemeral Parthenopean Republic, 4. So far we have been thinking largely of differences in religious and political beliefs between the various social strata; but disparities in intellectual cultivation and differences in lan- guage, habits and family customs also have their importance. We are accustomed to taking for granted the distinctions that exist between the class that has received a polished literary and scientific education and the classes that have received none at all or have stopped at the first rudiments — between the "social set" that has the habits and manners of good breeding and the populous throngs that lack good breeding. We readily assume, therefore, that the same distinctions exist, equally sharp and equally thoroughgoing, in all human societies and have always existed in our own countries. That is not at all the case. In the Mohammedan East no such distinctions appear, or if they do, they are infinitely less conspicuous than they are among us.1 In Russia the profound difference between the class called the "intelligentsia" and the muzhiks, or between those same "intel- lectuals " and the long-bearded merchants that were so frequently to be seen in the days of the czar, could not have existed in the age of Peter the Great, when there were no universities — the boyars of that day were almost as crude and unlettered as the peasants. Even in western Europe hardly more than two cen- 1 This fact, which is attested by Renan and other writers, is obvious to anyone who has had any experience at all with Mohammedan societies and Mohammedan culture. §4] CLASS DISTINCTIONS 111 turies ago, disparities among the various social classes in intel- lectual cultivation and in public and private manners were far less striking than they are today. Such disparities have grown more and more marked, but the trend dates from not earlier than the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ; In France, for example, Voltaire declares,1 that when Louis XIV actually assumed the throne, in 1660, the French nobility were rich in natural intelli- gence but ignorant and crude in manners. In England, toward the end of the eighteenth century, Cobbett pointed to the differ- ence between the farmers of the good old days — that is, when he was a boy — and those of the time when he was writing. Formerly, he says, farmers had lodged and fed all their peasants, sat with them at their great oaken boards and, after a prayer from the curate, drunk the same beer. Then customs changed. The wage earner drew his pay and went to eat his meal alone in some tavern. The farmer became a "gentleman," using glass bottles, ebony-handled forks, ivory-handled knives and porcelain dishes. His sons would, if necessary, be clerks, copyists, shop- boys, but in no case farmers. A similar change has taken place during the last hundred and fifty years among the landlords, great and small, of Sicily and the district of Naples. Their great-grandfathers may have been rich but in any case they were peasants. Now, they may be poor but in any case they are gentlemen — they are galantuomini (the term galantuomo in the local dialects means a person of quality, of polite up-bringing). Strange as it may seem at first glance, the trend here in question coincides with the birth and growth of that current of ideas and sentiments which generally goes by the name of democracy, and it constitutes one of the more curious contrasts between the democratic theories that are now so generally in vogue and their practical application. Disparities in upbringing among the various social classes are likely to become more marked in bureaucratized societies. In societies of feudal type the individual members of the ruling class are generally sprinkled about among their followers. They live in constant contact with them and have to be, in a sense, their natural leaders. It may seem surprising that in the Middle Ages, when the baron stood alone in the midst of his vassals and dealt with them harshly, they did not take advantage of their 1 Sttcle de Louis XIV. 118 RULING CLASS AND SOCIAL TYPE [CHAP. IV numerical superiority to break free. But actually that could not always have been an easy matter. Superior as they may have been in energy and in familiarity with arms to the rest of the subject elements, the vassals were more or less bound to the lot of their lords. But, independently of that, another consider- ation of very great importance must not be overlooked. The baron knew his vassals personally. He thought and felt as they did. He had the same superstitions, the same habits, the same language. He was their master, harsh sometimes and arbitrary. For all of that, he was a man whom they understood perfectly, in whose conversation they could share, at whose table, be it in a humbler station, they often sat, and with whom they sometimes got drunk. It requires utter ignorance of the psychology of the lower classes not to see at once how many things this real familiar- ity, based on an identical education, or lack of education if one prefer, enables an inferior to endure and forgive. It may be objected that as a rule the poor dislike serving the newly rich. That is true, but other elements have to be taken into account in this regard. In the first place the man of recent wealth is likely to be envied. Then again he is often harder and greedier than the man who has been accustomed to ease from birth. Finally, instead of maintaining a community of habits and sentiments with the class from which he has sprung, the upstart almost always does his best to adopt the ways and manners of the higher class. His chief ambition and concern, usually, is to make people forget his origins. In the Middle Ages the first peasant revolts broke out not when feudalism was harshest but when the nobles had learned to associate with one another, when the courts of love — a conscious quest of good manners (the gai saber) — had begun to give them polish and alienate them from the rustic ways of the lonely castle. Mickiewicz makes an important observation in this connection. He finds that the Polish nobles were popular with the peasants as long as they lived in their midst. The peasants would suffer the very bread to be snatched from their mouths that their lord might buy horses and costly weapons for hunting and for sabering Turks and Russians. Then French education gained a foothold among the Polish nobles. They learned how to give balls after the manner of Versailles and began spending their time in learning to dance the minuet. From that day on peasantry and nobility §4] CLASS DISTINCTIONS 113 became two peoples apart, and the peasants did not support the nobles with any great effectiveness in the wars they fought with foreigners late in the eighteenth century.1 So it was with the Celtic aristocracy in Ireland. According to Macaulay and other historians, the ancient nobility of the "OV and the "He's" was very popular with the peasants, whose labors supplied the head of the clan with such luxury as his coarse and abundant table could boast and whose daughters were sometimes levied for his rustic harem. But such nobles were looked upon virtually as members of the family. They were one with the peasants, it was thought, in blood. They certainly were one with them in habits and ideas. On the other hand, the English landlord, who supplanted the Irish, was probably a gentler sort of person, and he was beyond any doubt more law- abiding and more scrupulous in his demands. All the same he was bitterly hated. He was a stranger in language, religion and habits. He lived far away, and even when he resided on his properties he had by tradition acquired the habit of keeping to himself, having no contacts whatever with his dependents except such as were strictly necessary to the relation of master and servant. A follower of Gumplowicz might observe that in the case of Ireland the hatred that arose between landowners and peasants could be due to differences in race — to the Celt's finding himself face to face with the Saxon, to use one of O'ConnelPs favorite expressions. But, the fact is, the first Anglo-Norman families that settled in Ireland during the Middle Ages, for example the Talbots or Fitzgeralds, lived long in that country, ended by adopting Celtic ways, and fought in the ranks of the Irish against the English in the various insurrections. But suppose we consider, rather, what happened in czarist Russia. There, certainly, there were no important racial differ- ences between nobles and peasants, but there were great differ- ences in social type and especially in manners. The cultured class, poor or rich as it may have been, had adopted European education. The rest of the population clung, as it still clings, to Asiatic ideas and customs. Tchernishevski, a Russian revolu- tionary of the 90*s, says, referring to the possibility of a peasant revolt: 1 Histoire populaire de Pologne, 114 RULING CLASS AND SOCIAL TYPE [CHAP. IV Ignorant, full of gross prejudices, and blindly hating all who have forsaken primitive Russian ways [antipathy springing from differences in social type], the people would make no distinction between individuals who dressed in German styles [who had abandoned the traditional Rus- sian costume and were dressing in western European fashion]. It would treat them all alike, deferring neither to science, nor to poetry, nor to art. It would demolish our whole civilization.1 5. The fact is that the human being has sentiments which, taken individually, may be imponderable, hard to analyze and harder still to define, but which in sum are very powerful and may con- tribute to bringing on the most important social phenomena. The person who wrote that the human being lets himself be guided by self-interest alone stated a general maxim that is almost entirely devoid of practical value, since it can tell us nothing save at the cost of exceedingly minute analyses and distinctions. Anyone who thinks that interest has to be something that can be expressed materially in terms of money and measured in pounds and pence is a person of too little heart and too little head to understand the people about him. Interest is suited in each individual to the individual's own tastes, and each individual interprets his interest in his own individual way. For many people, to satisfy their pride, their sense of personal dignity, their vanities great and small, to humor their personal caprices and rancors, is worth far more than pleasures that are purely material. We must not forget such things, especially when we set out to analyze the relations between rich and poor, between superiors and inferiors, or, in short, between different social classes. When the elementary needs of life are to an extent satisfied, what mostly contributes to creating and maintaining friction and ill feeling between the various social classes is not so much differences in the enjoyment of material pleasures as membership in two different environments. For a part of the lower classes, at least, more bitter by far than any physical privation is the existence of a higher world from which they are excluded. No law, no hereditary privilege, forbids them to enter that world. It is roped off from them by a silken thread of the subtlest fiber — a difference in education, in manners, in social habits. Only with difficulty is that thread ever broken. 1 Leroy-Beaulieu, L* Empire des twrs et lea Russes, vol. II, pp. 524 f . §5] CLASS AND SOCIAL TYPE 115 Over and over again since very ancient times it has been written that in every city and in every state there are two hostile popula- tions that stand ever on the alert to harm each other — the rich and the poor. Now that dictum does not appear to us to possess an unqualified, much less a universal, applicability. What we have just said may serve to explain the many exceptions and reservations that must accompany its acceptance. As a rule, the poor follow the lead of the rich, or rather the classes that are ruled follow the lead of the ruling classes, whenever they are imbued with the same opinions and beliefs and have been trained to intellectual and moral backgrounds that are not too dissimilar. The plebs, moreover, is a loyal associate of the upper classes in wars against foreigners, when the enemy belongs to a social type so alien as to arouse repugnance in rich and poor alike. So in Spain in 1808, and in the Vendee during the Revolution, peasants and nobles fought side by side, and the peasants never took advantage of the disorder, of the lawlessness, to plunder the houses of the nobles. One may doubt whether there is a single example of the poorer classes in a Christian country rising to support a Mohammedan invasion — much less of the poorer classes in a Mohammedan country rising in support of a Christian invasion. Social democracy in central and western Europe professes indifference to the concept of nationality, and proclaims the alliance of the proletarians of all countries against the capitalists of the whole world. Those theories might have a certain practi- cal efficacy in the event of a war between the Germans and the French, or between the Italians and the English, since all these nations belong to approximately the same social type. But if it were a question of repelling a serious Tatar or Chinese invasion, or merely a Turkish or Russian invasion, we believe that the great majority of proletarians, even in countries where they are most strongly imbued with doctrines of world-wide collectivism, would eagerly cooperate with the ruling classes.1 Anyone who has done any great amount of traveling must have been struck by a fact that is not without significance. Very often the poor of different countries, as well, for that matter, as the rich of different countries, more readily fraternize than the rich and 1 In the United States, Negroes, and especially Chinese, are generally excluded from labor unions. 116 RULING CLASS AND SOCIAL TYPE [CHAP. IV poor of the same country. To be strictly exact one should note that at the present time "cosmopolitanism" is much more strikingly characteristic of one element in the ruling class — the element that has the greatest wealth and the greatest leisure — than it is of the poor. But this cosmopolitan fraternizing arises only so long as peoples of approximately similar customs are con- cerned. If they go to faraway lands where ideas and ways are altogether new, the rich and the poor of one country, or even of merely neighboring countries, feel more closely drawn to each other than to foreigners of their own class. That is the case with Europeans in India and China, and in general in all countries where the civilization is markedly different from the European. All this is just another way of saying that sooner or later a point is reached where difference in social type as between members of different countries becomes greater than difference in social type as between classes in the same country. $. Psychological and intellectual isolation on the part of the lower classes, as well as too noticeable differences in beliefs and education between the various social classes, give rise to social phenomena that are very interesting to the student of the political sciences, dangerous as they may be to the societies in which they occur. / / In the first pla,ce$£s a consequence of their isolation, within the lower classes another ruling class, or directing minority, necessarily forms, and often this new class is antagonistic to the class that holds possession of the legal government.1 When this class of plebeian leaders is well organized it may seriously embar- rass an Official government^ In many Catholic countries the clergy is still the only authority that exerts any moral influence over the peasantry, and the peasants extend to the parish priest all the confidence that they withhold from the government official. In other countries, where the people look upon the public functionary and the nobleman if not exactly as enemies certainly as utter strangers, the more resolute and aggressive of the ple- beians sometimes succeed in organizing widespread and fairly permanent associations, which levy assessments, administer a 1THs phenomenon is something like the one we observed earlier in this chapter (§2, last paragraph) in speaking of countries where differing social types, in the strict sense of the expression, exist side by side. §6] CLASS ISOLATION 117 special justice of their own and have their own hierarchies of officials, their own leaders, their own recognized institutions. So a real state within the state comes into being, a government that is clandestine but often more feared, better obeyed, and if not better loved certainly better understood, than the legal government. , , In the second plac^whenever and wherever a section of the ruling class tries to overthrow the legal government, whether because of Conversion to a new political formula or for some other reason, it always seeks the support of the lower classes, and these readily follow its lead when they are hostile or indifferent to the established order. This alliance is so often struck that the plebs becomes an essential instrument in almost all upheavals and revolutions, and to the same alliance also is due the fact that we so often find men from the higher social levels leading popular movements*/ Yet the opposite phenomenon also appears at times. The portion of the ruling class that is holding power and resisting the revolutionary current may find its main support in the lower classes, which still cling loyally to old ideas and to the old social type. That was the situation in Spain in 18££ and down to 1830, and so it was with the Kingdom of Naples in 1799 and more or less down to 1860. In such cases there may be periods of government by an ignorant, inept and vulgar dema- goguery which someone thought of defining as "the negation of God." But the most dangerous among the consequences that may result from differences in social type between the various social classes, and from the reciprocal isolation of classes that necessarily follows in their wake, is a decline in energy in the upper classes, which grow poorer and poorer in bold and aggressive characters and richer and richer in "soft/* remissive individuals. We have seen that that development is practically impossible in a state of the feudal type. In a society that is broken up into virtually independent fragments the heads of the individual groups have to be energetic, resourceful men. Their supremacy in large measure depends on their own physical or moral strength, which, moreover, they are continually exercising in struggles with their immediate neighbors. As social organization progresses and the governing class begins to reap the benefits of an improved bureau- cratic machine, its superiority in culture and wealth, and espe- 118 RULING CLASS AND SOCIAL TYPE [CHAP. IV cially its better organization and firmer cohesion, may compensate to some extent for the lack of individual energy; and so it may come about that considerable portions of the governing class, especially the circles that give the society its intellectual tone and direction, lose the habit of dealing with people of the lower classes and commanding them directly. This state of affairs generally enables frivolousness, and a sort of culture that is wholly abstract and conventional, to supplant a vivid sense of realities and a sound and accurate knowledge of human nature. Thinking loses virility. Sentimental and exaggeratedly humanitarian theories come to the fore, theories that proclaim the innate goodness of men, especially when they are not spoiled by civilization, or theories that uphold the absolute preferableness, in the arts of government, of gentle and persuasive means to severe authori- tarian measures. People imagine, as Taine puts it, that since social life has flowed blandly and smoothly on for centuries, like an impetuous river confined within sturdy dikes, the dikes have become superfluous and can readily be dispensed with, now that the river has learned its lesson. Tacitus described Germanic customs as eminently simple, frugal and virtuous. More than three centuries later, during the barbarian invasions, Salvian of Marseilles attributed the victories of the Goths, Vandals, Franks and other barbarians, to their moral superiority. According to Salvian, the invaders were chaste, temperate, truth-telling, whereas the Romans, and espe- cially the upper classes among the Romans, were fornicators, drunkards and liars. In describing the manners and customs of the Germans of his day Machiavelli evidently wrote under the influence of Tacitus. In the course of the last two centuries, many philosophers have raised paeans to the holiness of savage morals and to the rustic simplicity of the plain, untutored man. It would seem therefore that there is a frequent, if not a universal, tendency in very mature civilizations, where ruling classes have acquired highly refined literary cultures, to wax enthusiastic, by a sort of antithesis, over the simple ways of savages, barbarians and peasants (the case of Arcadia!), and to clothe them with all sorts of virtues and sentiments that are as stereotyped as they are imaginary. Invariably underlying all such tendencies is the concept that was so aptly phrased by Rousseau, that man is good by nature but spoiled by society and civilization. This notion §6] CLASS ISOLATION 119 has had a very great influence on political thinking during the past hundred and fifty years. A ruling class is the more prone to fall into errors of this kind the more closed it is, actually if not legally, to elements rising from the lower classes. In the lower classes the hard necessities of life, the unending and carking scramble for bread, the lack of literary culture, keep the primordial instincts of struggle and the unfailing ruggedness of human nature, alive. In any case, whether or not the factor of intellectual and moral isolation is reinforced by this factor of, so to gay, personal isolation, certain it is that when the ruling class has degenerated in the manner described, it loses its ability to provide against its own dangers and against those of the society that has the misfortune to be guided by it. So the state crashes at the first appreciable shock from the outside foe. Those who govern are unable to deal with the least flurry; and the changes that a strong and intelligent ruling class would have carried out at a negligible cost in wealth, blood and human dignity take on the proportions of a social cataclysm. One should note, as an example, that in the course of the nineteenth century England adopted peacefully and without violent shocks almost all the basic civil and political reforms that France paid so heavily to achieve through the great Revolution. Undeniably, the great advantage of England lay in the greater energy, the greater practical wisdom, the better political training, that her ruling class possessed down to the very end of the past century. CHAPTER V JURIDICAL DEFENSE 1. We might very well dispense with defining the moral sense. It is something that we all feel and understand without a definite, carefully qualified formula to describe it. Generally, however, the phrase is taken to mean that mass of sentiments by which the natural propensity of human beings to develop their activities and capacities, to satisfy their appetites and impulses, to command and enjoy, is curbed by a natural compassion for the pain or harm that other people may experience from an indulgence of that propensity. Sometimes such sentiments are carried to a point where the spiritual satisfaction one derives from procuring pleasure or advantage for another is greater than the material satisfaction one derives from providing for one's own pleasure. When our limiting the satisfaction of our impulses at the cost of another's sacrifice rests on sentiments of affection for people who are close and dear to us, it is said to be based on " sympathy." When it is inspired solely by the respect that is due to other men, even strangers or enemies, simply because they are men, we get a sentiment that is far more delicate and not so generally felt by people — the sentiment of "justice." Idealizations and exaggera- tions of these moral sentiments are crystallized in the well-known formulas, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," "Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you." These maxims, however, express an aspiration to a moral perfection that can never be attained rather than a practical counsel that is applicable in real life. Save for exceptions that arise almost exclusively in connec- tion with parental love, each individual is better qualified than anyone else to look out for himself; and if he is to look out for himself effectively he must love himself a little more than he loves others and deal with them otherwise than he deals with himself. One might well feel that all these cautions on our part were hardly required, for the fact is that, apart from some exceptional moment or some exceptional individual, people have never taken the maxims mentioned seriously. 120 §fc] MORAL EVOLUTION 121 The question as to whether the moral sense is progressive or stationary has been much debated. As is well known, Buckle, a distinguished English writer of the past century, observed that the purest and loftiest ethical principles had been known and proclaimed in remotely ancient times, and he therefore main- tained that progress in human societies is almost exclusively intellectual and scientific, never moral.1 The much followed evolutionist school of our day reaches essentially different con- clusions. According to the evolutionists the moral sense can, and must, continually progress in view of the struggle for existence, which selects for survival in every society the individuals who are richest in altruistic sentiments, these being the sentiments that best serve the interests of the social body. In the struggle for existence between different societies victory regularly goes to societies in which the same altruistic sentiments are, on the average, strongest.2 We had better examine these two doctrines briefly, just to show that neither of them can be taken as a basis for scientific conclusions. Suppose we begin with the second, which has so far won wider acceptance. 2J We have already proved to our own satisfaction (chap. I, §13) that, in a society that has attained any degree of civilization at all, the struggle between individuals is not a struggle for existence but a struggle for preeminence. But even ignoring that, we find altogether paradoxical the principle that is pro- claimed by these self-styled positivists, to the effect that within every social group those individuals who are most moral and therefore most highly endowed with altruistic sentiments are the ones who are destined to survive (in our terms, to attain the highest social rankings). All that we can grant in that regard — and we grant it very willingly — is that an individual who is particularly deficient in moral sense, and is unable to conceal his propensities sufficiently, will have to overcome greater difficulties than others because of the antipathy and repugnance that he will generally inspire.! But as far as that goes, an individual who has an unusually delicate moral sense will be at a disadvantage that is 1 History of Civilization in England, vol. I, chap. IV (" Comparison between Moral and Intellectual Laws"). 2 See Letourneau, Evolution de la morale, chap. I, §15. 122 JURIDICAL DEFENSE [CHAP. V almost as serious. In all the dealings, great or small, of life, he will find himself fighting with altogether inferior weapons. Most men will use against him tricks that he will be thoroughly familiar with but will be careful not to use; and he will certainly suffer far greater damage from that fact than the sly rascal who knows just where to stop in his crookedness will ever suffer from the ill-will that he arouses about him. Really, one may be good almost unconsciously through a natural simplicity of character, or one may be consciously good through magnanimity of purpose, high resolve, unconquerable aversion to evil, inflexible integrity of character; but certainly one could never become good from believing that by being good one could more easily realize one's aims, or achieve what is commonly called success in life. Utili- tarianism interpreted in that sense, as the basis of morality, could only be, to speak quite plainly, the maneuver of a hypocrite or the dream of a fool. \It follows that, in all societies, so-called evolution, the selection of the best, ought to eventuate in a perpetuation and multiplica- tion of individuals of average morality, who are, in literal fact, the best adapted to what is called the struggle for existence. Survival, or, as we consider it more accurate to say, preeminence, ought preferably to await those characters who, in whatever sort of social environment, represent a moral mean of the most highly refined gold. And yet the evolutionary theory does not seem to become acceptable even with that basic emendation, since it assumes in any event that the moral element is always the main factor in the success or failure of an individual in achieving the aims that he sets out to achieve in lifey In practice things do not work out that way at all. To say nothing of the influence of chance, which is far greater than is commonly supposed, the possession in greater or lesser degree of certain intellectual qualities, such as readiness of perception and keenness of observa- tion, figures very considerably in the decision as to whether a man is to reach the higher ranks in his society or is to stay in the lower. But there is the very great influence also of other qualities, which depend upon the individual's temperament, without being, strictly speaking, either intellectual or moral — such qualities as tenacity of purpose, self-confidence and, above all, activity. If we set out to judge whether an individual will or will not get on in |j|e — whatever the type of society — we find that we cannot use §8] MORAL EVOLUTION 128 any singleWiterion, to be sure, but that if we would keep an eye on the main factor, we must watch and see whether he is active* and whether he knows how to make good use of his activity. Apart from brief periods of violent revolution, personal quali- ties are always less important, as regards attaining the highest positions in life, than birth or family. \ In any type of society, whether ostensibly democratic or otherwise, being born to a high station is one of the best claims a person can have to staying there. Families that have occupied the highest levels in the social scale for a number of generations often lack the qualities that are best fitted to carry a man from the bottom to the top, while they possess very different qualities in abundance/ Except in unusual cases that are due to careful education, old aristocratic families are not distinguished for activity. At the same time a real refinement of the moral sense may be detected in persons who have not had to fight fierce, shady, and often degrading battles in order to reach the top. |n a word, the virtues and defects that help a plebeian to force trie gates of an aristocracy are some- thing very different from the virtues and defects of aristocrats themselves.] We can accept as true only one portion of the selectionist theory. One may safely grant that, other things being equal, in a struggle between two societies that society will triumph in which the individual members are on the average better equipped in moral sense and therefore more united, more trustful of each other and more capable of self-sacrifice. But that exception hurts the evolutionary thesis as a whole more than it helps it. If, in a given society, a higher average of moral sense cannot be explained by any survival of the best individuals, then, granting that the higher average is there, it can be ascribed only to the better organization of the society — to causes, in other words, that are historical in nature and that are the worst enemies of those who try to explain social phenomena primarily by changes in the individual organism or in the individual "psyche." 3. Though Buckle's theories are not as widely at variance with our point of view as the above, we feel unable to accept them without modifying or at least supplementing them to some extent. It is of course true that in very ancient societies we find maxims and laws that denote an exquisite moral sense. In the 124 JURIDICAL DEFENSE [CHAP. V ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, for instance, especially in parts of it that go back to a very remote antiquity, precepts very similar to the Ten Commandments are to be found1; and papyri dating from the twelfth dynasty contain moral principles that are as good as anything in Christian or Buddhist ethics. The Platonists and the Stoics in the Greco-Roman world and the Essenes in the Hebrew world represented very high levels of morality, and numerous traces of the same ethics can easily be noted in Chinese, Indian and Persian civilizations long anterior to the Christian era. But though the precepts in question go back to very remote times, they were formulated and accepted by peoples who had very ancient civilizations, and whose moral sense, therefore, had undergone a long-protracted elaboration. Indeed, if any comparison is possible between the morality of a primitive tribe and the ethical system of a relatively civilized people that has been organized for long ages in great and populous political organisms, it is the comparison that can be made between the ethical systems of a child and an adult. The former is unconscious, the latter conscious. In the former good and bad impulses are roughly sketched. In the latter we find them fully developed and mature. Child and savage alike may do evil, and great evil, but in what they do blind animal impulse will always figure more largely than calculation and premeditation; and they may even do good without ever achieving that exquisite dis- crimination, that deliberate sacrifice of self, of which the adult human being and the civilized human being are capable. Making due allowances, of course, ethical feeling in the crude person stands to ethical feeling in the well-bred person much as the sense of morality in the child or the savage stands to the ethical system of the adult or the civilized man. What we call delicacy of feeling is just the intuition of a higher morality applied to a greater number of social relationships. European travelers in the interior of Africa have, in general, found the Arab adven- turers who foregather there preferable to the native Negroes. That is understandable. The Arabs are heirs to an ancient civilization. Though they are perfectly capable of treachery, theft and murder, they can, when they choose, assume the manners of gentlemen. They have some conception at least of a morality that is higher, and so more like our own. 1Lenormant, Maspero. §3] MORAL EVOLUTION 125 But it is not only in greater refinement of moral and immoral impulses that civilized man differs from the savage. In societies of ancient culture that have for centuries enjoyed sound political organizations, the repression of immoral impulses — what some criminologists call the " inhibition " that curbs impulses — is unquestionably stronger and acquires all the force of inveterate habit. By a long and slow process of elaboration such societies gradually develop the institutions that enable a universal morality to curb the expression of individual immorality in a certain number of public and private relationships. When they are not under the sway of interests and passions, almost all individuals come to understand that a given act is not consistent with the sentiments of justice that prevail in the society in which they live. Still, the greater majority of individuals might commit that very act under stress of passion or at the bidding of an engrossing interest. Now public opinion, religion, law, and the whole social mecha- nism that enforces observance of the law, are expressions of the mass conscience, which in the general case is dispassionate and disinterested as against the one, or the few, whose perception of what is just and honest is clouded at the given moment by the violence of selfish impulses. The judge is the instrument of the mass moral sense, which, case by case, curbs the passions and evil instincts of the individual and holds them in leash. feo in a highly developed civilization not only do moral instincts — and for that matter selfish passions — become more refined, more conscious, more perfect. In a society in which political organization has made great progress, moral discipline is itself unquestionably greater, and the too selfish acts that are inhibited, or obstructed, by the reciprocal surveillance and restraint of the individuals who compose the society are more numerous and more clearly defined. In every society, of course, there is a relatively small number of individuals who have tendencies that are definitely refractory to any sort of social discipline and, likewise, a certain number of individuals of superior scruples and soundly molded characters for whom any curb from without would be superfluous. But between these two extremes come the vast majority of men, who have average consciences, for whom fear of harm or punishment, and the fact that they are to be held responsible for their conduct by ot^ier people who are neither 126 JURIDICAL DEFENSE [CHAP. V their accomplices nor their subordinates, serve as most effective means for overcoming the thousand temptations to transgress the moral law that everyday living offers) (The social mechanisms that regulate this disciplining of the moral sense constitute what we call "juridical defense" (respect for law, government by law). These mechanisms are not equally perfect in all societies. It may happen that a society that has advanced further than some other in the arts and sciences remains conspicuously inferior to that other in this respect. And it may also happen that juridical defense weakens and becomes less efficient in societies that are traversing periods of scientific and economic progress.1 Great catastrophes, such as long wars or great revolutions, everywhere produce periods of social dissolu- tion, when the disciplining of selfish impulses falters, when habits that have long curbed them break and when brutish instincts that have been dulled but not eradicated by long periods of peac^ and civilized living come to life again — f or if greater culture has succeeded in veiling them it has also steeled and sharpened them. po from time to time we see groups of adventurers from civi- lized countries, on coming into contact with barbarous peoples or peoples of a social type markedly different from theirs, feeling themselves loosed from ordinary moral restraints and perpe- trating the sort of crimes that won infamy for the Spanish conquerors in America, and for Hastings and Clive in India. The tremendous excesses of the Thirty Years' War, or of the French Revolution and other civil wars, become explainable by reference to these same criteria.! Characteristic is the picture that Thucydides paints of the demoralization that fell upon Greece after the struggles between different cities, and the civil wars within individual cities, which took place during the Peloponnesian War. It is interesting to note that all social cataclysms that destroy moral discipline are followed by periods of relaxation in that discipline itself, so that the level of morals is reestablished but very gradually. Letour- neau has well shown that intellectual progress is much more rapid among barbarians and sayages than moral progress.2 This 1 In his article "Foules et sectes au point de vue criminel" Tarde expresses the opinion that of late there has been a real decline in morals in modern European society and that the decline is due to social causes. 2 La Sodologie d'aprds Vethnographie. §4] ORGANIZED MORALITY 127 phenomenon is apparent in civilized societies as they emerge from periods of social disorganization. It is due to the fact that moral habits are established and reestablished very slowly, but it contributes to lending a semblance of truth to Buckle's doctrine, that the moral sense is absolutely stationary. We have so far carefully avoided, it will be noted, any specula- tion as to the origins of the moral or altruistic instincts. For our purposes here, it is sufficient to observe that they are innate in man and necessary to social living. It will further be noted that our view is contrary to the doctrine of Rousseau, that man is good by nature but that society makes him wicked and per- verse. We believe that social organization provides for the reciprocal restraint of human individuals by one another and so makes them better, not by destroying their wicked instincts, but by accustoming them to controlling their wicked instincts. 4{ The chief peoples that have had histories, or are now making them, entrust the disciplining of the moral sense not to religion only but to the whole legislative system. In the early periods of all peoples the secular enactment and the religious precept go absolutely hand in hand, and the sanctions that uphold the one uphold the other also. That is the case even today in some societies. But in our time, in countries of European and Chinese civilization, secular or civil organization and religious organiza- tion are more or less distinctly separated, the religious organization becoming more effective according to the strength of the faith that it manages to inspire and maintain, whereas the secular organization bases its progress on its success in conforming to certain psychological tendencies} fjt has long been debated whether the religious sanction, when taken apart from the political sanction, is more effective than the latter — whether, in other words, fear of hell is worth more in actual practice than fear of jail and the policeman.] A definite answer, applicable to all the cases that might arise under the question, can hardly be given. Evidently a country in which political organization is slack and primitive while religious faith is ardent is in an essentially different situation from another country in which religious enthusiasms have deteriorated while political, administrative and judiciary systems have improved* Both religious precepts and secular laws emanate from the JURIDICAL DEFENSE [CHAP. V collective moral sense that is indispensable to all human associ- ations, and it is undeniable that all religions do have, as they could hardly fail to have, some practical influence. But there is reason to fear, nevertheless, that the importance of religion can easily be overestimated. If religion were so important, it would seem, for instance, that the moral difference between a Christian people and an idolatrous people should be very considerable. Now of course if we compare a civilized Christian people with a barbarous, idolatrous people, the moral discrepancy is enormous ; but if we place side by side two peoples of the same degree of barbarism, one of which has embraced Christianity and the other not, it will be found that in practice their behaviors are very much the same, or at least there is no appreciable difference between them. The modern Abyssinians are a living and notori- ous illustration of this fact. Cardinal Massaja was a missionary in Ethiopia for thirty-five years. He testifies to the scant practical influence of Christianity on the lives of the Abyssinians.1 If we compare the still pagan but politically well-organized society of the age of Marcus Aurelius with the Christian but very disorderly society that is described by Gregory of Tours, we very much suspect that the parallel would prove to be favorable to the former. lit is consistent with human nature that certain and speedy piinishment, however slight relatively, should be generally more feared than a far severer punishment that is uncertain and remote. For average consciences, at the moment when greed, lust or vengefulness spurs them to theft, rape or murder, fear of prison and the gallows is a more potent and, especially, a more certain deterrent than the possibility of eternal torment. If that is true for great breaches of the moral law, which are committed only in moments of violent passion, it is truer still of those petty violations of the more obvious precepts of fairness and justice into which human beings are misled by the daily pressures of petty interests and little jealousies.j Is there a moral or religious law that does not recognize that to pay one's debts is, on the whole, a just and proper thing? Yet one has to confess that many good believers would fail to pay theirs, and would find a thousand sophistries and pretenses to uphold their own consciences in doing so, if they were not held to their obligations by public 1 / miei trentacinque anni di missione in Etiojria. §4] ORGANIZED MORALITY disgrace and, above all, by the process server. It takes no over- delicate conscience to understand that to pummel and beat another person is, at the very best, not a decorous thing to do; yet the habit of laying hands on one's neighbor in the moment of anger is effectively combatted in the masses only by the certainty that the man who deals a blow runs the chance of promptly receiving another in return and that the business may easily go farther than that. As the weakest and most defenseless of human beings, women and children should be the ones most entitled to protection from the religious and moral sentiments; but we see only too regularly, alas, that in actual fact they are the most frequent victims of brutal physical assaults. In very religious countries, where the lower classes are completely at the mercy of the higher, it is no unusual thing to see masters beating their servants or other subordinates. Religious faith, like patriotic enthusiasms and political pas- sions, may at moments of extraordinary exhilaration produce great currents of abnegation and self-sacrifice and spur the masses to acts and efforts which, to one considering man's ordinary nature only, seem almost superhuman. Catholic jubilees and Protestant revivals furnish more than one example, and one might mention as characteristic the great wave of charity and brotherly love that swept over Umbria in the day of St. Francis of Assisi and a number of fleeting moments in the French Revolu- tion and during the disturbances of '48 in Italy. We are speaking here of collective, not individual, acts. As regards the latter, cases where isolated individuals, or groups of individuals, give proof of extraordinary abnegation and complete self-sacrifice are not so very rare in any age, or in any civilized nation. They come to the fore in every war and in every serious epidemic — on any occasion, in short, when it is desirable and necessary that someone suffer or face a danger in the interest of all. On such occasions, just as a sublimation of virtue is to be seen in some individuals, so an exaggerated cowardice and self- ishness appears in others, who cast aside the mask they have been accustomed to wear the moment they are faced by a real danger and a real need of self-sacrifice. It is equally true, of course, that just as the masses have occasional spasms of exalted abne- gation and self-sacrifice, so they have feverish paroxysms of the base emotions — greed, lust for blood, panic. 180 JURIDICAL DEFENSE [CHAP. V But the capacity that certain sentiments have for exciting ephemeral periods of intoxication should not mislead one as to their actual efficacy in the ordinary daily lives of human beings. In moments of patriotic and religious exhilaration whole cities have been known to despoil themselves of their property in order to donate it to state or church. But no political organization can long subsist unless taxation has its compulsory aspect, and the Catholic Church itself, whenever it has been able, has made the tithes obligatory. The patriotic, and still more the religious sentiment, and most of all the two combined in a single passion, suffice to produce gen- eral and violent insurrections, and at times they have prompted whole populations to take up arms and set out upon distant and very perilous expeditions — this was the case in the first two or three Crusades. But save in peoples who look upon war as an ordinary occupation and a normal source of gain, those two sentiments do not provide an adequate basis for sound and dependable armies that will be ready at a moment's notice wherever they are needed. Among people who normally depend upon agriculture, industry and commerce, armies of that sort are products of a sound social discipline, which inexorably forces the individual to do his duty and lend his services at certain times and in specified ways. 5. (The political organization proper, the organization that establishes the character of the relations between the governing class and the governed and between the various levels and various sections of the ruling class, is the factor that contributes more than any other to determining the degree of perfection that juridical defense, or government by law, can attain in a given people. The existence of an honest government, a government that is based on integrity and justice, a government that is truly liberal in Guicciardini's sense of the term, is the best guarantee that one can have that the rights commonly known as private will be effectively upheld — in other words, that property will be protectedA Guicciardini defines political liberty as " a prevalence of law ana public decrees over the appetites of particular men."1 If we take "particular men" in the sense of "individuals," meaning "single individuals," including individuals who have 1 Opere inedite, vol. II, p. 160. J5J LIBERTY AND LAW 131 power in their hands, it would be difficult to find a more rigor- ously scientific definition. It has, too, the virtue of being very ancient, since, unwittingly perhaps, Guicciardini was repeating the substance of an apothegm of one of the famous Seven Wise Men of Greece. Guicciardini was certainly not an ingenuous soul. In his Pensieri and Discorsi he often reverts to the opinion that "men in general love the good and the just whenever love of their own interest and the interests of relatives, or fear of the vengeance of others, does not mislead their understanding." These words contain a recognition of the psychological law that we have put forward as the basis of juridical defense. A corrupt government, in which the person who commands "makes his will licit in his law" — whether in the name of God or in the name of the people does not matter — will obviously be inadequate to fulfilling its mission in regard to juridical defense. Officially it may proclaim acceptable and even lofty principles in regard to legal process. In practice the principles will not be very strictly observed. In the old kingdom of Naples and to an extent in czarist Russia, law enforcement by the courts, and the law itself, could be nullified by a police official. Even equality before the law, though officially proclaimed, was more or less a farce. To choose an ancient example, as less stirring to modern emotions, the Theodosian Code lays down1 that the larger property owners (potentiores possessores) should pay their taxes through provincial governors, because, it seems, the municipal magistrates, who were generally entrusted with the collection of taxes, were too weak as compared with the landowners and too deferential towards them. Under Arcadius, farmers who were freemen had a right, in the abstract, to hale a proprietor before the imperial courts, but such a procedure was styled an "imperti- nence" (audaciani).2 [The extent to which relations between rulers and ruled, and between the various cliques among rulers, are inspired by princi- ples of morality and justice, varies, of course, more or less appreciably according to the country and the period in history. Readily apparent is the difference in this respect between the government, say, of the Chinese mandarins and the government 1XI, 7, 1*. s Fustel de Coulanges, Reckerches sur quelques probldmes d'htstoire, pp. 100, 120. 138 JURIDICAL DEFENSE [CHAP. V of the Turkish pashas and viziers of the good old days — men of the stamp of Mohammed Kuprilu, Mustapha Bairakdar, or Ali Tebelen, who disposed