The Politics of Aristotle, from which these principles are
taken, presents a striking picture of the variety and activity
of political life in the free communities of Greece. The king and
council of heroic times had disappeared, and self-government
in some form or other was the general rule. It is to be noticed,
however, that the governments of Greece were essentially
unstable. The political philosophers could lay down the law
of development by which one form of government gives birth
to another. Aristotle devotes a large portion of his work to
the consideration of the causes of revolutions. The dread of
tyranny was kept alive by the facility with which an over-powerful
and unscrupulous citizen could seize the whole machinery
of government. Communities oscillated between some form of
oligarchy and some form of democracy. The security of each
was constantly imperilled by the conspiracies of the opposing
factions. Hence, although political life exhibits that exuberant
variety of form and expression which characterizes all the intellectual
products of Greece, it lacks the quality of persistent
progress. Then there was no approximation to a national
government, even of the federal type. The varying confederacies
and hegemonies are the nearest approach to anything of the kind.
What kind of national government would ultimately have arisen
if Greece had not been crushed it is needless to conjecture;
the true interest of Greek politics lies in the fact that the free
citizens were, in the strictest sense of the word, self-governed.
Each citizen took his turn at the common business of the state.
He spoke his own views in the agora, and from time to time
in his own person acted as magistrate or judge. Citizenship
in Athens was a liberal education, such as it never can be made
under any representative system.
The Government of Rome.—During the whole period of freedom the government of Rome was, in theory at least, municipal self-government. Each citizen had a right to vote laws in his own person in the comitia of the centuries or the tribes. The administrative powers of government were, however, in the hands of a bureaucratic assembly, recruited from the holders of high public office. The senate represented capacity and experience rather than rank and wealth. Without some such instrument the city government of Rome could never have made the conquest of the world. The gradual extension of the citizenship to other Italians changed the character of Roman government. The distant citizens could not come to the voting booths; the device of representation was not discovered; and the comitia fell into the power of the town voters. In the last stage of the Roman republic, the inhabitants of one town wielded the resources of a world-wide empire. We can imagine what would be the effect of leaving to the people of London or Paris the supreme control of the British empire or of France,—irresistible temptation, inevitable corruption. The rabble of the capital learn to live on the rest of the empire.[1] The favour of the effeminate masters of the world is purchased by panem et circenses. That capable officers and victorious armies should long be content to serve such masters was impossible. A conspiracy of generals placed itself at the head of affairs, and the most capable of them made himself sole master. Under Caesar, Augustus and Tiberius, the Roman people became habituated to a new form of government, which is best described by the name of Caesarism. The outward forms of republican government remained, but one man united in his own person all the leading offices, and used them to give a seemingly legal title to what was essentially military despotism. There is no more interesting constitutional study than the chapters in which Tacitus traces the growth of the new system under the subtle and dissimulating intellect of Tiberius. The new Roman empire was as full of fictions as the English constitution of the present day. The master of the world posed as the humble servant of a menial senate. Deprecating the outward symbols of sovereignty, he was satisfied with the modest powers of a consul or a tribunus plebis. The reign of Tiberius, little capable as he was by personal character of captivating the favour of the multitude, did more for imperialism than was done by his more famous predecessors. Henceforward free government all over the world lay crushed beneath the military despotism of Rome. Caesarism remained true to the character imposed upon it by its origin. The Caesar was an elective not an hereditary king. The real foundation of his power was the army, and the army in course of time openly assumed the right of nominating the sovereign. The characteristic weakness of the Roman empire was the uncertainty of the succession. The nomination of a Caesar in the lifetime of the emperor was an ineffective remedy. Rival emperors were elected by different armies; and nothing less than the force of arms could decide the question between them.
Modern Governments.—Feudalism.—The Roman empire bequeathed to modern Europe the theory of universal dominion. The nationalities which grew up after its fall arranged themselves on the basis of territorial sovereignty. Leaving out of account the free municipalities of the middle ages, the problem of government had now to be solved, not for small urban communities, but for large territorial nations. The medieval form of government was feudal. One common type pervaded all the relations of life. The relation of king and lord was like the relation between lord and vassal (see Feudalism). The bond between them was the tenure of land. In England there had been, before the Norman Conquest, an approximation to a feudal system. In the earlier English constitution, the most striking features were the power of the witan, and the common property of the nation in a large portion of the soil. The steady development of the power of the king kept pace with the aggregation of the English tribes under one king. The conception that the land belonged primarily to the people gave way to the conception that everything belonged primarily to the king.[2] The Norman Conquest imposed on England the already highly developed feudalism of France, and out of this feudalism the free governments of modern Europe have grown. One or two of the leading steps in this process may be indicated here. The first, and perhaps the most important, was the device of representation. For an account of its origin, and for instances of its use in England before its application to politics, we must be content to refer to Stubbs’s Constitutional History, vol. ii. The problem of combining a large area of sovereignty with some degree of self-government, which had proved fatal to ancient commonwealths, was henceforward solved. From that time some form of representation has been deemed essential to every constitution professing, however remotely, to be free.
The connexion between representation and the feudal system of estates must be shortly noticed. The feudal theory gave the king a limited right to military service and to certain aids, both of which were utterly inadequate to meet the expenses of the government, especially in time of war. The king therefore had to get contributions from his people, and he consulted them in their respective orders. The three estates were simply the three natural divisions of the people, and Stubbs has pointed out that, in the occasional treaties between a necessitous king and the order of merchants or lawyers, we have examples of inchoate estates or sub-estates of the realm. The right of representation was thus in its origin a right to consent to taxation. The pure theory of feudalism had from the beginning been broken by William the Conqueror causing all free-holders to take an oath of direct allegiance to himself. The institution of parliaments, and the association of the king’s smaller tenants in capite with other commoners, still further removed the
- ↑ None of the free states of Greece ever made extensive or permanent conquests; but the tribute sometimes paid by one state to another (as by the Aeginetans to the Athenians) was a manifest source of corruption. Compare the remarks of Hume (Essays, part i. 3, That Politics may be reduced to a Science), “free governments are the most ruinous and oppressive for their provinces.”
- ↑ Ultimately, in the theory of English law, the king may be said to have become the universal successor of the people. Some of the peculiarities of the prerogative rights seem to be explainable only on this view, e.g. the curious distinction between wrecks come to land and wrecks still on water. The common right to wreckage was no doubt the origin of the prerogative right to the former. Every ancient common right has come to be a right of the crown or a right held of the crown by a vassal.
