Nationalism and Culture (72 page)

its end, and there developed in its stead the latifundia, of which Pliny says quite truthfully that they were the downfall of Italy and the provinces.

In the earliest days of Rome the land question already played a significant role, a fact which found clear enough expression in the long struggles between patricians and plebeians. In this stern conflict the plebeians at last won equal rights with their former opponents, and the famous Licinian-Sextine laws, whose wording has come down to us only in mutilated form, provided that thereafter the two classes should share alike in the division of public lands. The law also provided that the larger landholders must employ a prescribed number of free laborers proportionate to the number of the serfs each employed. After the end of the Second Punic War, however, these provisions were, in general, not enforced. Hundreds of small farms lay quite untilled because their owners had fallen in battle. The state had, moreover, come into the possession of vast tracts of land by the confiscation of the property of all of the partisans of Hannibal in Italy. The greater part of these fell into the hands of speculators, and land speculation assumed horrible forms. Contemporary writers are unanimous in their description of the base devices by which the small owners were robbed of their holdings.

Unsated avarice

Moves back the boundary-stones of neighboring fields.

Thou over-ridest everywhere

The peasants' hedges. Outcast wander forth,

Husband and wife, upon their backs

Their goods; in their arms, miserable children.^^

Even though in some parts of the realm the small holdings were not completely abolished, nevertheless many thousands of small landowners were ruined by the plan for managing the latifundia. The latifundia, when they were not allowed to lie fallow or converted into pasture land, were tilled by so-called "serfs," whose lot was the hardest of all of the slaves. By this sort of husbandry the productivity of agriculture was constantly diminished, as always happens with slave labor. Great masses of free laborers, because of this slave-labor, were deprived of their means of subsistence J while the importation of grain from Sicily and Africa completely wiped out innumerable small peasants.

In the cities a similar picture presents itself. There slave industry in the homes of the rich cut off the means of living for small artisans and plunged them into the abyss with the small peasants and agricultural laborers. These latter wandered by thousands into the cities and swelled the ranks of the ruined beggar proletariat that had completely lost the

" Horace, Odes. Book II.

habit of productive occupation and served the state only as bearers of babes. This homeless, idle, purposeless mass, which had become used to living on the refuse of the rich, offered to political adventurers and upstarts of every sort a claque whose paid support was useful to their avaricious plans. Already under the republic the sale of their votes had become for the proletariat a comfortable source of income. The rich bought the votes of the poorer citizens and so were enabled to hold the most important positions and to bequeath them to their children, so that certain state offices remained almost constantly in the possession of the same families. A candidacy for a public post was quite hopeless unless the candidate was in a position to bribe the electors by the distribution of gifts or the exhibition of public games—usually gladiatorial combats.

Under such conditions it was inevitable that the influence of victorious commanders upon the course of political affairs should become constantly greater, thus first smoothing the road to Caesarism. In fact the change from republic to monarchy was accomplished in Rome without any difficulty worth mentioning. Men like Caesar, Crassus, Pompey, expended enormous sums in molding public opinion. The later Caesars made use of these same methods, making of the proverbial panem et circenses a buttress of inside politics. Cruel gladiatorial combats had to be used to keep in good humor the depraved proletarian masses of the cities. Thousands upon thousands of the strongest slaves were carefully trained in special schools to slaughter one another in the arena before the eyes of brutalized crowds, or to measure their strength in combat with that of starving wild beasts. "Every sort of monstrous horror," says Friedlander, "took place in the arena j for there was hardly a form of torture or frightful death known to history or literature that was not offered to the people in the amphitheater for their entertainment." The murderous games often lasted for weeks j thus it is said that Trajan once had 10,000 slave combatants driven into the arena, where the gruesome exhibition continued for a hundred and twenty-three days. What a devastating effect the constant viewing of such revolting cruelty had on the character of the people needs no description.

It was a necessary consequence of the continuous wars that Rome became in time unable to enlist from the ranks of her free population enough men fit to bear arms. Julius Caesar had, in fact, begun to incorporate in his armies hired foreign soldiers. Later commanders developed the employment of mercenaries into a complete system and created by its use that military monarchy, the seeds of which the republic had planted. But the foreign mercenaries, who later were made up chiefly of Celts, Germans and Syrians, lacked those ideological assumptions in which the ancient Romans were reared and trained. To them the thievery of the soldier was merely a profitable tradej the "Roman idea" troubled them

very little, since its essence was quite alien to them. Therefore the Caesars had always to take care to keep their pretorian hordes contented, if they did not wish to imperil their rulership. The last words of the Emperor Severus to his two sons, 'TCeep your soldiers loyal and care for no one else in the world!" were the watchword of Caesarism.

But since none of the Caesars was quite sure of his rulership and had always to protect himself against rivals from the ranks of his generals and his favorites, the army became a constantly more expensive instrument, and its maintenance a constantly greater burden. And so the pretorians gradually became the controlling element in the state, and the Caesars were often no better than their prisoners. They supported some rulers and hurled others from the throne according as they saw greater profit from the one side or the other. Every election of an emperor was accompanied by a thorough plundering of the state treasury, which must then be refilled by the employment of every forcible means. Thus the provinces were constantly, and at ever shorter intervals, squeezed dry like a sponge j and this gradually led to a complete exhaustion of all economic forces. To this must be added that Roman capitalism developed no sort of productive activity, but lived only by plunder, which necessarily hastened the catastrophe.

The farther Caesarism proceeded along its perilous course, the larger became the number of parasites who fastened themselves on the mass of the people. It went so far that emperors had to pledge their "personal property" to the exchequer or to pawnbrokers to raise money for their soldiers. Marcus Aurelius was once compelled, when he needed money, to sell at public auction all his portable possessions including the art treasures of his palaces and the costly wardrobe of the empress. Others found it more profitable to make away with wealthy contemporaries in order to confiscate their possessions. Nero, for instance, when he learned that one-half of the soil of Africa was in the hands of only six persons, had all six of them murdered so that he might inherit from them.

All the earlier attempts to put an end to the evil were without result and were suppressed by the owning class with bloody cruelty. Thus, the two Gracchi had to pay for their daring with their lives; and it went no better with Cataline and his fellow conspirators, whose real objective has never been made entirely clear. And the numerous slave revolts which periodically convulsed the realm, and of which the uprising under Spartacus seriously endangered Rome itself, were all without lasting result. This could have been because the majority of the slaves were filled with the same spirit as were their masters. Here can be applied also the saying of Emerson, that the curse of slavery is that one end of the chain is forged round the ankle of the slave, the other round that of his owner. The slave revolts in Rome were uprisings of mistreated and desperate

men who lacked any lofty purpose. So if a brief success was achieved by the revolting slaves they knew no better course than to imitate the role of their former masters. So utterly had the spirit that breathed out of Rome corrupted men and weakened in them all impulse toward freedom. There could be no talk of a mutual alliance of the oppressed, because even the beggar-proletariat of Rome regarded the slaves as inferiors. And so it came about that slaves had to help the possessing class to suppress the Gracchi, and proletarians helped them to put down the revolt of Spartacus.

What could be the end of a status where all intellectual power was crippled and every ethical principle trodden into the mud? As a matter of fact the whole history of Roman Caesarism was a long chain of frightful horrors. Treason, assassination, beastly cruelty, crazy confusion of ideas and morbid greed prevailed in tottering Rome. The rich gave themselves over to the most excessive indulgence and the poor knew no other desire than to be able to participate, ever so modestly, in that indulgence. A little gang of monopolists ruled the realm and organized the exploitation of the world according to well-established principles. At the court of the Caesars one palace revolution followed another, one bloody outrage wiped out its forerunner. And everywhere peeped the eye of the snooper j no one was secure in his most private affairs. An army of spies infested the land and sowed distrust and secret suspicion in every heart.

Never before had the spirit of authority celebrated such triumphs. Rome first provided the conditions for that contemptible status which we might call slavery on principle. And while the spirit of basest slavery was completely unmanning the masses of the people, the delusion of grandeur of the rulers was growing in inverse proportion, because no one dared to oppose their cruel whims. The most honored members of the Roman Senate, overcome with awe, threw themselves in the dust before the God-emperors and paid them divine honors. A Caligula could cause his horse to be chosen a member of the sacerdotal college j a Heliogabalus could have his made a Roman consul. Human cowardice swallowed even this.

Upon this road there could be no longer any halt. In insane blindness Rome had wasted the wealth of the world j and when this was quite exhausted its power collapsed like a decayed building in whose timbers the worms have long been at work. For such a people liberation by its own effort was no longer possible, because every earnest resolution, every independent impulse had been crushed out of it. Under the long-continued domination of a power system developed to the point of madness, serfdom had become for it a habit, degradation had become a principle. The revolt against the "Roman idea" came in the form of Christianity. But dying Rome revenged herself even in her hour of dissolution by infecting with

her poisonous breath the very movement in which it seemed that new hope for an enslaved world might be looked for, and transforming it into a church. So out of the world dominion of the Roman state there developed the world dominion of the Roman church j in Papism Caesarism celebrates its resurrection.

ROME AND GREECE AS SYMBOLS. VISIGOTHIC FEUDALISM IN SPAIN. THE ARABIAN CULTURE. THE PRIME OF THE SPANISH CITIES AND THE AUTONOMY OF THE TOWNS. POLITICAL DECAY AND ZENITH OF MOORISH CULTURE. THE WAR BETWEEN CROSS AND CRESCENT. THE SPANISH FUEROS AND CITY CONSTITUTIONS. THE CORTES. FEDERALISTIC SPIRIT OF SPAIN. THE VICTORY OF THE UNIFIED NATIONAL STATE. THE INQUISITION AS INSTRUMENT OF POLITICAL POWER. CONQUEST OF THE COMUNEROS AND GERMANIAS. THE DETERIORATION OF CULTURE UNDER DESPOTISM. THE PERIOD OF FREE CITIES IN ITALY. UPSURGE OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE. EXPANSION OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS. THE GUILDS AND THE TIME OF FEDERALISM. THE ADVOCATES OF NATIONAL UNITY AS DEADLY FOES OF FEDERATION. MAZZINI'S DREAM AND PROUDHON'S SENSE OF REALITY. ABSOLUTISM AS DESTROYER OF FRENCH FOLK CULTURE. LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE IN THE STRAIT-JACKET OF DESPOTISM. THE REGIMENTATION OF INDUSTRY. NATIONAL UNITY AND THE END OF INTELLECTUAL CULTURE IN GERMANY. BISMARCKISM. GLANCES INTO THE FUTURE.

GREECE and Rome are merely symbols. Their whole history is just a single instance of the great truth that the less the political sense is developed in a people, the richer are the forms of its cultural lifej and the more political endeavors get the upper hand, the deeper sinks the general level of spiritual aiid social culture, the more completely natural creative impulse, all deep spiritual feeling—in a word, everything human—dies out. The spiritual is supplanted by a dead technique in affairs which takes account only of calculations and neglects all ethical principles. Cold mechanization of forces takes the place of vital influx in all social activities. Organization of social forces is no longer a means to the higher ends of the community, something that has become organic and is always in fluxj it becomes a dreary end-in-itself and leads gradually to a retardation of all higher creative activity. And the more man becomes aware of the inner incapacity, which is only the result of this mechanization, the more desperately he clings to the dead form, and for any remedy looks to that technique which is devouring his soul and laying waste his mind. Rabin—

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dranath Tagore, who as an Asiatic surveys western civilization with something of detachment, has set forth the deeper meaning of these events in pithy words:

When the organization-machine begins to embrace wide territory and machine workers become parts of the machine, then the human person dissolves into a phantom, everything that was human becomes machine and turns the great wheel of politics without the slightest feeling of sympathy and moral responsibility. It may well happen that even in this soulless performance the moral nature of man still tries to assert itself, but the ropes and pulleys creak and groan, the threads of the human heart become entangled in the gears of the human machine, and only with difficulty can the moral will call up a pale, mute image of what it was striving for.^