A CLASSIFICATION OF EUROPEAN POLITICAL BODIES.

The subject matter of the study of politics consists firstly of the groups or collections of men who have lived under governments, and secondly of the governments under which they have lived. In the present chapter I wish to speak of the groups, to describe in outline the various forms which they have taken, and to define the names by which their forms are severally known. I must premise that I shall call some of the groups political communities, meaning by a political community a number of persons living under one government and also having much else in common besides government: the rest I shall call political aggregates, meaning by a political aggregate a number of persons or bodies of persons living under one government and having nothing else or very little else in common. Having said this, I can proceed to notice the forms of individual communities or aggregates, with a view to classifying them according to their forms. In my survey the earliest forms will be taken first, and the others afterwards, as far as possible in chronological order6.

The two European races into whose past we can grope our way farthest back are the Germans and the Greeks. Each of these races, when first we have any knowledge of them, had formed a large number of tribes or small primitive political communities. The German tribes in the times of CÆsar and of Tacitus and the Greek tribes in the time of Homer were alike in being of small size and in being primitive in their habits and government: but in a German tribe the whole population lived scattered over the open country and there was no walled city, while in a Greek tribe, though most of the people lived in the open country, there was a walled city as a centre for the community and a dwelling place for a few of the most important tribesmen. It is desirable to give the word tribe such a definition as will emphasize the distinction between a tribe and a city, and I shall therefore define it as meaning a small primitive political community, living in the open country without any walled city. From this definition it follows that I must regard the German tribes alone as being perfect specimens of the genus tribe or as being tribes pure and simple: the early Greek communities, though for brevity I shall speak of them as tribes, ought in strict accuracy to be regarded as tribes which were on the way to become cities and which had already acquired some small portion of the qualities by which cities are characterized.

In Greece tribes were succeeded by cities, that is to say small communities in which a walled city is everything, and the country districts are of little importance: and similar communities arose also in Italy. The cities of ancient Greece and Italy are often further designated as city-states, and the name is rightly applied to them: for they were not only cities in the sense which I have given to the word, but were also states because each of them was an independent community with a government of its own.

But the cities of ancient Greece and Italy were not all alike: the Greek cities were inexpansive: in Italy one city expanded itself by conquering a host of other cities and absorbing their populations into its own body politic. The contrast between the inexpansive cities of Greece and the expansive city of Rome is a matter of which I hope some time to speak at length: for the present it will suffice to notice that the Athenians, the largest political community known to Greek history in the age of the city states (that is to say before 338 B.C.), inhabited a territory of less area than an average English county: while in Italy before the beginning of the second Punic war (218 B.C.) towns or fortresses peopled by fully qualified citizens of the Roman Republic were to be found scattered over all the central region from Sena Gallica in Umbria to Sinuessa in Campania, and other towns or fortresses whose inhabitants possessed the private but not the public rights of Roman citizens existed in all parts of the peninsula7. It must however be observed that Rome did not by its expansion lose the distinguishing characteristics of a city state: it still continued after its expansion over all Italy to be a community in which a single city was of supreme importance and the population remote from the city was, politically at least, of little moment: but as it was incomparably larger than any ordinary city state, we must call it not simply a city state but an enlarged or expanded city state.

The small size of the Greek cities and their incapacity for acting in concert led to their subjugation by Macedonia in 338 B.C. About sixty or eighty years later many of them had recovered their independence, and some of them, in order to guard against a second conquest by Macedonia, joined together in a league or federation. The union of many communities in a federation was not a new thing in Greek history: during several centuries that preceded the year 338 B.C. some obscure tribes of mountaineers (the AchÆans) had lived in such a union; their league had been broken up by the Macedonian conquerors, but they had been able, about 281 B.C., to reconstitute it: and the Greek cities, when they began, about 251 B.C., to see their need of mutual defence, had the AchÆan League ready at hand, and were able to gain what they needed by enrolling themselves among its members. The AchÆan League, enlarged by the admission of many important cities, was a federal state: that is to say, it was a community in which each city or canton had a government of its own for most purposes, but the federation or union of cities and cantons had also a common government for those matters which most nearly concerned the safety of them all. The League was perfectly successful till 221 B.C. in attaining the ends for which it had been established, and is remarkable as furnishing the first example in history of a well organized federal state8.

The Romans employed the strength, which they had acquired through their conquest of Italy and their success in the second Punic war, in getting possession of many distant territories inhabited by alien races. Before 146 B.C. they were masters of Macedonia, part of Asia Minor, Spain and northern Africa, and the Roman dominions presented an example of a mere political aggregate, or heterogeneous empire or number of peoples having no natural attraction for one another and held together only by force. For the rule of a heterogeneous empire the institutions of a city and even of an expanded city proved utterly unsuitable: and it was necessary that both the conquering city and the dominions which it had conquered should submit to be ruled under a centralised and despotic system of government adapted to the needs of a heterogeneous empire. The right system was only gradually made, but it had been completed by the death of the Emperor Constantine the Great in 337 A.D.

But it is time to return to the Germans: for the Germans were the successors of the Romans as masters of Western Europe. The Germans in their primitive tribal condition possessed a great aptitude for forming large political communities by the union of many small communities:—an aptitude which is probably common to all peoples in a tribal condition:—and they inhabited a flat country which put no obstacles in the way of the amalgamation of their tribes. At any rate the German tribes between 150 A.D. and 400 A.D. were engaged in a process of amalgamation. About 150 A.D. Ptolemy enumerated more than fifty of them9: by the year 400 all or nearly all of these had gathered themselves into a few great hordes or associations of tribes, (which may themselves be called overgrown tribes,) bearing severally the names of the Saxons, the Salian Franks, the Ripuarian Franks, the Angli, the Alamanni, the Burgundians, the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, the Lombards. After 400 A.D. came the great migrations of the German peoples: some of them invaded the provinces of the Western Roman Empire, still full of wealth and of such civilisation as the Romans had planted there: others, in the second half of the fifth century, betook themselves to Britain, from whence the Romans had departed in the year 407.

During the eleven centuries which intervened between the migrations of the Germans and the year 1500, the Germans who went to Britain, Spain and Gaul succeeded in forming certain large political communities which are usually known as the nations of medieval Europe. These political communities as they existed about the year 1480 or 1500 possessed three of the distinguishing features of nations: for each of them was of large size, lived under a single government, and was composed of men well suited for living together and under one government: but all of them lacked one quality which is essential for the making of a perfect nation: and that lacking quality was a strong cohesion between the inhabitants of the different parts of their territories. But it will be necessary to observe in detail the processes by which the large political communities were built up.

The Saxons, Angles, and Jutes who went to Britain established themselves at first in a number of small settlements on its southern and eastern coasts. From these settlements they gradually pushed their way inland, and by 577 A.D. they had conquered nearly all the richest and most fertile regions in Britain. The many political communities formed by settlement and conquest were soon afterwards engaged in strife with one another: in the beginning of the ninth century the West Saxons overpowered all their opponents and the West Saxon king received the submission of all the German settlers in the island. The conquering West Saxons and the conquered Angles and Jutes showed the same genius for amalgamation as had been shown by their forefathers in Germany long before: and by the middle of the ninth century all the Germans in Britain (we may now call them the English) had combined into a single large political community. Three times over, in 867-878, 988-1016, and 1066-1070, the English were disturbed by invasions of fresh immigrants from the continent of Europe: but on each occasion the new comers were successfully united in a single political community with the older settlers, and by the year 1174 or at any rate by 1215 the English people had been for the last time fashioned into one kindred under one government.

The German peoples who invaded Spain were the Vandals, the Alans, the Suevi and the Visigoths. The Visigoths proved to be the strongest of the four, and by the early years of the sixth century they had occupied nearly all the peninsula except the north east corner, which they left to the Suevi. In the enjoyment of the luxuries afforded by Roman civilisation, and in the fancied security of their position, they neglected the arts of war in which they had once so greatly excelled. In 710 A.D. their country was invaded and in the three following years was conquered by Moors from Africa, so that none of it was left to the Goths, the Suevi and some other tribes who were neither Germans nor Moors, except some valleys among the Pyrenees and a narrow strip of land about twenty miles broad and two hundred miles long between the shore of the Bay of Biscay and the mountain range of Cantabria and Asturias10.

During the five centuries which followed the Moorish conquest of Spain the Goths who lived on the shores of the Bay of Biscay and the inhabitants of the southern valleys of the Pyrenees gradually expanded by reconquering territory from the Moors, and before the middle of the twelfth century had formed the two large political communities of Castile and Arragon11. Each of these communities during its long contest with the Moors had acquired habits, thoughts and institutions of its own, and they were but little inclined to join themselves together into a single nation. The marriage of Ferdinand of Arragon with Isabella of Castile in 1469 produced as its result some time later that both Castile and Arragon were ruled by the same government: but differences and jealousies between the two peoples continued to exist long afterwards, even so late as the War of the Spanish Succession in the eighteenth century12, and it may well be doubted whether the two were ever welded together into a single Spanish nation until after the terrible misfortunes which they endured and the great efforts which they made in a common cause during their war against Napoleon.

In Gaul the formation of a large political community was delayed till late in the middle ages; in Germany, the original home of the Germans, no large political community of great importance was established till late in the seventeenth century. In both countries the same hindrances stood in the way of the making of great communities. The two countries were included in the heterogeneous empires founded between 687 A.D. and 800 A.D. by the house of Pepin, especially by Charlemagne, the greatest man of the house of Pepin: in that empire, as in all heterogeneous empires, it was found necessary that the central ruler should delegate very great powers to the officials who governed provinces or districts: and under the circumstances of the time it was also found convenient for him to grant large estates of land to men who had been useful to him and could be trusted to serve him well in the future. In 843 Gaul (or the land of the West Franks) was severed from the empire, and set up a king of its own, who pretended to have the same powers as Charlemagne had exercised. But the kings of the West Franks could not control the local officials and landowners: by the eleventh century the local officials and the landowners had converted themselves into independent sovereigns, each ruling his own lands and the men who lived on his lands: that particular landowner who still enjoyed the title of king had no authority (or at any rate no authority which he could habitually exercise) except within the lands which specially belonged to him: and even within his own lands he, like the other landowners in Gaul, found that his authority was often disputed in arms by his tenants.

In the early years of the twelfth century Louis VI., owning or claiming to own an estate or demesne of land which had Paris as its centre and measured about 140 miles from north to south and about 50 miles from east to west, set himself to establish order and government within his demesne by force of arms. The inhabitants of the demesne valued the good government and the order that was maintained among them by Louis VI. and his grandson Philip II., and when the twelfth century ended they may be counted as forming a small political community or a body of men, possessing not only a common government, but also common interests habits and wishes13. In the thirteenth century the king's demesne was increased by the acquisition of Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Poitou, Champagne in the north of Gaul, and by the distant region of Languedoc in the south. The new parts of the demesne were placed under the same government with the old, and no doubt those of them which lay together in the north of Gaul constantly tended to unite themselves into a single political community. But the work of unification was greatly impeded by causes all closely connected with the independence which the different parts of Gaul had possessed in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and it had not made very great progress in 1415 when France was invaded by the armies of the English. After the expulsion of the invaders the work was taken up again and carried on with better success by Charles VII., Louis XI. and the later kings of France.

In Germany events followed much the same course as in Gaul; but they occurred later. The extinction of the Emperor's authority and the rise of the local governors and landowners to independence did not come to pass in Germany till the middle of the thirteenth century; and none of the princes who then gained their independence succeeded during the middle ages in rising to preeminence above the rest.

In order to complete our survey of the chief political communities of the middle ages we must glance at northern Italy and Switzerland. Northern Italy contained many important towns which had been founded by the Romans: during the early part of the middle ages it became the commercial centre of Europe: the towns grew in wealth and influence, and before the year 1200 they succeeded in making themselves independent, and constituted themselves as city states, resembling the city states of ancient Greece. In Switzerland three tribes of mountaineers in Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, in 1291, agreed to form a league or permanent alliance, which was afterwards joined by many of their neighbours, though no steps towards forming a federal state were taken till about the year 150014.

It has been remarked already that the large political communities of the middle ages were not thoroughly coherent or consolidated. A want of coherence was exhibited both in France and in England by the frequent recurrence of rebellions or civil strife, in France under John II. and Charles VI., in England under Edward II., Richard II. and Henry VI.; still more clearly was it made visible in France in 1356-1360 and 1415-1422 by the inability of the French to act unitedly in resistance to an invading enemy, and by the ease with which portions of French territory were detached from the dominions of the French king and transferred to the victorious invaders. The danger of civil discord was great enough in the fifteenth century when it arose mainly from the armies of retainers kept by ambitious noblemen: but it became still greater in the sixteenth, when differences of creed divided each people into two hostile camps. The disruptive forces at length became so strong that both France and England seemed to be in danger of losing the character of political communities and of lapsing into masses of heterogeneous elements; and accordingly each country adopted that kind of government which is best suited to hold heterogeneous elements together, namely, a monarchy with almost unlimited power. The subsequent histories of the two countries, though dissimilar in general character, were in one respect alike: in both countries civil war actually occurred, in France in the sixteenth century, in England in the seventeenth; and in each country experience of the miseries of war brought a love for the blessings of peace, with the result that France from 1700 to 1789 and England from 1745 to this day present very perfect examples of united nations.

Besides the nations of France, England, Spain, Scotland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark which grew up directly from the large political communities of the middle ages, others have been founded in more recent times, some of them having only a single government, and being therefore called unitary states, and others having one government for some purposes and many governments for other purposes, and being known as federal states. Among the unitary or non-federal nations we must notice Brandenburg-Prussia 1700-1866, Italy since 1859, Belgium, Holland, Greece, and the Balkan States: among the federal nations the United States of America and modern Switzerland stand out conspicuously. The German Empire founded in 1871 is a federal nation, though it differs from other federal nations because Prussia, one of its component states, is larger than all the other component states put together: Austria Hungary was for centuries a mere heterogeneous empire, but in recent times its parts have been held together by the possession of common interests and not by force, so that it has acquired some of the characters of a federation, though it cannot be said that it has grown together into a single nation.

But the making and consolidation of nations is not the only kind of state-building that has gone on since the end of the middle ages: for other sorts of construction have also been actively carried on, and they have resulted in the making of a number of states that are larger than nations. In some cases two European nations or a European nation and some other European population have been brought under a single government: in other cases a European nation has expanded by the foundation of colonies far away from its original abode: and yet again in some cases a European state has conquered a host of non-European peoples and formed them into a heterogeneous empire dependent on itself.

The most conspicuous instances of the union of a nation with another nation or people occurred in 1683 when Alsace was acquired by France, in 1707 when England and Scotland placed themselves under one government, in 1771, 1793 and 1795 when parts of Poland were annexed to Prussia, and in 1801 when the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was formed. The enlarged states which result from such unions can never be strictly called single nations immediately after the union has taken place, and for a time at least after the union they must be denoted merely as unitary states: but usually they have not for most purposes differed very greatly from nations: for in all cases one of the two peoples united together has been a large and well consolidated nation and the other has been much smaller and far less perfectly organized: and consequently the larger partner in the union has had a predominant share in the government, and has gradually succeeded in communicating its own national characteristics and feelings to some part at least of the population of the lesser partner in the union.

A state formed by colonial expansion presents difficulties to any one who tries to define its nature. It is like a family of plants all sprung from one stock; the stock has sent out offshoots, which have themselves struck root, but are still connected with the parent stock from which they sprang. In one sense such an expanded state is still a single political community: in another sense each of the colonies which belongs to it is also a political community, though it never possesses complete independence, and therefore is not to be counted as a state.

The greatest conquerors of distant lands outside Europe have been the Spaniards, the English and the Russians. Their conquests formed three great political aggregates or heterogeneous empires, the Spanish Empire in southern and central America, the Indian Empire, and the Russian Empire. The Indian and the Russian Empires are administered by methods more or less resembling those used in the old heterogeneous Empire of the Romans by Constantine the Great and his successors: the administration of the Spaniards was very defective from the outset, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century their empire broke up into a number of independent states.

And now I may attempt a classification of all the more important forms that have been assumed by groups or collections of men living under governments. First of all, some of these groups are mere political aggregates, having little in common save the fact of living under one government, and the rest are political communities whose members have much else beside government in common. The mere aggregates will not need to be further divided; they are all heterogeneous empires held together by force. The political communities must be divided into three classes, tribes, cities, and the larger political communities. The class tribes needs no subdivision: cities must be divided according as they are inexpansive or expansive: the larger political communities (a class identical with the nations and those communities which possess many of the qualities of nations) need be subdivided only into unitary states or large political communities each with a single government only, and federal states or large political communities in which there is one government for some purposes and many governments for other purposes.

The essentials of a perfect classification are four in number. Firstly, it ought to be exhaustive or to comprehend all individual specimens, so that no individual shall be without a place in it. Secondly, the marks which distinguish the classes should be easily recognisable. Thirdly, the marks of one class should never be present in a single individual together with the marks of another: for, if they are, the individual is in two classes at once. Fourthly (and this is most essential of all), the classes should be such that many important general propositions are true of all the individuals which compose any given class.

It will be well to try to ascertain in what measure these essentials are found in a classification of European bodies politic under the five heads of tribes, cities, nations unitary and federal, and heterogeneous empires. Firstly, the classification is, I believe, so far exhaustive that it includes all those bodies which most clearly deserve to be called both political and European: it does not however provide a place for mere feudal principalities which never grew into nations, nor is it intended to include the Asiatic Empire of the Turks in Europe. Secondly, the marks which distinguish the classes are easily recognisable. Thirdly, the classification is decidedly imperfect because it does not make it impossible for a political body to be in two classes at once. But the possibility that a political body may be in two classes at once does not occur except during those periods when a community is gradually growing out of one form and into another. Such periods of transition have occurred in the history of many peoples: there was one in Greek history when the tribes were growing into cities: one in Roman history when the Republic was ceasing to be a mere enlarged city and was growing into a heterogeneous empire: and one in English history when the English were losing the character of a tribe and acquiring the qualities of a nation. But such periods of transition do not occur in the life of all peoples, and where they do occur, they are not usually of long duration when compared with the whole of the people's history. Fourthly, there are many important general propositions which are true of all or of nearly all the individuals in any given class. To establish such general propositions by historical evidence will be my task in the present chapters and in any future additions which I may be able to make to them. Some of these general propositions may be at once indicated in an imperfect form, though the proofs of them must be postponed.

The most important of these propositions are those which assert that there is an intimate connexion between the form of a political body and the form of government by which it is ruled: and that each of the forms that a political body can assume has a certain type or certain types of government commonly and almost uniformly associated with it. The propositions may be set down in the following way. Firstly, all the tribes of which we have any good records have had governments not differing from one another in any important particular. Secondly, cities pure and simple or inexpansive cities have usually three kinds of government only, pure oligarchy, or pure despotism, or direct and almost unmixed democracy: and Republican Rome, the single example of an expanded city, had a government peculiar to itself. Thirdly, in the large unitary states or nations, it is, roughly speaking, true that three kinds of government have succeeded one another in regular sequence: at first, during the middle ages, they were under governments in which power belonged partly to a king and partly to an assembly of estates, the assembly consisting usually of the nobles, the prelates of the church, and representatives from rural districts and towns: afterwards, when they were in danger of disruption, they placed themselves under monarchies of unlimited or almost unlimited power, and these monarchies usually continued to exist after all danger of disruption had been removed: and now, in modern times, all unitary states are ruled by cabinets under the control or supervision of popular representative assemblies. Turning to federal states, which form the fourth class of political communities, we find that all of them are alike in having a central government both legislative and executive, whose sphere of action is strictly limited by the constitution to certain portions of the work of governing, and in permitting each of the states, which are joined together in the federation, also to have a government of its own, which controls all business except that portion which is allotted by the constitution to the central government of the federation. And, lastly, heterogeneous empires must, unless they are to break in pieces, have governments whose chief object is centralisation. Supreme power may belong to a despotic monarch or to a small body of men appointed by a foreign state which rules the empire: but in all cases the one thing necessary is that there shall be a central supreme power and that the commands of that supreme power shall be implicitly obeyed by everyone within the empire.

It will be observed that most of the propositions which I have enumerated are qualified with a saving word or saving clause to admit the existence of exceptions. The exceptions however are not, so far as I can judge, very numerous. Among the governments of city states the Cleisthenean constitution at Athens was exceptional, since, though it was more like a democracy than anything else, it was not by any means an unmixed democracy: and some similar exceptions occur, I believe, in the earliest part of the history of some medieval cities in Lombardy. During the middle ages, it was only in those peoples which best deserved the name of large political communities or incipient nations that an effective division of power between a king and an assembly of estates was to be found, and even in them it was not maintained without occasional interruptions: in England for example there were three periods (1258-1259, 1310-1322, and 1388-1389) of pure oligarchy, and two (1200-1215, and 1397-1399) of pure despotism: among the French and in some other peoples which had not truly acquired the character of political communities, we find a semblance of a division of power, but not the reality. The assertion that the nations during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were ruled by strong monarchical governments scarcely needs any qualification: there is however a short exceptional period in English history, 1649-1653, when the government was an oligarchy; and Poland never acquired a strong monarchical government, but was punished for the absence of such a government by ceasing to exist. In the course of the French Revolution 1789-1795 there occur some seeming exceptions to the propositions about forms of government which have been enumerated: but I believe they will be found not to be exceptions, if we observe that during those years Paris was practically an independent city state.