J. M. Robertson

A GENERAL VIEW OF DECADENCE

We are now, perhaps, in a position to contemplate the wood without being distracted by the trees, and without forgetting, on the other hand, that it is an aggregate of trees individually conditioned by aggregation.

The record of GrÆco-Roman, as of all other ancient civilisation, with the partial exception of that of China, is one of a complete decadence—in this case a twofold decadence: a passing from collective energy and achievement to collective decrepitude and mental impotence, from intellectual freedom and force to the dogmatic arrest of thought, from artistic splendour to the very negation of the finest forms of art. However we may dispute about the nature of progress, we all agree that this was decadence. Not even the Christian Greek, the least freethinking of educated moderns, supposes that the life of his race went upwards from the time of Constantine. The Italian to this day aspires—by way of Tripoli, among other things—to bear some comparison with the Roman, whose "greatness" he envies. Decadence, then, is confessed. It concerns us, if we would have a historical philosophy at all, to think it all in terms of general causation.

At the outset, we shall do well to realise that in the long transmutation there was no day, save those of sudden and dire disaster, on which the human elements of the State organisms concerned were collectively conscious of any great change in their way of life. And days of dire disaster had occurred in the times to which we look back as those of energetic expansion. Early Rome had been actually captured by Etruscans, by Gauls; "she" had ostensibly come to the verge of overthrow by Hannibal a whole era before she was sacked by the Goths; Athens had been sacked by the Persians long before the Roman invasion. What was the determining difference in the consciousness of the citizens at the two epochs? Clearly that between the minds of men wont to "fend for themselves" collectively and of men wont to be ruled and prescribed for by a master—a difference, therefore, in power of resistance and of recovery. And this difference had itself been wrought by long mutations—from the day of Sulla to the day of Tiberius in Rome, from the day of Alexander to that of Sulla in Greece. No one generation had been born in full "freedom," to pass away in complete subordination to an autocrat. The earlier generations, like the later, had been habituated to slave-owning, superstition, and the thought of war. The substantial and fatal change was in the degree of simple average manhood among the free. National decadence, in a word, is loss of manhood—a thing not easily lost.

A Conservative statesman of our day, wont to apply analytic criticism chiefly for partisan purposes, has attempted a comparatively disinterested analysis of the problem before us, in a short but not inconsiderate survey of the decadence of the old world. At the outset he rightly notes the inconsistency with which men still tend to hold by the old idea of an inevitable ageing and ultimate decrepitude of States and civilisations, while holding no less confidently to the modern notion, practically unattained by the ancients, of an inevitable progress. "Why," he asks, "should civilisations thus wear out and great communities decay? and what evidence is there that in fact they do?"[429] It may or may not be by reason of political bias that the questioner—who indeed avows that he is pursuing one of "those wandering trains of thought where we allow ourselves the luxury of putting wide-ranging questions, to which our ignorance forbids any confident reply"—propounds no clear answer to either query, contenting himself with suggesting that modern civilisation, in virtue of its strengthening hold on physical science, stands a chance of escaping the doom that fell on the old. But such a curtailed answer moves us afresh to seek a more complete one.

Our questioner, contemplating the "fall" of Rome, argues that the cause cannot have been even so serious an evil as slavery, which had been in operation from the beginning. He overlooks the fact that it had greatly increased in the period of far-reaching conquest,[430] and so misses an element in the solution. Passing over this, he recognises one proximate "cause," diminution of population; and he in effect seems to trace to this source the secondary factor of fiscal collapse—the breaking down of the tax-paying classes everywhere under the ever-increasing burden of State exaction. The final fiscal process he oddly describes as "a crude experiment in socialism." Putting the decay of population and the increase of burdens together, he pronounces that "they absolutely require themselves to be explained by causes more general and more remote"; and his answer—confessedly a mere restatement of the problem—is just the word "Decadence." The process is simply formulated, once more, in terms of its name. The questioner does not even take the further analytical step of asking how the Eastern Empire came to endure a thousand years longer than the Western; and why the decadence did not similarly operate there.

If anything has been made out in the foregoing survey, we have got further than this; and indeed from any point of view the arrest of the analysis is surprising. Supposing failure of population to be the central phenomenon, we have obviously to ask: What were the political differentia of the progressive and the ostensibly declining states of population? How were the peoples ruled when they were strong, expansive, and collectively equal to their burdens? Surely the answer is obvious. Republican Greece and Republican Rome were self-governing communities, or aggregates of such, supporting themselves by individualist production of all kinds, breeding beyond and not under the apparent limit of food-production. When Romanised Italy ceased to produce a sufficiency of men, she had ceased to produce a sufficiency of things; and this latter failure, entailing the other, can be shown to have been a direct result of the exaction of all manner of subsistence from conquered territories. So far, there is no mystery.

Our querist, however, affirms a diminution of population not only in Italy but throughout the Empire. Here we must first question the assertion. Pestilences, such as that of 166 A.C., doubtless visited most parts of the Empire; but pestilences belong also to the pre-imperial period, and need not here be specially considered. As to Greece, the facts have been already given. The depopulation of that, after Alexander, was primarily a matter of exodus to the richer conquered lands, where a new Hellenistic civilisation arose under purely monarchic rule, and therefore unaccompanied by the all-round, self-developing mental energy which had marked the life of "free" Greece. In Byzantium, of course, the mental stagnation, under Christian autocracy, was no less complete. But there is no evidence whatever that after Constantine the principle of population failed in the Eastern Empire, especially when that was restricted by the amputation of the tributary territories.[431]

Did population then fail in Gaul and Spain and Africa? If so, when? As to Gaul, there is evidence that after the conquest population and productivity increased, though the latter had not previously been low—witness the loot taken by CÆsar at Toulouse. Gaul was certainly taxed exorbitantly; but Julian, as we saw, prudently lessened the drain; and Mommsen describes both Gaul and Spain as flourishing in their Romanised period.[432] They continued, in fact, to be, with North Africa, the main sources of the revenue of the Western Empire down to its collapse. Materially, they in some respects went forward, notably in the case of the region of old Carthage. The element wherein they were decadent was precisely that of free manhood, everywhere eviscerated by autocratic and bureaucratic rule. Therefore it was that, like Britain—similarly productive of revenue in the imperial period—they were unable to defend themselves against the final barbarian inroads. Had Honorius carried out his scheme for a measure of Home Rule in Gaul,[433] and followed it up by a similar scheme for Spain, Italy indeed might all the sooner have lost her hold on them as milch kine, but both provinces might conceivably have developed a new life centuries before they historically did.

The Conservative statesman has in fact, and very naturally, excluded from consideration the central political factor. Echoing the Gibbon-Mommsen-Renan thesis as to the excellence of the Antonine government of the Mediterranean world, he ignores as those writers did the vital problem: Wherein lies the felicity of a world wholly at the mercy of the chance of the election of a good emperor by a mercenary soldiery? To fall back on phrases about the Empire "respecting local feelings, encouraging local government," and being "accepted by the conquered as the natural organisation of the world," is merely to burke the real issue as to the political viability of communities satisfied with such a system, content to rest the social pyramid forever on its apex. To say that the conditions of the Empire under the Antonines were "getting better" is merely to close the eyes to the frightful hazard of imperial succession. A world absolutely dependent for its betterment—nay, even for its safe continuance—on the chance of a good succession of despots is a world doomed by the mere law of variation.

If we will but gauge moral and economic forces in human affairs as we gauge physical forces in that toil of science of which the Conservative statesman has learned to recognise the efficacy, we shall deliver ourselves from the mystery-mongering which he is fain to substitute for the old shibboleth of "the divine will." To trace causation in a known civilisation is not to pretend either to understand all social sequences in all ages or to predict the destinate future: it is but to recognise the real reactions of human proclivities and procedures which habit and prejudice have been wont to contemplate uncritically. The late Sir John Seeley, who at times hardly advances on Kingsley as an interpreter of history, grappled in his day with our problem; and he too specified the Antonine age as a notably hopeful period, from which he dates the decadence:—

"A century of unparalleled tranquillity and virtuous government is followed immediately by a period of hopeless ruin and dissolution. A century of rest is followed not by renewed vigour, but by incurable exhaustion. Some principle of decay must have been at work; but what principle? We answer: it was a period of sterility or barrenness in human beings; the human harvest was bad. And among the causes of this barrenness we find, in the more barbarous nations, the enfeeblement produced by the too abrupt introduction of civilisation and universally the absence of industrial habits, and the disposition to listlessness which belongs to the military character."[434]

One is tempted to apply the theory of human crops to the case of the chair of history at Cambridge. Prof. Seeley's theory is an edifying variant on that of Mr. Balfour. Where one thesis finds the key to all in the emperor, the other sees failure of the human harvest the moment the imperial succession goes wrong. And while the Professor offers the semblance of a reason for the alleged failure in the human breed, it is really too nugatory for discussion. If the "barbarous nations" alluded to were Gaul and Spain, they had suffered the "abrupt introduction of civilisation" more than two hundred years before. Egypt and Syria and Greece and North Africa had older civilisations than the Roman. Germany was not decadent. The decay of industrial life in Italy had begun long before the Empire. As well might we say that a bad human crop there had preceded the Etruscan conquest, the invasion by Hannibal, and the civil wars. To cite, as does Prof. Seeley, the pestilence of the year 166 as a beginning of depopulation, is to ignore the problem of three hundred years of previous depopulation in Italy, and to set up a misconception as to the rest of the Empire. According to Gibbon, the long pestilence of the years 250-265 was the worst of all.[435]

More plausibly, Prof. Seeley goes on to argue that "what the plague had been to the population, that the fiscus was to industry. It broke the bruised reed; it converted feebleness into utter and incurable debility. Roman finance had no conception of the impolicy of laying taxation so as to depress enterprise and trade. The fiscus destroyed capital in the Roman Empire. The desire of accumulation languished where the Government lay in wait for all savings—locupletissimus quisque in prÆdam correptus. All the intricate combinations by which man is connected to man in a progressive society disappeared."[436] But this is a finally excessive description of a process which had been in full swing in the time of Cicero, and which subsisted for three hundred years after Marcus Aurelius in the West. A generation after Marcus came the powerful Severus, whose son Caracalla could find millions of money to build his immense baths at Rome, still monstrous in their ruins; and seventy years after Caracalla, Diocletian, wielding the Empire at its utmost extension, could build still vaster baths for the imperial city at which he had ceased to dwell. With a debased silver coinage,[437] the emperors of that day seemed to feel no fatal lack of real revenue, and maintained, at great cost, huge armies for the control and defence of their enormous realm.

It is impossible to see why the age of the Antonines should be taken as a turning point in the Empire's history rather than the age of Diocletian. That great organiser seems to have partly provoked the insurrection of the Bagaudae in Gaul by taxation; but the Bagaudae were a jacquerie oppressed by the nobles, as their fathers had been before CÆsar, and as their posterity was long afterwards; and their wrongs may as well have been at the hands of their lords as at those of the autocrat.[438] However that might be, Roman rule in Gaul survived the revolt of the Bagaudae, yielding a great revenue to Constantine; and at the time of the fall of Rome Gaul was much more productive than Italy. All this is beside the case. To say that "the downfall of the Empire is accounted for" by the fiscus[439] is to raise the question whether the Empire, as such, could have been run by any other method. The Professor himself pronounces that "Government in its helplessness was driven" to fiscal oppression. Then fiscal oppression belonged to the nature of the Empire. Once more we return to the true line of sequence and explanation. Every step and stage in decadence belonged to the process of conquest, of confiscation, of subjection of foreign races, who were made to pay for the vast machinery that kept them subject till they were unfit for self-defence.

There is a danger that, in insisting on the primarily moral causation of the process of social disease and decay, we may on the one hand relapse into a delusive sense of moral superiority, and on the other hand fail to realise how the subjective moral divagation becomes politically effectual in structural and economic change. It is the understood process of causation that is alone truly instructive. But the instruction is deepened in the ratio of our realisation of the decay. Though it is clear that before Rome many a civilisation had gone to violent wreck, there is in recorded history no more overwhelming memory of long triumph and long downfall than that "from the far-distant morning when a small clan of peasants and shepherds felled the forests on the Palatine to raise altars to its tribal deities, down to the tragic hour in which the sun of GrÆco-Latin civilisation set over the deserted fields, the abandoned cities, the homeless, ignorant, and brutalised peoples of Latin Europe."[440] And this whole tremendous arc of triumph and decline is to be understood as the historic expression of the specially conditioned bias of conquest in one people.

The decline is the due sequence of the "rise": everything roots in the wrong relation of communities throughout the Empire. The extension of such a social disease as slavery is one of the symptoms, one of the sequelÆ, of the central malady.[441] A totally progressive State eliminates or minimises slavery; a declining one fails to do so. The economic malady involved affects primarily the dominant or parasitic State or central part, its condition of parasitism being more deadly than its draining effect on the others. Their malady lay in their state of subjugation, which was an impoverishment of character and political faculty; and thus it came about that the collapse of the centre of organisation meant the fall of the entire civilisation of Western Europe before the new barbarism.

Rome had so visibly ruined all that we are apt to forget how the process of moral and political retrogression had begun in the Greek world long before. There, however, the Roman conquest was but a consummation; and the economic and political continuance of the Eastern Empire was concurrent with a moral and intellectual contraction which was never recovered from. In a word, varying conditions determined the differences of continuance and evolution in the two spheres. But the causation is none the less clear throughout.

It might be supposed that this reverberating lesson could have been read in only one way—as a warning to the nations against taking the Roman road of conquest and dominion. And yet it is doubtful whether modern States have been at all guided by that lesson, as compared with the extent to which they have been overruled by the sheer difficulty of repeating the evolution. The problem has been faced by Lord Cromer, a ripe ruler, in his very scholarly essay on Ancient and Modern Imperialism. The experienced administrator is quite alive to the analogy between the part played of old by Rome around the Mediterranean and in Europe, and that played to-day by England in India and, in some measure, in Egypt. Raised in some degree above the ordinary hallucination of mere dominion, the confused pride of the average man in his country's rule over large portions of the earth, the veteran governor notes that, whereas there was a general acquiescence of the subject peoples in the imperial rule of Rome, no imperium to-day has won any such cordial acceptance.[442] Neither France in Algeria and Tunis nor Britain in India and Egypt is an assimilating and unifying power. We may note the proximate explanation, which he does not at first give—to wit, the sundering force of crystallised religious systems. As he later puts it, following Sir Alfred Lyall, religions make nations, where the Romans had to deal with tribes.[443] But that need not greatly affect our view of the political problem, which would remain if the religious factor were eliminated; and it is over the political problem that Lord Cromer most significantly balances.

Falling back on the method of fatalism, he pronounces, like others before him, "that Rome, equally with the modern expansive Powers, more especially Great Britain and Russia, was impelled onwards by the imperious and irresistible necessity of acquiring defensible frontiers; that the public opinion of the world scoffed 2,000 years ago, as it does now, at the alleged necessity; and that each onward move was attributed to an insatiable lust for extended dominion."[444] As in all fatalistic reasoning, we are here faced by radical self-contradiction. The "public opinion of the world," which Lord Cromer allows to include a large part of Roman opinion,[445] could not scoff at an "irresistible necessity": it knew that it was no more irresistibly necessary for A to conquer B than for B to conquer A; and in ascribing to Rome an "insatiable lust for extended dominion" it merely credited Rome with an appetite known to inhere in all States. Rome succeeded in her aim; others failed. Pisa, overborne by Florence, had in her day overborne other communities. Lord Cromer has begged the vital question, which is: Can States, or can they not, live neighbourly? To say that Rome could not because of the ambitions or menaces of others is idle: the menace was reciprocal.

For practical purposes, of course, the thesis is sometimes adequate all round, as when France and Britain, face to face in North America and in India, strove each to oust the other. But at times the plea becomes visibly farcical, as in the recent case of Russia in the Far East, and the earlier case of Britain with regard to Afghanistan. We can all remember the temporary growth of the doctrine of "a scientific frontier." First you want a river; then you need the territory beyond the river; then you need the line of hills commanding that territory; then the territory behind the hills becomes a sine qua non.[446] In this case the doctrine has disappeared with the policy, and that disappeared simply because it failed. The event has proved that the doctrine was a chimera. And nobody to-day probably will maintain that Russia lay under an imperious and irresistible necessity to go and be defeated by the Japanese in Manchuria; or that she could not conceivably have stopped short of that extremity.

The use sometimes made of the word "cupidity" is apt to obscure the problem. There is cupidity of power and conquest as well as of territory, revenue, plunder. Roman cupidity was of all kinds. But so was that of "the" Greeks. Lord Cromer employs the old false dichotomy—above discussed—that marks the Greeks as "individualistic" and the Romans as somehow unitary.[447] As we have seen, the original Roman City-State was just the same kind of thing as the Greek: it was opportunity that made "the Romans" expand, whereas "the Greeks," down to Alexander, remained segregated in their States. What was common and fatal to both, what led Greece to dissolution and Rome to downfall, was the primary impulse to combat, the inability to refrain from jealousy, hate, and war. And for the moderns, seeing this, the problem is, Can they refrain?

Either we are thus to learn from history, or all history is as a novel without a purpose. And Lord Cromer, as a man of action, cannot in effect take this attitude, though he recoils from any clear statement of the lesson. On the one hand, he makes the most of the differentia between ancient and modern Imperialism. English rulers in India, he admits, originally aimed at home revenue, and did for a time practise sheer plunder;[448] the British rule no longer does either: which is in effect an admission that one "imperious and irresistible necessity" of the Roman rule has been successfully resisted—shall we say, by modern enlightenment? But he will not frankly take the further step and say that for the ideal of dominion over backward races we should substitute the ideal of their education and purposive evolution. Rather he makes the most of the difficulties, enlarging in the familiar fashion on the dividedness and differentiation of the Indian peoples and the relative stationariness of Islam: two undeniable propositions, of which the first is nothing to the purpose, since we are discussing the lines of progressive policy; while the second merely incurs the rejoinder that Christendom was long as stationary as Islam, and that Christian Abyssinia is so still.

As was, indeed, to be expected, Lord Cromer will rather homologate the whole Roman process, decadence and collapse and all, than pronounce it what it was, a vast divagation in human progress. Ultimately he does not even blench at the proposition that the whole ruin "had to" take place[449] by way of preparing for the civilisation that was to follow, even as he argues that "the" Romans "had to" undertake fresh wars where they (on the urging, as he admits, of their wisest men) had sought to evade further conquest by recognising "buffer States"[450]—as who should say that whatever course a majority or a Government do take "had to" be taken. The answer to such reasoning is the mention of the fact, which he admits, that it was "a supreme principle of the Roman Government to acknowledge no frontier Power with equal rights."[451] Can it be still a question whether that principle is to be transcended?

On the final issue as to what the ruling nations "have to" do to-day as regards the subject peoples, the disinterested student can hardly hesitate, however the ex-administrator may feel bound to balance. "The Englishman," Lord Cromer tells us, truly enough as regards the average citizen, "would be puzzled to give any definite answer" to the question Quo vadis? in matters imperial.[452] He may well be, when Lord Cromer visibly is, despite the ostensible emphasis with which he exhorts his countrymen to keep "the animus manendi strong within them."[453] The danger is that, noting the formal conclusion rather than the implicit lesson of Lord Cromer's very able survey, "the Englishman" may turn from his puzzle to some new insanity of imperialism. Not many years have passed since English wiseacres were speculating on a "break-up" of China, and a dominion of some other State over her huge area and multitudinous millions. He would be a bad sample of modernity who should now regret that China is apparently on the way, like Japan, to build up a new progressive civilisation in the "unchanging East."[454] But it is perhaps as much to the sheer impracticability of further great conquests as to any alert and conscious reading of the lesson of history that we owe the growing disposition of modern States to seek their good in their own development. If so, provided that the ideal be changed, "it is well, if not so well."