Part 3

Beyond the certified beyond, we see dimly through the mists of history, hosts of men marching, ever marching from the east, spreading some toward Norway and Sweden, some skirting the Baltic Sea to the south; driving their cattle before them, and learning the arts of peace and war, and self-government, from the harsh school-masters of pressing needs and tyrannical circumstances, the only teachers that confer degrees of permanent value. They become fishermen and small landholders in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. "Jeudi," or Jupiter's day, becomes their god Thor's day, or Thursday; "Mardi," or Mars's day, is their Tiu's day, or Tuesday; "Mercredi," or Mercury's day, is Odin's or Woden's day, or Wednesday.

These men trained to solitude in small bands, owing to the geographical exigencies of their northern country, become the founders of the particularist or individualistic nations, Great Britain and the United States among others. Those who had gone south, driven by pressure from behind, follow the Danube to the north and west, find the Rhine, and push on into what is now southwestern Europe.

It is worth noting that the Rhine and the Danube have their sources near together, and form a line of water from the North Sea to the Black Sea, a significant line in Europe from the beginning down to this day. This line of water divides not only lands but nations, manners, customs, and even speech, and what we call the North, and what we call the South, may be said to be, with negligible exceptions, what is north and what is south of those two rivers. It is and always has been the Mason and Dixon's line of Europe.

All of these peoples mould their institutions, from the habits and customs forced upon them by their surroundings. The members of the tribe of the Suevi, now Swabians, were not allowed to hold fixed landed possessions, but were forced to exchange with each other from time to time, so that no one should become wedded to the soil and grow rich thereby. Readers of history will remember, that Lycurgus attempted similar legislation among the Spartans, hoping thus to keep them simple and hardy, and fit for war.

How many hundreds of years, these various tribes were working out their rude political and domestic laws, no man knows. The imaginative historian pushes his way through the mists, and sees that the tribes who lived in the Scandinavian peninsula were forced by their cramped territory to become fishermen and sailors, and cultivators of small areas of land, accustomed therefore to rule themselves in small groups, and hence independent and markedly individualist. Such historians divide even these rude tribes sharply between the patriarchal and the particularist. The particularist commune developed from the estate which was self-sufficient, isolated, and independent. When they were associated together it was for special and limited purposes, so that independence might be infringed upon to the least possible extent. The patriarchal commune, on the other hand, proceeded from the communal family which provided everything for everybody. It was a general and compulsory partnership, monopolizing every kind of business that might arise. The particularist group then, and their moral and political descendants now, strive to organize public authority, and public life in such a way, that they are distinctly subordinate to private and individual independence. In the one the Emperor is the father of the family -- the Russian Emperor is still called "Little Father" -- the independence of each member of the family is swallowed up in the complete authority of the head of the national family; in the other the president, or constitutional king, is the executive servant of independent citizens, to whom he owes as much allegiance as they owe to him.

In Saxony, to-day, more than ninety per cent. of the agricultural population are independent peasant proprietors, and the most admirable and successful agriculturists in the world. It is said indeed that the Curia Regis, which is the Latinized form of the Witenagemote, or assembly of wise men, of the Norman and Angevin kings, is the foundation of the common law of England, and the common law of England is the law of more than half of the civilized world.

Whatever the varieties and distinctions of government anywhere in the world, these two differences are the fundamental and basic differences, upon which all forms of government have been built up and developed.

In the one, everything so far as possible is begun and carried on by individual initiative; in the other the state gradually takes control of all enterprise. The philosophy of the one is based upon the saying: love one another; the political philosophy of the other is based upon the assumption that men are not brethren, but beasts and mechanical toys, who can only be governed by legislation and the police. The ideal of the one is the good Samaritan, the ideal of the other is the tax-collector. The one depends upon the wine and oil of sympathy and human brotherhood; the other claims that the right to an iron bed in a hospital, and the services of a state-paid and indifferent physician, are "refreshing fruit," as though sympathy and consideration, which are what our weaker brethren most need, could be distilled from taxes!

It is claimed for these Teutonic tribes, that those of them which drifted down from the Scandinavian peninsula, are the blood and moral ancestors of the particularist nations now in the ascendant in the world. The love of independent self-government, born of the geographical necessities of the situation, stamped itself upon these people so indelibly, that Englishmen and Americans bear the seal to this day. This change from the patriarchal to the particularist family took place in this German race, and took place not in those who came from the Baltic plain, but in those who came from the Saxon plain.

The tribes from the Baltic plain, the Goths, for example, merely overran the Roman civilization, spread over it; drowned it in superior numbers, and with superior valor; but it was the Germans from the Scandinavian peninsula who conquered Rome, and conquered her not by force alone, but by offering to the world a superior social and political organization. It was to this branch of the German race that Varus lost his legions, at the place where the Ems has its source, at the foot of the Teutoburger Wald. Charlemagne was of these, and his name Karl, or Kerl, or peasant, and the fact that his title is the only one in the world compounded of greatness and the people in equal measure, is the pith of what the Germans brought to leaven the whole political world. He made the common man so great, that the world has consented to his unique and superlative baptismal title of Karl the Great, or Carolus Magnus, or Charlemagne.

The pivotal fact to be remembered is that these German tribes saved Europe by their love of liberty, and by their virility, from the decadence of an orientalized Rome. Rome, and all Rome meant, was not destroyed by these ancestors of ours; on the contrary, they saved what was best worth saving from the decline and fall of Rome, and made out of it with their own vigorous laws a new world, the modern western world. Great Britain, Germany, and the United States are not descended from Egypt, Greece, or Rome, but from "those barbarians who issued from the woods of Germany."

Every school-boy should be taught that Rome died of a disease contracted from contact with the Oriental, the Syrian, the Jew, the Greek, the riffraff of the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean; who, by the way, make up the bulk of the immigration into America at this time. Rome was an incurable invalid long before the Germans took control of the western world and saved it.

When the Roman Emperor Augustus died, in 14 A. D., to be succeeded by Tiberius, the Roman Empire was bounded on the north and east by the Rhine, the Danube, the Black Sea and its southern territory, and Syria; by all the known country from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean in northern Africa on the south; and by the Atlantic Ocean as far north as the river Elbe on the west. Five hundred years later, about 500 A. D., the Barbarians, as they were called, had thrust aside the Roman Empire. The Saxons controlled the southern and eastern coasts of England; the Franks were rulers in the whole country from the Loire to the Elbe; south of them the Visigoths ruled Spain; Italy and all the country to the north and east of the Adriatic, as far as the Danube, were in the hands of the Ostrogoths. The Roman Empire had been pushed to the eastern end of the Mediterranean, with its capital at Constantinople.

In another three hundred years, or in 800 A. D., the king of one of these German tribes revived the title of Roman Emperor, was crowned by the Pope, Leo III, and governed Europe as Charlemagne. His banner with the double-headed eagle, representing the two empires of Germany and Rome, is the standard of Germany to-day. Charles Martel, who led the West against the East, defeating the Arabs in the country between what is now Tours and Poitiers, was Charlemagne's grandfather. What is now western Europe, became the home and the consolidated kingdom of the German tribes who had drifted down from the west of the Baltic, and into the Saxon plain. They had become masters in this territory: after victories over the Mongolian tribes, and the Huns under Attila, who had conquered and plundered as far as Strasburg, Worms, and Treves, and were finally defeated near what is now Chalons; after driving off the Arabs under Charles the Hammer (732); after imposing their rule upon the Roman Empire, the remains of which cowered in Constantinople, where the Ottoman Turk took even that from it in 1453, which date may well be taken as marking the beginning of modern history, and became themselves thereafter one of the first powers in Christian Europe; a power which is now, in 1912, the quarrel ground of the Western powers.

These are Brobdingnagian strides through history, to reach the days of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Froissart, and the first translation of the Bible into a vulgar tongue by Wickliffe, to the days when Lorenzo de Medici breathed Greece into Europe, and the feeling for beauty changed from invalidism to convalescence; to the days when cannon were first used, printing invented, America discovered, and the man Luther, who gave the Germans their present language by his translation of the Bible, and who delivered us from papal tyranny, born; and Agincourt, and Joan of Arc, are picturesque and poignant features of the historical landscape.

These rude German tribes had been welded by hardship and warfare, into compact and self-governing bodies. These loosely bound masses of men, women, and children, straggling down to find room and food, are now, in 1400 A. D., France, England, Austria, Germany, Scotland, and Spain. The same spirit and vigor that roamed the coasts all the way from Sweden and Norway to the mouth of the Thames, and to the Rhine, the Seine, and to the Straits of Gibraltar, are abroad again, landing on the shores of America, circumnavigating Africa, and bringing home tales of Indians in the west, and Indians in the east. This virile stock that had been hammered and hewn was now to be polished; and in Italy, France, England, and Germany grew up a passion for translating the rough mythology, and the fierce fancy of the north, into painting, building, poetry, and music.

France, Germany, England, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Italy, too, grew out of these German tribes, who poured down from the territory roughly included between the Rhine, the North Sea, the Oder, and the Danube.

As we know these countries to-day, the definite thing about them is their difference. You cross the channel in fifty minutes from Dover to Calais, you cross the Rhine in five minutes, and the peoples seem thousands of miles apart. "How did it happen," asks Voltaire, "that, setting out from the same point of departure, the governments of England and of France arrived at nearly the same time, at results as dissimilar as the constitution of Venice is unlike that of Morocco?"

One might ask as well how it happened, that the speech of one German invasion mixing itself with Latin became French, of another Spanish, of another Portuguese, of another Italian, of another English. These are interesting inquiries, and in regard to the former it is not difficult to see, that men grew to be governed differently, according as the geographical exigencies of their homes were different, and as they occupied themselves differently.

The observant traveller in the United States, may see for himself what differences even a few years of differing climate, and circumstances, and custom will produce. The inhabitants of Charleston, South Carolina, are evidently and visibly different from those in Davenport, Iowa. Two towns of similar size and wealth, Salisbury, Maryland, and Hingham, Massachusetts, are almost as different, except in speech, and even in speech the accent is perceptibly different even to the careless listener, as though Salisbury were in the south of France, and Hingham in the north of Germany. These changes and differences are only inexplicable, to those who will not see the ethnographical miracles taking place under their noses. Look at the mongrel crowd on Fifth Avenue at midday, and remember what was there only fifty years ago, and the differentiation which has taken place in Europe due to climate, intermarriage, laws, and customs seems easy to trace and to explain.

The fishermen and tillers of the soil in the Scandinavian peninsula, afterward the settlers in the Saxon plain and in England, recognized him who ruled over their settled place of abode as king; while roaming bands of fighting men would naturally attach themselves to the head of the tribe, as the leader in war, and recognize him as king. As late as the death of Charlemagne, when his powerful grip relaxed, the tribes of Germans, for they were little more even then, fell apart again. Another family like that of Pepin arose under Robert the Strong, and under Hugue Capet (987) acquired the title of Kings of France. The monarchy grew out of the weakening of feudalism, and feudalism had been the gradual setting, in law and custom, of a way of living together, of these detached tribes and clans, and their chiefs.

A powerful warrior was rewarded with a horse, a spear; later, when territory was conquered and the tribe settled down, land was given as a reward. Land, however, does not die like a horse, or wear out and get broken like a spear, and the problem arises after the death of the owner, as to who is his rightful heir. Does it revert to the giver, the chief of the tribe, or does it go to the children of the owner? Some men are strong enough to keep their land, to add to it, to control those living upon it, and such a one becomes a feudal ruler in a small way himself. He becomes a duke, a dux or leader, a count, a margrave, a baron, and a few such powerful men stand by one another against the king. A Charlemagne, a William the Conqueror, a Louis XIV is strong enough to rule them and keep them in order for a time. Out of these conditions grow limited monarchies or absolute monarchies and national nobilities.

More than any other one factor, the Crusades broke up feudalism. The great noble, impelled by a sense of religious duty, or by a love of adventure, arms himself and his followers, and starts on years of journeyings to the Holy Land. Ready money is needed above all else. Lands are mortgaged, and the money-lender and the merchant buy lands, houses, and eventually power, and buy them cheap. The returning nobles find their affairs in disarray, their fields cultivated by new owners, towns and cities grow up that are as strong or stronger than the castle. Before the Crusades no roturier, or mere tiller of the soil, could hold a fief, but the demand for money was so great that fiefs were bought and sold, and Philippe Auguste (1180) solved the problem by a law, declaring that when the king invested a man with a sufficient holding of land or fief, he became ipso facto a noble. This is the same common-sense policy which led Sir Robert Peel to declare, that any man with an income of $50,000 a year had a right to a peerage. There can be no aristocracy except of the powerful, which lasts. The difference to-day is seen in the puppet nobility of Austria, Italy, Spain, and Germany as compared with the nobility of England, which is not a nobility of birth or of tradition, but of the powerful: brewers and bankers, and statesmen and lawyers, and leaders of public opinion, covering their humble past with ermine, and crowning their achievements with coronets.

The Crusades brought about as great a shifting of the balance of power, as did later the rise of the rich merchants, industrials, and nabobs in England. As the power of the nobles decreased, the central power or the power of the kings increased; increased indeed, and lasted, down to the greatest crusade of all, when democracy organized itself, and marched to the redemption of the rights of man as man, without regard to his previous condition of servitude.

During the thousand years between the time when we first hear of the German tribes, in 113 B. C., and the year 1411, which marks the beginnings of what is now the Prussian monarchy, customs were becoming habits, and habits were becoming laws, and the political and social origins of the life of our day were being beaten into shape, by the exigencies of living together of these tribes in the woods of Germany.

There it was that the essence of democracy was distilled. Democracy, Demos, the crowd, the people, the nation, were already, in the woods of Germany, the court of last resort. They growled dissent, and they gave assent with the brandishing of their weapons, javelins, or ballots. They were called together but seldom, and between the meetings of the assembly, the executive work, the judicial work, the punishing of offenders, was left to a chosen few; left to those who by their control over themselves, their control over their families, their control over their neighbors, seemed best qualified to exercise the delegated control of all.

The chief aim of their organized government, such as it was, seems to have been to leave themselves free to go about their private business, with as little interference from the demands of public business as possible. The chief concern of each one was to secure his right to mind his own business, under certain safeguards provided by all. If those delegated to govern became autocratic, or evil-doers, or used their power for self-advancement or self-enrichment, they were speedily brought to book. The philosophy of government, then, was to make men free to go about their private business. That the time might come when politics would be the absorbing business of all, dictating the hours and wages of men under the earth, and reaching up to the institution of a recall for the angel Gabriel, and a referendum for the Day of Judgment, was undreamed of. The chiefs of the clans, the chiefs of the tribes, the kings of the Germans, and finally the emperors were all elective. The divine right of kings is a purely modern development. The descendants of these German tribes in England, elected their king in the days of William the Conqueror even, and as late as 1689 the Commons of England voted that King James had abdicated, and that the throne was vacant!

The so-called mayors of the palace, who became kings, were in their day representatives of the landholders, delegates of the people, who advised the king and aided in commanding the armies. These hereditary mayors of the palace drifted into ever greater and greater control, until they became hereditary kings. The title was only hereditary, however, because it was convenient that one man of experience in an office should be succeeded by another educated to, and familiar with, the same experiences and duties, and this system of heredity continues down to this day in business, and in many professions and so long as there is freedom to oust the incompetent, it is a good system. There can never be any real progress until the sons take over the accumulated wisdom and experience of the fathers; if this is not done, then each one must begin for himself all over again. The hereditary principle is sound enough, so long as there is freedom of decapitation in cases of tyranny or folly.