\WA^o ^"^..^^ J ^ ^.p-. .0- V^ ^ ^ • • ' ^ //Aw^ %. y '^' : /v '^mm^ ^^'^ • -^^^^ c^'^ ^'^%f/k^. ^^ .^^ .^ EUROPE'S Handicap- Tribe AND Class By L. p. GRATACAP AUTHOR OF "Why the Democrats Must Go" And when you hear historians talk of thrones And those that sat upon them, let it be As we now gaze upon the mammoth's bones, And wonder what old world such things could see. — Don Juan New York Thomas Benton 1915 y. G6 Copyright, 1915 By L. P. Gratacap m 151915 THE EDDY PRESS CORPORATION CUMBERLAND, MARYLAND CI.A414576 J ARMAGEDDON ;;^ The air is vibrant, tense, and o'er all lands There broods a shadow dread, as of despair, ^ That chills all hope and deadens even prayer! ^ From Thule far to India's burning sands And where the waves of Ocean break on strands Remote, 'neath Southern constellations fair, All eyes are turned to Europe where Flame War's red ensign and its blazing brands! Earth shudders at the sound of conflict dire As on a threefold battleline are flung The mightiest hosts the world has seen, on fire With battle's lust of blood, while high uphung, In balance stern of God, there hangs the fate Of Empires that the dread decision wait! And now that mighty maelstrom slowly draws With ever-widening sweep and whelming might The nations that have stood aloof I Despite Their wish and will they now are swept, like straws. In narrowing circles, nearing the dread Jaws Of Ruin, threatening to engulf them quite — Helpless to stem the swirl, escape the blight Of fateful war which now the whole world awes! Within the shadow of the Pyramids, And to the lands where history began, And Ocean's isles. War's challenge comes and bids The nations turn to Europe's battle- van! Is this the doom the ancient Prophets show? Are Armageddon's thunders rumbling low? H. T. Sudduth CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. The Tribe 9 II. The System of Class 22 III. The Confusion of Tribes 34 IV. The Origins of Class 81 V. Tribal Wars and Class Domination . 120 VI. Religious Bigotry and the Inquisition Products of Tribe and Class . . . 192 VII. The Present War 205-- VIII. America's Neutrality 288 IX. Germanization 295 FOREWORD Almost every one has said something about the present war, and they have said very different things. Even when agreeing in their general contentions, their idiosyncrasies of feeling, their guise of mind, or some intangible residue of faith, as with the ministers, have made them impart to any notion they have of it, a separate though not always an easily distinguishable tone. At any rate they have not exactly repeated each other. The statesmen have championed their countries, the wits have satirized their own countries, and other people's countries, 'the poets and senti- mentalists have been eloquent, touching, and effective, the college professors and presidents have displayed wisdom, (as for what else are they made for?) ransacked history, and professor and presi- dent-like have gravely instructed an inferior world about it, and the observers, those who have been in the battles, in the cities, behind and before the scenes, have picturesquely noted much. The essayists (Chesterton, Wells, Shaw, Belloc, Ellis, Millioud, Delbruek, etc.) have risen to un- equalled heights of sarcasm, biting analysis, and hammer-like emphasis of triple-tongued sentences, and the pacifists, the clergy, the various afflicted companies of the deuteroscopoi, have seen in it DESTINY, the hand of GOD, the prelude to the Everlasting Peace, the Rise of Democracy, and almost anything else their fervent hearts, and spiritualized minds and thirsting imaginations de- sired to see in it. But no one specifically has written of it as an Enemy of Europe, as one who would welcome Europe's wholesale destruction, in a political and social way; as an irreconcilable American, as a pervert, if you like, to an ultra Star-Spangled-Bannerism, and yet one not a socialist, or a mobocrat, not an I. W. W. not an agnostic, or an atheist, not a suffragist, or one in any way interested in the afflictions of Progressiv- ism. This book has been written by him. EUROPE'S HANDICAP- TRIBE AND CLASS CHAPTER I The Tribe The tribe is the first social unit that marks the emergence from savagery of the aboriginal man, unless indeed under a supernatural interpretation we assign the beginnings of society to divine guid- ance. That interpretation has only a restricted value, locally and philosophically, and in the gregarious invention of the TRIBE we encounter man's first instincts in government. The under- lying ethnic propulsions that secured the social coherence called the TRIBE were probably simple, certainly not lofty, the mere animality of herding, the mere animality of breeding, the mere animality of securing food and help against enemies, were its useful and necessary causes. Underlying the tribe idea, quite aboriginally and universally was the idea of kinship, by a common origin in an original parent. We are told, (Sir Henry Sumner Maine), that it has been found "that among rude and partially nomad communi- ties great numbers of kindred, whom we should keep apart in mind, and distinguish from one another in language, are grouped together in great classes and called by the same general names. Every man is related to an extra- 10 Europe's Handicap — ordinary number of men called his brothers, to an extraordinary number called his sons, to an extra- ordinary number called his uncles". John Richard Green no less emphatically asserts the family bond of early tribal societies among the Anglo-Saxons. He says, (History of the English People) ; ''kinsmen fought side by side in the hour of battle, and the feelings of honor and discipline which held the host together, were drawn from the common duty of every man in each little group of warriors to his house. And as they fought side by side on the field, so they dwelled side by side on the soil. Harling abode by Harling, and Billing by Billing; and each 'wick' or 'ham' or 'stead' or 'tun' took its name from the kinsmen who dwelled together in it." The tribal incentives we have enumerated made the first co-operative societies, and because all these exigencies were extremely personal, that developed in the tribe a distinct centralization of interest, which excluded all consideration of others rights, or at least overwhelmed their considera- tion in the more practical and indulgent emphasis of their own. Everything in an aboriginal en- vironment reinforced this centripetal tendency. Self-preservation, as the first law of nature com- pletely sways all primordial society. The TRIBE becomes the macrocosm of the human units it encloses. What they are, it is. The passions of the individual are added together in the passions of the TRIBE, and in the tribe the passions gain- ing in mass, gain in impetus, and obliterate reason. Tribe and Class 11 But there is something more ominous. Primal instincts are ferocious. Hate, Envy, Revenge, Jealousy, Pride, Avarice, Lust, possess a fearful sway in the aboriginal heart, but they are occa- sional, spasmodic, accidental, varying in tempera- ments, varying in violence and individual traits. Under the culture of economic interests and tribal elation, when they express the consolidated egot- ^ism of a group, they become fixed, inherited, and irritable. As primal emotions in individuals, they come and go like storms in the sky, but as rooted entities in character, when the TRIBE assumes them, they secure an impregnable regnancy in the feeling of the tribe, and are always observable, or felt or exercised. They enter then into the racial texture; they constitute a good portion of racial antipathies, and may always underlie an apparent amiable or apathetic intercourse, hidden but potential. The TRIBE sentiment never dies out, the accidents of livingonly deepen, perpetuate, dignify it, and it may, under the soothing ascrip- tions of self-importance grow into a coercing pas- sion of itself, a passion, though, rooted in the less admirable germs we have named, viz. Hate, Envy, Revenge, Jealousy, and the rest. This tribal state is evinced in all tribal societies, in the Indian of North America, the aborigines of Australia, the blacks of Africa, the gregarious gangs of South America. The sentiment of the TRIBE, the conservative Impulse of kinship Is a step in the evolution of higher societies, less rudl- mentally or elementally fierce or craven than the 12 Europe's Handicap — individual wild man. Its fiercer aspects may be absent in some tribes, rampant in others, exactly as men are brave or cowardly, unambitious or ambitious, restless or subdued. But the tribal psychology is unmistakable. Let us see. It is Maine again — surely a safe authority — who writes (Early History of Institutions), "There was no brotherhood recognized by our savage forefathers except actual consanguinity regarded as a fact. If a man was not of kin to another there was noth- ing between them. He was an enemy to be slain, or spoiled, or hated, as much as the wild beasts upon which the tribe made war, as belonging in- deed to the craftiest and the crudest order of wild animals. It would scarcely be too strong an asser- tion that the dogs which followed the camp had more in common with it than the tribesmen of an alien and unrelated tribe." The tribal organization is dominant all over the ancient world. I mean the world of men before the rise of equality under the dispensation of law and the enunciation of a society based on merit, service, and the prerogatives of endowment. Of course there was equality in the TRIBE a coarse brutal equalness, unenlightened by any moral considerations or any sense of the innate glory of manhood, except as that manhood was strong, muscular, brave, fearless, and triumphantly effec- tive in fighting, which, before the christian or the Jewish ideals of the dignity of the more spiritual virtues, was well enough. For the most part it was the equality of the members of a pack of cattle, Tribe and Class 13 qualified by the emergence of the more vivid emo- tions in a being separated from the brute by all the wide interval of intelligence and feeling. The later stages of political advancement in the better circumstanced and endowed tribal com- munities of south eastern Europe, gave rise to the Grecian communities and the Roman nation. In the former we are taught, in the over-perfumed language of Edward A. Freeman, to see "the native land of art and song and wisdom, and more glori- ous still the native land of law and freedom", and in the latter a nation that "won the political dominion of the world by her arms, and kept her hold of it by her abiding Law". But we are not told that in both we can ciiscern the ferocity and cruelty, the jealousies, the meannesses and lusts, the animality in short of the TRIBE. Before the invasion of Greece by the Persians its innumerable communities — direct heirs of the tribal state — , bound by no common tie and influenced by the fluctuating pressure of envy or interest, were politically segregated into alliances that fell apart at the slightest shock, to be arranged into new groups, like the color dislocations in a kaleidoscope. The republics were cities, with some adjoining territory or islands, and the as- perity of their mutual jealousies, like that of quarrelsome or suspicious neighbors, abetted their continual contrivances to advance individual ends or circumvent those of others. Except at the invasion of Greece by the Persians, and the threatened conquest of its liberties by Philip, 14 Europe's Handicap — Grecian public sentiment was seldom engaged in any exalted issue. The evanescent surfaces of interest, intrigue and superstition, enmity, or friendship, alone, at other times, reflected the party sympathies of its citizens. As to Rome there was gradually separated from the first elements of government in Rome, which involved the idea of the family and the TRIBE, two orders of society, contrasted by their wealth and social position. The one a class of rank, prestige, and endowment, the Patrician, the other a class not technically endued with these marks, though its individuals may have acquired opulence and fame, the plebeian. The conflict between these classes formed the two great parties whose incessant contest, recriminations, and alternate depredations upon each other make the internal history of Rome a long chronicle of social disorder. When the Gracchi were over thrown the rage and vengeance of the higher orders succeeded, and the republic became successively the prey of Marius and Sulla, until its confusion and political chaos, in which the seeds of individual arrogance, self- indulgence, and fanaticism bore fruit in accumu- lated crimes, issued in the establishment of the monarchy. To the north in the vast centres of Europe where pullulated the teutonic hordes, later to absorb the higher civilizations of the south, the tribal facies was maintained in its purity, undis- turbed by the sophistications that half or wholly concealed the imbedded tribal characteristics of Tribe and Class 15 Greece and Rome. But the history of the teu- tonic tribes, of the Grecian city-commonwealths, of the Roman nation, expresses, at all times and everywhere, the tribal status of warfare, with its attendant horrors, with its baser passions, its carnage, its racial turpitudes of hate and jealousy, of bitterness and aggressions. This is absolutely incontrovertible. No enamel of art, no succeda- neous professions of freedoms in Grecian societies hide the innate bitterness of their reciprocal hatreds, nor have they ameliorated the actual cruelties of their retaliations; and no high-sound- ing ascriptions of merit in their initial formulation of Law, saves the Roman Republic from the in- criminating accusations of its own historians of ruthless slaughters. Human butchery is the san- guinary records of all tribal history as we read it in that early day, and the monotonous nauseating pages of its recital appear circumstantially and con- tinuously in the formative and in the later eras of those much admired social and political entities — Greece and Rome — and no decoration of tech- nical analysis as to their contributory influences on later civilizations, will hide, for an instant, the tribal blood-thirstiness of their vengeances, the tribal brutalities of their punishments and tor- tures, the tribal excesses of their selfishness and arrogance. These cultural growths in civilization in southern Europe were infiltrated with barbar- ism — tribal barbarism — the tribal barbarism that down to this present moment has tinctured the history of all Europe with disgrace. 16 Europe's Handicap — And as for the rest of Europe In that early hour of its emergence from the dark and hidden past of quaternary and post tertiary neolithic and palaeo- lithic man, it's history by a calculable likelihood, though its accidents and features remain dimly seen, or revealed by fits and starts behind the lurid curtain of endless conflict, was an interminable drama of intertribal discords. It would obscure the conclusions of this essay, and prove incomparably irksome as well, to analyze, in the different nations of Europe, the tribal heterogeneity of each. That is surely well established as historic fact, and in the survey of the present nationalities of Europe, the composite structure of the eastern over the western is strik- ingly seen. The greater concentration and as- similation of parts into a comparatively homoge- neous ethnic result, appears in France, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Norway, even in Spain and Portugal, and a contrasted complex, more obviously dissonant and obstreperously con- flicting, in Russia, Austria, Hungary, and in Ger- many, though in all of these countries at this moment sufficient solidarity is maintained to carry on a stupendously desolating war, as separate autonomous governments. ' Without go- ing further, the titles of the Emperor of Austria in the protocols of the Chancellery illustrate, in his case the tribal diversity of his subjects. It reads; Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, and of Bohemia, of Dalmatia, Croatia and Slavonia, of Galicia and Lodomeria,king of Illyria, grand duke Tribe and Class 17 of Austria, of Bukowina, of Styria, Carniola, of Carinthia, grand prince of Silesia, margrave of Moravia, count of Hapsburg, and the Tyrol. And the long lists of names appropriated to de- scribe the elements of the various nations, in their formative period, shows the nomadic confusion of peoples, in the early centuries, crowding on the European stage. Now what is the Psychosis of the Tribe? The Tribe is the lowest condition of human compacts in government, or in society. Europe has never quite extricated itself from its former tribal dis- abilities, even when these latter seem the least apparent, as perhaps in England or France. It has quite ostentatiously retained them elsewhere, where the tribal meanness and lowness, always discoverable anywhere throughout Europe, is stamped in unmistakable lineaments upon na- tional conduct. In what does this tribal lowness consist? Probably in four things; the Bigotry of Blood, the domineering conviction of superiority; the Indulgence of Passion, the unchecked sway of rapacity and hate, with the inevitable con- comitants of cruelty, heartlesness, and oppression; The Rage of Vindictiveness, the animal satisfac- tion of Vengeance; the Pride of Fighting, the love of combat, which implies probably the noblest feature of the tribal state, viz. heroism and devo- tion, along with the less admirable implications of tyranny, insult, abuse, and boastfulness. Tied up with these master moral ions was and Is a variety of ignoble feelings which however were less obvious 18 Europe's Handicap — in the primary phases of communal life — the tribe proper — than in the later growths of nations and commonwealths, and especially in the subsequent exasperation of the tribal temperament by the establishment of the Class-System. (See Chapter II). Here range the contemptible vices, deceit, envy, malice, selfishness, felony, mendacity, glut- tony, vanity, intolerance, suspicion, deception. The earliest tribal character which pervaded the innumerable races of Europe, from which its modern nations have evolved, and which tribal character was softened in some people almost to extinction, in others attaining a typical intensity, might be almiost described as Parkman has de- scribed the character of the North American Indian, with a few verbal excisions, whose reten- tion would mar its apt relevancy; "Ambition, revenge, envy, jealousy, are his ruling passions; and his temperament is little exposed to those effeminate vices which are the bane of milder races. With him revenge is an overpowering instinct; nay more, it's a point of honor and a duty. His pride sets all language at defiance. He loathes the thought of coercion; and few of his race have ever stooped to discharge a menial office. A wild love of liberty, an utter intolerance of control, lie at the basis of his character, and fire his whole existence. Yet, in spite of this haughty independence, he is a devout hero-worshipper; and high achievement in war or policy touches a chord to which his nature never fails to respond. He looks up with admiring reverence to the sages Tribe and Class 19 and heroes of his tribe; and it Is this principle, joined to the respect for age, which springs from the patriarchal element in his social system, which, beyond all others, contributes union and harmony to the erratic members of a tribal community. With him the love of glory kindles into a burning passion; and to allay its cravings he will dare cold and famine, fire, tempest, torture, and death itself." It will be impatiently asked why should we dwell upon the darkest side of the picture, when the fevers de medaille may be lustrous with contrasted virtues. Virtue, goodness, excellence, in all its forms, is never extinguished, never totally undis- cernable anywhere. Heaven knows they have abounded in European history, but in the pres- ence of the great violation of sanity, now embodied in the War of the Twentieth Century, the dark side solely remains as the consummate key to the intricacies of its antecedents, to the violence of its conduct, or to the probable (or possible) harsh- ness of its settlements. The tribal cultus is the cultus of self. It is savagely self-centred and ferociously bombastic. Its pugnacity is the instinct of self-preservation in part, in part a virile primitiveness of self con- sciousness. Altruism is its absolute negation. It exults in self-promotion at any and at all costs, and in the narrow focus of its perception nothing exists but itself. It presents at once the most expansive and the most concentrated phase of egotism, expansive in its exclusion of all other considerations outside of itself, concentrated in 20 Europe's Handicap — the irreducible hardness of its conceit. The con- summation of its pride is FORCE, and its esti- mate of success is CONQUEST. Qualitatively and quantitatively its expression and measure re- sponds to the wide diversity of ethnic tempera- ment — vitriolic in the Turk, devastating in the Hun, murderous, or simply massive, in the Cos- sack, Slav, the Croat, idealistic, as of one who defends a right, in the Celt, engrossingly arrogant in the Anglo-Saxon, impetuous in the Lombard, exterminating in the Visigoth, bigoted in the Semite, annihilating and enslaving in the Samnite, quarrelsome in the Pelasgi. The barbarity of tribal exploits is notorious, and it has nowhere been more notorious than in Europe. Of these the industry of scholarship has uncovered the records with incriminating fidelity. And Europe has never eradicated its tribal strain of sentiment. It indeed became individualized and degenerated in ruling houses and dynasties, in single titled heads of lands, by the erection and maintenance of the Class-System, which dimin- ished perhaps the robust fierceness of the tribe — welded together in a common weal or common- wealth — but which injected into the tribal temper the vices of insincerity, deceit, mendacity, subter- fuge, persecution, extortion, in a regime where a few fed their indulgence at the expense of the many, or magnified their importance by the slav- ery of multitudes. History is irreversible; it is beyond criticism and shares this immunity with the solar system, Tribe and Class 21 with the universe of natural laws, because its facts are always determined, and the efforts of correc- tion take place in an evolution depending on vicissitudes and states, which may retard or has- ten it, but which remain as facts no matter how regarded, involving no praise, no blame, from the passionless view of the historian, who finds the drama prepared for him by powers resident in nature, perhaps referable also to a supervision recondite, inscrutable, omniscient and compensa- tory. The drama of history is picturesque in pro- portion as it is dreadful, and the scribe who relates it may have his sympathies, but sees its puppets move without a tremor of remonstrance. Europe is a phenomenon, its present condition a virtual necessity from unescapable precedents. Its emergence from its difficulties must be its own work, but that work again resides in the larger mechanism of the corporate control over them- selves in vast masses of men, ostensibly free, per- missibly rational. The militarism of Europe is the modern survival of the Fighting Spirit of the Tribe-cultus and the Class-System of Europe connotes a more or less sublimated retention of Slavery, also an element in the tribe-cultus. Both were absolutely predestinated by the facts in the case, and the latter — the Class-System — has subjugated, in spots extirpated, the demo- cratic strain in the original tribe, for in the tribe there was an indulgent and distributed individual freedom. CHAPTER II The System of Class The Stages of progressive civilization in the tribe quickly starts the rooted pride of our nature into active growth, as in primitive habits of mind it must. Class distinctions arise. They must, and it is inevitable, we might say it is inevitably just, that they should be connected with vanity, self-glorification, self-promotion, the fluid motives of eminence and separate elevation. They are the most desirable gratifications to ambition that the rude condition of society offers strong or able men. And the first rewards of eminence are a tribute to merit, to courage. They are the just and serviceable compensations of ability and dar- ing. They represent the conscious acknowledge- ment of the demos for the aristos, the crowd for its leader, and doubtless, until such honors became hereditary, they have been born with modesty and devotion, under the inspiration of a feeling of their popular commitment. The process of differentiation in sophisticated societies, those in which the economic process of division of labor has developed, soon establishes, as a permanent status, what at first was a fugitive, oscillating and individual accident. The principle of Heredity is easily recognized, and the claims of blood, are readily admitted. A great man must Tribe and Class 23 endow his sons with his own greatness and the prerogatives of place, of birth, of connection, soon visualize to the masses, in the erection of a class, whose functions are immediately involved in the superintendence of the civic and politics of the community. The rise in importance, in consolida- tion, in industry, the advancing conjunction of tribes into nations, has, as a historic fact, advanced the distinction of class and strengthened them. Where communities were small, when they remained purely tribal, or where cities rather than nations were formed, as in Greece, the ele- mental equality among men was better retained, was less violently assailed, and delayed that as- sumption of prerogative and the exclusiveness of per- sonal continuity which increasingly controlled the interests of people, when people massed themselves together frequently by conquest, oftentimes by alliance and fusion, into larger more varied units. The simple fact that the tribe by itself, was a more or less democratic political organization, modified by individual or temporary disturbances, advertised its limited territorial control. In the tribal state early populations are found to be parcelled out in innumerable tribes. They were so indeed in Greece, where the tribe had become better regulated as a city. They were so in Italy, before the Roman event merged and habituated to a single government the contiguous cantons, and absorbed the Etruscans the Samnites, Mar- sians, Volscians, the Sabines, and Rutili. King- ship was early recognized both in Greece and Italy, 24 Europe's Handicap — in fact as Freeman writes, ''the King represents the national as distinguished from the tribal stage of political development. The lowlier chiefs, Ealdormen or Dukes were the chiefs of separate tribes; as the union of tribes grew into a nation, the nation chose a King as the chief of all. They chose him perhaps because he was in some sort a King already. Some faint signs may be seen in our glimpses of the days of our earliest fathers which look as if there were kingly houses before there was such a thing as kingly government. It would seem that the kingly house, the cynecyn, the noblest among the noble, the house which most truly embodies the whole being of the race, was called, when the nation felt the need of a common chief, to take its place at the head of all. The house which was already kingly in point of descent became kingly in point of political power." Monarchy was — for the most part — abandoned in Greece; the Homeric King — chief — whose sceptre passed on from father to son as strictly hereditary, was displaced, and the residues of the tribal democracy reasserted themselves in a re- stricted popular government. At Rome where there had also been kings the kingship was abol- ished, but a partial resumption may be inferred from the establishment of a strong aristocratic rulership in the Senate, and the executive officers, who carried out its behests, though here again, the tribal survival of equality was recognized in the later participation of the people in the consulship. The exceptional facts of Greece and Rome how- Tribe and Class 25 ever disappeared with the irruption of the Bar- barian, and the modern origins of Europe quickly present to the student the segregation of society in classes, the universal — or almost so — predomi- nance of a nobility, whether it was first a nobility of office or possession and later became a nobility of birth or not. Class Life is coextensive with European civilization and the fabled democracies of Rome and of Greece were not exempt from its recognition. Freeman tells us; "we cannot tell what was the origin of the peculiar privileges which belonged to an Athenian Eupatrid, to a Roman Patrician, or to an English Earl. We may con- jecture, we may theorize, we may even infer with a high degree of probability, but we cannot dog- matically assert. All that we can say is that, in the first glimpses which we get of Grecian, Italian, and Teutonic history, we see the distinction be- tween the noble and the common freeman at least as clearly marked as the distinction between the common freeman and the classes which were be- neath him." Nothing could be more natural; it belonged to the tribal and rudimentary relations of men before philosophical considerations of a higher utility apportioned to men in a free government, where the opportunities of individual development were unlimited and the admixture of classes com- plete, the widest scope of political attainments. And that class culture naturally also assimilates the idea and practice of Slavery. It was the class life and class predilections of the South that harbored and insisted upon an actual personal 26 Europe's Handicap — slavery; it is the class conditions of Europe, that to-day nourish a real slavery there also, although the literal application of the word has no just relevancy. It is a slavery conditioned upon the abjectness of an idolatry of Title, and the surrender of individual opinion to the superior emphasis of Caste. It is apparent in the obsequiousness of service, the ascription of excellence to position, the social idolatry of name, and the influence of nominal claims upon public appointments, and the exemption of titled estates, of property in land, of privileged classes, from just taxation. It is also seen in the "reptile press" that fawns on the Foreign Office and the Ministers. When the barbarian tribes of northern Europe accomplished the destruction of the Roman Em- pire, and began the laying of the foundation of the modern societies, which are its nations to-day, we are told (J. T. Abdy) they found "a nation com- posed of a privileged class and of an impoverished lower class, the middle class no longer existing; they found towns governed by heads, and pos- sessed of regulations, but pauperized by the exac- tions of the imperial city ; they also found a power- ful, vigorous, and well trained body of ecclesias- tics, into whose hands had fallen the real direction of corporate business; moreover they found an agricultural population ground down by the exac- tions of the proprietors under whom they worked, and destitute of any notion of freedom". The sweeping proclamation of freedom in Athens and its showy but deceptive application was actually Tribe and Class 27 reconciled to a literal slavery, as of the thetes, the small proprietors of the country; "they are ex- hibited as weighed down by debts and dependence, and driven in large numbers out of a state of freedom into slavery — the whole mass of them, being in debt to the rich, who are proprietors of the greater part of the soil", (Grote), nor did the change of conditions effeted by Solon, and the later revolution, operated by Kleisthenes, extirpate the mood and the exercise of oligarchy and class. Tribal temper and Class influence have always facilitated if they did not demand Slavery. Free- man has put it pretty clearly; "slavery has been the common law of all times and places till, within a few centuries past, it has, among most of the nations of the Western Aryan stock, either died out or been formally abolished. And we must further remember what the earliest form of slavery, before slavery has been aggravated by the slave trade, really is. The prisoner of war who, according to the military code of a rude age, might lawfully be put to death — the criminal who has forfeited his life to the laws of the state of which he is a member — is allowed, whether out of mercy or out of covetousness, to exchange death for life in bondage. Then the family feeling, so strong in setting up one stock steps in no less strongly for the pulling down of another, and the man who has forfeited his own freedom is held to have forfeited the freedom of his children also. Thus arises the class of personal slaves, mere chattels either of the commonwealth or of an individual master." 28 Europe's Handicap — The vassalage that characterized the course of social and civil procedure in Europe, the servile relations of the so-called lower classes to the domineering and land-owning gentry, the intoler- able license of behavior of the privileged — the titled — to the untitled, the tyrannies of intimida- tion, the actual felonies of forfeiture, the arrogance of interference, the natural delusions of superiority by birth, are all related to the ingrained accept- ance of the slave-idea, against which the revolt of freedom — implanted instincts, themselves in Eu- rope due to a resumption of the healthier impulses of the Tribe — has progressively advanced, but which only, through the severing stroke of the French Revolution, attained virtual victory. This victory has been greatly annulled by — under the circumstances — an irrepressible reaction, which served the purpose of reviving the Tribe and the Class, and all they imply, — all a matter of common history — so that to-day their extirpation rests solely in some sort of universal demolition, and social deracination. It is most certain that the class systems of Eu- rope are immemorial in their origins, that they represent obsolete phases of tribal government, that everything about them is stamped with the ineffaceable mark of antiquity, that it would be almost impossible to ascend any where the current of legible history where we do not constantly en- counter class distinctions, as the inevitable and necessary impositions of rank in times, primordial, nepionic, and dissolute — dissolute, observe, in the Tribe and Class 29 sense of partially formless or wholly juvenile. At no time was the institutions of class more likely to arise than at the disastrous moment when the regulated and structurally imposing dominion of Rome fell to pieces, and the swarming teutonic tribes overwhelmed and submerged it. The slow subsidence of the ethnic invasion per- mitted roman institutes to reappear, roman offices to continue, and the impregnable efficacy of roman law to influence jurisdiction and common law. With the slow growth of new domains of govern- ment out of the vast colossus of the roman em.pire, under the conditions of confusion, of conflict that supervened with its dismemberment, the feudal System and the Monarchy became established, and both in a measure, the latter profoundly, won a deeper permanence from the sanctification of the Church. "The King's commission was divine, because it was bestowed with ecclesiastical rites by the highest ministers of the Church within the kingdom" (Freeman). And In a still further pro- cess of perpetuation the same author writes, "it was by a later change again that the King gradu- ally changed from the chief of the people into the lord of the land, that the notion of office began again to be lost in the notion of possession, and that the kingdom began to be looked on as a personal estate, which must, like any other estate, pass on from father to son, according to some rule of hereditary succession laid down beforehand." An idea so imbedded in Its genesis with the entire historic consciousness of nations has, with slow- 30 Europe's Handicap — ness and opposition and with reactionary bitter- ness of feeling only been dislodged. Its moral effectiveness in Europe to-day is unmistakable. It belongs to the Tribe-Cultus and the Class- System, and it is an anachronism. Its influence on national sentiment is at all times prolonged and definite, even when the office itself has been re- duced in its functions and practical efficiency, to almost nothing, as in England. It extends the Tribal feeling, and it justifies the Class-System. Neither of these is reconcilable with true democ- racy — the democracy of soul and mind as well as of form — and both continue the practice of war- fare and the policy of depredation. The Feudal System lies at the root of the modern European Class System, and in it we discover too a sort of extension of a titled officialdom in the Ro- man Empire, for Gibbon tells us, ''the titles, counts and dukes, have obtained in modern languages so very different a sense from their Roman form, that their use may occasion some surprise. But it should be recollected that the second of these appellations is only a corruption of the Latin word, which was indiscriminately applied to any military chief. All these provincial generals were therefore dukes: but no more than ten among them were dignified with the rank of count or companion — a title of honor or rather favor, which had been recently invented in the court of Constantine. A gold belt was the ensign which distinguished the office of the counts and dukes, and, besides their pay, they received a Tribe and Class 31 liberal allowance, sufficient to maintain one hun- dred and ninety servants and one hundred and fifty-eight horses." Feudalism was the climax of the confused, de- fenceless, and scattered condition of the popula- tions of Europe, when the weak became the prey of the strong, and the man of arms rose, by the most natural legitimacy of position, to be the master of the man without arms, or, under considerations more or less legally formulated, became the latter's protector. Land rights and territorial possession accrued to the powerful, beginning at the King at the top, and the successive Class- despots beneath him, or to express it more deliber- ately, with the dispassionate'accent of scholarship, the Feudal System, says Hallam, ''was the general establishment of a peculiar relation between the sovereign (not as king, but as lord — ) and his im- mediate vassals, between these again and others standing to them in the same relation of vassalage, and thus frequently through several links in the chain of tenancy". All of which meant many things, which the portentous research of an army of scholars has re- duced to a vast terminology of public and personal relations between the varying degrees of the sub- jection of the vassal, and the varying degrees of the dominion of the lord. But it meant one thing very clearly, very forcibly, the erection into an organic feature of government of the distinction of class, which distinction crystallizing into fixity, by the force of habit, impressed itself on the mind 32 Europe's Handicap — as essential and the Noble in rank was the noble in character, and in attainments. And those claiming nobility interpreted their rights without much deference to reason or justice, and not seldom without the ameliorating exhibition of mercy or sympathy. The Class idea grew upon a substratum of fealty, as to a defender, in those who were not noble, upon a substratum of in- feriority, as of a servant, also, and the roots of this double meaning, so inserted themselves in the mentality of the masses that nothing about it seemed unnatural, seemed obnoxious. Enlighten- ment changed much, but the concrete extinction of the conception accompanied a violence so ex- travagant, that by the perennial force of reaction, the old relation of noble and commoner was re- sumed, after the Revolution; and, while very differently displayed, kept its intractable hold on the imagination of the people, and yet, in Europe, subjects them to the vagaries of individual initiative, to the pow-wow of ministerial cabinets, the chamber or window conferences of diplomats, the intrigues of rules, the philosophical or theo- retical excursions of essayists. The Tribal Status remains to-day in Europe and shows itself in the insubordination of racial preju- dice, the Class Status abides there also, and is seen of course most conspicuously in the actual use and inheritance of Title, and is more latently influen- tial and subversive of temperamental equality, at least, in the suppliancy of fashion to mere verbal degree, in the restraints of intercourse and at many points in the flummeries of fashion. Tribe and Class 33 TRIBE and CLASS have accomplished great things, and under the coercion of a wonderfully interesting retinue of events — whose occasion or reasonableness of meaning no one knows anything about that, resting, as we say, "in the lap of the gods" — has evolved the present Europe, has filled the pages of history with the recital of marvellous achievements, enriched literature and science with libraries and discoveries of beauty and utility, produced the masterpieces of art, and set up the images of great men before the reverential gaze of all. But if such results, mediately or immediately, are to be ascribed to them, also in the reckoning, must be thrown in, their pernicious incitation to warfare, plunder, oppressio^ii, slavery, extortion, their persistent opposition to improvement, their intrinsic alliance with the baser and meaner pro- clivities of human nature, and their recalcitrance under correction, their blindness before instruction. History admits of no philosophy; it simply IS. Perhaps in the past men have not made their own history; it has been made for them, and they have undergone a necessary training. In the future, history must be what they wish it to be, and to-day UTILITY dominates device, and the Benthamite axiom of the Greatest happiness for the Greatest num- ber forms the controlling clue to the mystery of living. If in the past history has been the mutual interaction of Tribe and Class — regarding Europe only — in the future, both must be abolished. DEMOCRACY may mean the subjugation of the individual, and a lessening of histrionic interest, but it means also PEACE. CHAPTER III The Confusion of Tribes Without regarding the tribal commixtures that prevailed in Greece and Italy in the earliest glimpses we get of these countries, and which com- mixture had been clarified and settled by the for- mation of the grecian commonwealths, and more definitely disposed of by the absorption of all of southern Europe by the aggressive Roman Re- public, consider the chaotic tides of racial move- ment in middle and eastern and western Europe — more quiescent in the west than in the east — from whose final overflow, everywhere, modern Europe was to arise. The great germanic hordes were pressing upon their Celtic and gaulic predecessors in the west, who had already displaced an Iberian population, which in its time and turn had im- pinged upon some hypothetical mongolian pre- cursors, now forced out of sight towards the north, in Finland and Lapland. Back of the Teuton was the Huns, and the Avars, and the Slavs, and laggardly, but still intrusively, the Tartar, or what that stands for, and in all of these consanguineous or opposed masses and stocks, from the Celt to the Tartar, was an assemblage of lesser communities — TRIBES — that contributed to the confusion of parts, while an uncontrolled instinct of movement Tribe and Class 35 brought each and all into incessant collisions, and inured them to warfare, as well as to subjugation and slavery. It was vortex within vortex, as of a tide whirled into eddies by its own motions. It was a slow or rapid transgression of an ethnic flood, that poured out torrents and volumes of diverse peoples, entering the settlements of Roman life, and engulfing the sporadic communi- ties of pre-existent aboriginal life. It was at- tended with disturbance, with conflict, mounting climaxes of confusion, as upon the inrush of un- appeasable conquerors like Attila and Alaric, the earlier sustained resistance against Rome of invaded patriots, like Vercingetorix against Julius Caesar, the refluent energy of repulse, as when the Franks held back their Germanic brethren beyond the Rhine, or when, after unmitigated slaughter, the Germans forced the Huns to retire to the shores of the Black Sea. Roman aggression had also contributed to the dislocation of tribes, and the conquest of Gaul, the annexation of Spain, the encroachments upon the teutonic wildernesses north of Rome, were con- tributory shocks whose vibrations were felt far and near, and which stirred the blood of the bar- barian, whose cupidity and his awakening realiza- tion of the splendors of the Roman world aroused in him motives of curiosity and pleasure. To make the picture more enthralling, more convincing, the reader — in whose mind must be slowly penetrating the concept of the basic bar- barism of Europe — is invited to follow up to the 36 Europe's Handicap — formal or symptomatic birth of the nations of Europe, their tribal antecedents. Let him begin — after Rome had slowly herself integrated the Eugani, the Albanians, the Fidenae, the Volscians, the Sabines, the Veientes, the Aequi, the Faliscae, the Volsinians, the Salpinati, the Etruscans, the Hernici, the Samnites, the Latins, the Privernates, the Lucanians, the Apulians, the Tusculani, the Ansones, the Umbrians, the Sallnetini — let him begin with the first centuries of our era, or rela- tively so, and, starting in his bird's eye and cameroscopic review, follow the tribal mutations of kin and sort from Spain through France, to the titanic tribal pulsations of the east, those that had for their stage the plains of Poland, and Hungary, the banks of the Danube, Dniester, Vistula, the mountains of Carpathia, the forests of Bavaria and Saxony, and the valley of the Rhine, and from this seething and tumultuous confusion of Europe's future material, or stuff for national life, draw his own conclusions as to the probability that even under the guise of fixed government, regulated by law, honored by practice, and enriched by talent, the overwhelming potency of heredity will not insert in it the temper and the constitution of its past progenitors. For Europe was simply tribal for centuries, and remains — in a residual and variously qualified way — tribal to-day. The brawling pugnacity of gens and septs, the snarling racial prejudices, the vehement provincial egoisms, the embittering taint of feud, the vindictive passions of reprisal, brutal Tribe and Class 37 destructiveness, the arrogance of domination in conquest and often the complicity of sycophancy and treachery are still there. This vulgarity of disposition is the legacy of history and there is no escape from it except by a changed environment or by the utter abandonment of tribal and class systems. The tribal and the class systems are not quite absent with us. They exist by reason of the imported habits of Europe, by reason of the human recurrence to the tribal nature, from which we have all emerged, and perhaps in a way by reason of the insipidity of feeling in certain classes — quite generally the bourgeois, and the feeble-minded rich — who adore the gloss of superficial refinement, and the sentiment of antiquity. But — we have forgotten our task. Turning then to Spain; Rome had conquered it, for Numantia had been destroyed, and its defence was itself a signal tribute to the ardor of the tribal temper — the Tribal Estate boasts its magnificent virtues too — as it and its inhabitants fell in self-ignited flames, and Numantia was the last stronghold of resistance to Rome. And after Rome came the Vandal and the Visigoth. It was the Suevi, the Alani and the Vandals first, and then the Goths. Almost endless struggles marked the fall of the first barbarians, and the later union of the Goth and the Iberian reestablished a king- dom of strength and a rude nobility. The tribal temperament of immitagable pugnacity was here so marked that as Washington Irving writes ''when they had no external foes to contend with. 38 Europe's Handicap — they fought with one another; and when engaged in battle, says an old chronicler, the very thunders and lightnings of heaven could not separate them." Afterwards followed that conquest of Spain by the Moor which has been embroidered with so many lustrous and quaint legends, and which, in literature, through the magic of the American Irving, seems to sparkle with the iridescent hues of fable, truth, and romance. And the subjuga- tion of christian Spain by the infidels under Taric el Tuerto, as given in the legend, expanded with lucid charm by Irving, reveals perhaps in the Moor a refreshing suppression of those tribal traits which in Europe has made victory abhorrent. The ravages of the Vandals, before the Goths came, had been indescribable in their horrors of pillage, massacre, and conflagration. Spain, like a wounded prey on the field of hunting, was severed into parts, between the rapacious clans of the Vandals, the Alans, and the Suevi. Then entered upon the distracted country the Goths under Ataulphus to be succeeded by a mercenary and sanguinary murderer Sigeric, while in the midst of internecine warfare, darkened by turpi- tude and infidelity, the Vandals slowly were ex- pelled, their retreating steps fatefully distin- guished by the abomination of robbery, bloodshed, and infamy. The contest for possession was continued be- tween the Goths and the Suevi, while again by a sudden coalition between Franks, Romans, and Goths, Theodoric a gothic king led the combined Tribe and Class 39 hosts against a new terror, the ruthless and de- molishing Attila. Relieved of this dark menace the battling tribes resumed their unquenchable hatreds, and "Goths and Romans and Suevi traversed Spain in every direction, and everywhere left melancholy vestiges of their barbarous fury". The annals of the Gothic ascendency before their overthrow by the Moors is a strange tapestry of savagery, religion, vice, heroism, treason, insur- rections, intestinal turbulence; perpetual dis- putes, with intervals of specious peace, and the fabled presence of prosperity. That militarism which is to-day, in Europe's tribal state, a virtual necessity, has always been a necessity, and under the Vi^goths of Spain was a relentlessly imposed duty. Mr. G. Mercer Adams thus describes it; "all Goths capable of bearing arms, whether lay or clerical, were subject to military duty; and heavy were the penalties with which he was visited who absented or hid himself to escape the conscription; if he were a noble fill- ing some high employment, he was deposed and banished; if a common noble, he was beaten and branded; the officer who for a bribe excused any- one from the service was compelled to pay four times the amount of the money he had received, besides a heavy fine to the king. The captain who forsook his post in time of war was beheaded; or, if he took sanctuary to a church, he was fined in six hundred crowns, to be divided among the soldiers of his company." In Gaul tribal quarrels introduced the Roman 40 Europe's Handicap — mastery though the Roman hand had long before been laid upon it, and when the bickering Aedui and Sequani were suddenly confronted with an invasion of the Helvetians, who had with stubborn grim cynicism burned their towns, and ruined their fields, so that no repentant regrets might tempt them to return, they summoned Julius Caesar to their rescue. The Roman legions delivered them from this initial peril, and with an equal facility later saved them a second time from the over- bearing Ariovistus and his german hosts, whom the Sequani had invited to assist them in their fratricidal altercations and then too late realized the moral of an ancient fable; Garde-toi, tant que tu vivras, De juger les gens sur la mine. With the assumption of power by the Romans the Belgians were called in to rescue the astonished Gauls, and the omnipotent Caesar crushed the confederates, annihilated the Nervii, and through his lieutenant enslaved Armorica. The tribal fierceness irrepressibly rose to the new ordeal, and the Veneti, followed by the tribes of Armorica, started a new revolt. Caesar overcame the rising, and obliterating 400,000 Usipetes at the confluence of the Rhine and the Meuse, invaded Britain, and imposed his irresistible power upon its inhabitants also. But the quenchless fires of rebellion awoke again, and the Gaulish tribes uniting, with the sharp unanimity of consent that distinguish tribal Tribe and Class 41 impulses, under Indutiomarus of the Treviri, and Ambiorix of the Eburones withstood the Romans, with the help of the tribes north of Cambresis and Hainault. The resourceful and quick-minded Caesar turned up in time, and relieved his besieged legionaries and again extinguished the fires of rebellion, striking right and left with an extermi- nating fury. Once more the resurgent forces of despair massed the Gauls against the indestructi- ble legions and the young hero Vercingetorix of the Auvergnats marched at the head of an undis- ciplined host against the Roman armies in Bel- gium. In the tribal style, massacres marked their advance, but Caesar, like a scourge, with fire and sword, was swiftly hastening through Arvernia to the rescue. Gergovia received the conquering Vercingetorix and here the last phases of the hideous duel were enacted. Rome was driven to bay, and the illustrious Caesar saved by the Tenth Legion withdrew; intercepted, victory perched again upon the standards of the Eagles, Unde nil majus generatur ipso, Nee viget quidquam simile aut secundum, and the discomfited and baffled Vercingetorix fortified himself behind the walls of Alesia. In the sight of two hundred thousand Gauls who had hastened to the succor of their compatriots Caesar helped by the Germans completed the cap- ture of the city, and the utter rout and slaughter of the Gauls who had rushed to its deliverance. 42 Europe's Handicap — Gaul became roman, and its wonderful pacificator passed on as one who gets the start of the majestic world and bears the palm alone. Under the roman rule the land of the Gauls suffered still from the impetuous and swarming efforts of the Germans to enter it, and when at last the expiring control of the Empire left the country more and more exposed to these violent incursions, and when Tetricus the last of the Gallic Caesars surrendered himself to the Emperor Aurelian, the Germanic tribes invaded and ravaged it. Then we are told (Bonnechose) ; "Devastated by barbarians, crushed with taxes imposed by the various candidates to empire, and exhausted of men and money, the country at length fell into the most miserable condition. So great was its desolation, that freemen frequently made themselves serfs or slaves, in order to escape the obligation of bearing a share of the public burdens." Constantly, amid this confusion, demoraliza- tion, and incertude, the recurrent waves of the Germanic migration beat against the eastern borders, and thus ensued the mingled terrors of war and desolation, until for a few years peace was won by a sweeping victory of Julian, the cousin of Constantine, at Argentoratum (Strasburg), and the Salian Franks were for the instant repulsed, leaving behind the most fearful memories, for these barbarians had ravaged forty of the most advanced Tribe and Class 43 cities of Gaul, Treves, Cologne, Mayence, Worms, Spires, and Strasburg itself. And the barbarian was everywhere; it was they in the armies of Rome, whose endurance, against the repeated in- vasions only secured temporary respite from moles- tation, it was they who tampered with the administration of its affairs and who fed the zeal of its missionaries with converts, who perpetually confiscated its property to their own purposes, vitiated its laws, and dishonored its prestige. It was after the fall of Constantine — a daring adventurer who had been elected by the Roman legions in Britain, and who had allied with him- self the Burgundians and Franks, and had gained possession of the greater part of Gaul — it was upon his fall that anarchy spread the darkest terrors of tribal rivalry and collision throughout the land that was to shape itself finally into France. To the south were the Visigoths extending their sway beyond the Pyrenees into Spain, and whose capital was Toulouse; to the east the Burgundians in Alsace, with territorial sovereignty reaching from the Lake of Geneva as far north as Coblenz on the Rhine; in the north and west the Franks, who had emerged from the areas of the Rhine, the Scheldt, and the Ardennes mountains, who had by successive encroachments occupied Belgium, and stretched their skirts to the banks of the Somme Illustrative of that tribal heterogeneity we have so much alluded to, the Franks were not a single na- tion but a confederation of related tribes, among whom the historians enumerate the Salii, the 44 Europe's Handicap — Ripuarii, the Sicambri, the Bructeri, and the Chamavi. But the inveterate strife, gathering from every circumstance of rapacity, or hatred, or deceit, fresh miseries, still went on, and the general Aetius with a barbarian army retained a disputed al- legiance to the disappearing genius of Rome, when that horrific inundation of the Huns under Attila, which threatened Spain also, swept out from that fecund East, whose tribal emissions like the pulsa- tions of a storm — tossed reservoir against its broken dams, with periodic violence carried new floods of population westward. Attila enters on the scene with five hundred thousand followers, all animated with the reckless madness of their chief, and marked his triumphal path with the atrocities of the despot, the savage, and the braggart. He was overthrown at Chalons-sur-Marne and moodily retreated and then, over the crumbling ruins of the Roman suzerainty, rose the power of the Salian Franks, and Clovis, a barbarian of the barbarians, ruthless, ungrateful, ferocious, schem- ing, credulous, as Watson has written it, ''by a dramatic career of force and fraud, daring and craft, perfidy and crime, crushed all rivals in France, and welded its widely different elements into a great kingdom." The Celt had succumbed to the Teuton and the latter became the nobility of the new kingdom, the ruling and privileged Class, and, under the weight of accumulated degradation and servitude, the tribal animosity of the Celt gathered bitterness Tribe and Class 45 with the rolling years, each one marked with new accesses of disdain and suffering. For, under the relations and reciprocations of Class Systems, the Tribal intensity of hatred, as between race and race, grow more deeply sinister. True Democracy alone assuages and reconciles Tribal enmities, and the historians have not been averse to see in the desecrating excesses of the French Revolution, the recrudescence of that early tribal revulsion, which the iniquities of the Class life of twelve hundred years had rendered ineffaceable, as between the Goth and the Celt. To dwell upon the full significance of these deductions here would be premature. Let us continue our suggestive — and suggestive only — review of the tribal foundationsof the European States. Turning to the Lowlands, the future Holland, whose tribal condition was so closely connected, and for a long time intrinsically identical with the Belgium provinces at its southern margins, we find a less confusing and disastrously complex tribal expression, but yet one which in its history revealed the same elements of daring, carnage, re- sistance, submission, and final subjugation by an inexorable conqueror. There were here two contrasted races, the Belgae, gaulic or Celtic in their affinities, and provenance, the Batavians or Frisians, germanic, and allied to the teutonic stock. Both were brave, hardy, of towering physiques and intrepid endurance, but the Ba- tavians, according to Tacitus were the bravest of all the Germans. 46 Europe's Handicap — ''The Chatti (Suavi?) of whom they formed a portion were a preeminently warlike race. 'Others go to battle,' says the historian, 'these go to war.' Their bodies were more hardy, their minds more vigorous, than those of other tribes. Their young men cut neither hair nor beard till they had slain an enemy. On the field of battle, in the midst of carnage and plunder, they, for the first time, bared their faces. The cowardly and sluggish, only, remained unshorn. They wore an iron ring, too, or shackle upon their neck, until they had performed the same achievement, a symbol which they then threw away, as the emblem of sloth." (Motley). It was Celtic Gaul that first rose against the legions of Rome, "inflammable, quick to strike, but too fickle to prevail against so powerful a foe, they hastily form a league of almost every clan", (Motley), but, rushing into the gap their disarray, retreat, and capitulation had made, the Nervii, their tribal colleagues — denizens of the black and sullen woods, the watered plains, the cold morasses — withstand and confuse the enemy; "they fought upon that day till the ground was heaped with their dead, while, as the foremost fell thick and fast, their comrades, says the Roman, sprang upon their piled-up bodies, and hurled their javelins at the enemy as from a hill. They fought like men to whom life without liberty was a curse. They were not defeated but exterminated." From their tragic annihilation Caesar turned to the easier task of pacifying the Aduatici, the Tribe and Class 47 Menapii, and the Morini. Later Claudius CIvilis, a Batavian, united the tribal strength of the low countries, (the Nether-Lands), in a desperate struggle for the expulsion of the foreign foe. This extraordinary effort was the brief and noble ex- postulation of the tribal pride against conquest, and, from a more philosophical point of view, also, was a proof of the ineradicable tribal individual- ism, that narrowly, doggedly, almost malignantly rejects fusion, and social amalgamation. Personal obliteration is the keenest disappointment to the savage freeman; it is his disgrace. CIvilis failed, his name disappears. In the swaying fortunes of Rome, before or beneath the onsets of her tireless, her inexhaustible foes, the Netherlands are "successively or simul- taneously trampled by Franks, Vandals, Alani, Suevi, Saxons, Frisians, and even Sclavonians, as the great march of Germany to universal empire, which her prophets and bards had foretold, went majestically forward." (Motley). The tribal picture of Europe in those first centuries of the Christian day, becomes more crowded with figures, more tumultuous with movement, more sanguinary in conflict, more in- explicable in origins, more rapid in changes, more dissonant in dialects, as we attempt to penetrate the thickening swarms of peoples who covered or moved over the face of ancient Germany, or with bewildered foot-steps we thread the maze of peoples beyond them, the Slavonians of Bohemia, Silesia, Poland, Galicia, Russia, Servia, Croatia, 48 Europe's Handicap — Carniola, Hungary, Prussia, Bulgaria, or, in tote, as Dr. Latham interpreted them sixty years ago, the Sarmatians, composed of Slavonic and lithuanic stocks. Long before the events hurriedly compacted together in these generalized indications, had transpired, the insistent barbarians (gauls) had penetrated from the north, in broken and occa- sional invasions, into Greece and Rome. In the time of Pyrrhus they had entered through Macedonia into Greece, as far as Delphi (Nie- buhr). These early incursions were symptomatic of the presence of restless and agitated populations of wild men in the north, whose number increased, and whose internal disquietudes, as of caged animals, kept constantly breaking through the boundaries of their imprisonment, to glimpse the cultivated gardens and blooms, they were denied. These gauls in some refluent current were sweeping back to Asia and twenty thousand of them crossed over into Asia, where they became a scourge from their tribal ferocity, and the mercenary prostitu- tion of their services until Attalus of Pergamus reduced them. These outbreaks did not spare Rome and the Eternal City in one of the most dramatic episodes of history became the prey of the northern savage. Every school-boy recalls the picturesque dilemma of the Roman Senate, sitting in ostentatious gravity, (Livy, Lib.V, Cap IV), arrayed in their august robes of office, awaiting the arrival of the advancing Gauls, now, as they entered the city. Tribe and Class 49 thunder-struck and suspicious of an ambuscade, at the death-like silence of the streets of the deserted city. The theatrical contrast is effectually spec- tacular. The barbarians penetrate the reserved precincts of the Senate, and gaze incredulously upon the stiff figures of the Senators, imposingly severe in their vestments, with lineaments fixed in the unnatural serenity of anticipated violence, and, thus assembled, resembling some congress of the gods, — and very dumb gods too. The acute suspense is broken, when an inquiring Gaul, stroking the descending beard of a patrician sen- ator — is struck on the head with his ivory staff, for the insolent familiarity. In a flash the slaughter begins, as the ruffians cut down the ancient worthies, motionless and unresisting, in their chairs. Then succeeds a free-booting excursion through the city, with all of the sanguinary and destructive accompaniments of savage exultation in ravage and mutilation and murder. — Post principum caedem nulli deinde mortalium parciy diripi tecta, exhaustis injici ignes. Intermittent depredations and injections from the northern incunabula are registered from time to time after this, but with no signal efficacy of incident. The barbarians are sometimes repulsed altogether, sometimes appropriated and digested, with that political aptitude of assimilation, that was the faculty of the Republic, and which de- rived its efficiency from a rude realization, and an imperfect practice, of equality, itself but a simu- 50 Europe's Handicap — lacrum and caricature of the democratic skill, with which these States cement and fuse their diverse social, moral, mental, and racial elements into a unit. In the year 113 B. C. a horde of the Germans of the North forced their way southward over the Alps of Tyrol and, crowding into Italy, with their households to the number of several hundred thousand met the consul Papirius Carbo and de- feated him in a great battle between the Adriatic and the Alps. The combined mass of Cimbrians and Teutons then heavily moved westward, and invaded Gaul, and, like some monstrous plague, ravished the countries they crossed. They reached Spain, but with the desultory indecision of savages returned, and were about to re-enter Italy, when the successful Marius met them, and first exterminated two hundred thousand Teutons at Aix, and afterwards, as a corroboration of his thoroughness, slew all of the Cimbrians at Vercelli. From this time the collisions of the Romans and the surging and unquiet denizens of the central mountains, forests, and valleys of Europe, in- creased in frequency, and the incessant conflict successively brought tribe after tribe, and groups of tribes under various leaders, against the generals and emperors of Rome, presenting along all the borders of the republic an exciting panorama of war, relieved by the momentary flashes of military genius, the splendor of individual germanic patriots, and darkened into the inkiest nightmares of cruelty, perfidy, and abominable carnage, by Tribe and Class 51 the unpitled sufferings of thousands, the un- counted dead, the overthrow of cities, the shame- less assassination of individuals, the towering ele- vation, as of some awful exaggeration of human wickedness, of an Alaric, or an Attila, or a Geiseric, the whole also interwoven, as with a mesh of disease, with the meanest motives of jealousy, and revenge, envy, and covetousness. And an overpowering influence in the diversified agitation, so far as the migratory restlessness of the peoples are concerned, was that pressure of the military masses of Asia. The words of Motley most ornately revealed it. "Obscure but importan^t movements in the regions of eternal twilight, revolutions of which history has been silent, in the mysterious depths of Asia, outpourings of human rivers along the sides of the Altai Mountains, convulsions up-heaving remote realms and unknown dynasties, shock after shock throbbing throughout the barbarian world, and dying upon the edge of civilization, vast throes which shake the earth, as precursory pangs to the birth of a new empire — as dying symptoms of the proud but effete realm which called itself the world; scattered hordes of sanguinary, grotesque savages pushed from their own homes, and hover- ing with vague purposes upon the Roman frontier, constantly repelled and perpetually reappearing in ever increasing swarms, guided thither by a fierce instinct, or by mysterious laws, — such are the well-known phenomena which preceded the fall of Western Rome." 52 Europe's Handicap — The tribal picture or tableau needs a further more explicit display, and we follow the excellent resumption of the matter in Bayard Taylor's history, as revised and modernized by Prof. Sidney B. Fay, quoting his broad designation of the germanic occupation; "the territory which they occupied was almost the same as that which now belongs to the German Empire. The Rhine divided them from the Gauls, except towards its mouth, where the Germanic tribes occupied part of Belgium. A line drawn from the Vistula south- ward to the Danube nearly represents their eastern boundary, while up to this time, they do not appear to have crossed the Danube on the south. The district between that river and the Alps, now Bavaria and Styria, was occupied by Celtic tribes. Northward they had made some advance into Sweden, and probably also into Norway. They thus occupied nearly all of central Europe north of the Alpine chain." Westphalia of to-day was inhabited by the Sicambrians; toward the Harz, the Marsi and Ampsivarii, and south of these the Ubii. From the Weser to the Elbe north was the Cherusci, south of them the Chatti, and along the head- waters of the river Main the Marcomanni, a very notable section of the family. Saxony was partially possessed by the Hermunduri — also called Suevi — and around the mouth of the Elbe dwelt the Longobardi; in Holstein the Saxons, in Schleswig, the Angles. East of the Elbe were the Semnones guarding a sacred district devoted by Tribe and Class 53 many tribes to religious rites not unaccompanied by the sacrifice of human victims. North of the Semnones dwelt the Vandals, and along the Baltic the Rugii; then between these latter and the Vistula river were the Burgundians, and where the city of Konigsberg now stands was the focus of the Goths, and south of them again the Sarmatians (Slavs). Bohemia was first settled by the Boii, a Celtic tribe, and beyond the Danube all was Celtic, with the Vindelici in Bavaria, the Noric and Rhaetian Celts in the Tyrolese Alps, and the Helvetii in Switzerland. We are not here concerned w4th describing their tribal constitution or indeed those hypothetical virtues and rude colorations of manner and cus- toms, their dress, their weapons, the paraphernalia of their culture, and the severe and homely attri- butes of their domestic life, their religion, or their vices. This thesis maintains that Europe now, this hour, is afflicted with the tribal instinct, the tribal nature, the tribal divisional repulsions, and what that implies is discerned most clearly in its effects or incitations as they are read in black and white on the pages of history. That history is in- deed most ineffectually presented here, and, but hinted at, but for the qualitative analysis of the tribal (also conjoined here with the vicious inter- action of the Class System) nature, we believe it is adequate — as we shall see — to establish the indict- ment of European civilization, not of course in its technique, but in its spirit. Nor is that quite all. 54 Europe's Handicap — The tribal instinct, the tribal nature has, under the vicissitudes of history, been exacerbated or degenerated, by these same vicissitudes, under the cruelty of conquerors, the selfishness of rulers, the brutality of regimes, the bigotry of religions, the meannesses of living, the squalor of sentiment. Nor should we be further misunderstood, by hav- ing attributed to us the utter blankness and ig- norance of mind that would ensue if we thought for an instant, that all of the most noble aspects of human feeling and human effort have not over and over again been illustrated in European affairs. They have; O! most gloriously so, but they have not prospered as they should have done, their results have not been as steadfastly estab- lished as they should have been, have not been as universally indoctrinated — so to speak — in the tissue and make up of the psychology of the European, contrasting in that respect with a finer and more generous and more noble cultural aspect of the emotions here in America, because those cultural aspects in this new land, under freshened conditions of temper and opportunity, have more happily encountered encouragement and perma- nence. To resume; after Caesar's conquest of Gaul, the Romans definitely inspired with the sense of their predestined role of world-owners, began the sub- jection of the Celtic tribes living between the Alps and the region of the Danube, from Constance to Vienna. Drusus, Tiberius, Varus, led the Roman legions, and reduced the vigorous resistance of the Tribe and Class 55 tribes — that had not yet learned the utility of combination, inflicting too, with a careless dis- regard of consequences, and untaught by the wiser policy of Caesar, a subversion of the tribal forms of government, violently enforcing Roman justice, ruthlessly imposing Roman taxes. Then came Hermann, the first german leader, a man of strength, of animation, of quick intelli- gence, with bright eyes. He succeeded in uniting the tribes, though he met the opposition of petty jealousies, quarrelsome habits, individual greed. His conspiracy was successful and at Winfield, "the long southern slope of the mountain, near Detmold, now bare, but surrounded by forests". Hermann defeated Varus.' Later he discomfited another Roman general Caecina, and then the Emperor Tiberius understanding the tribal in- felicity of disposition, its hopeless disunions led by rival ambitions, left the tribes alone, and divSsen- sion and disorganization asserted themselves. Hermann and Marbod fought it out indecisively, with Hermann the better of the contestants. But his fine conception of a united Germany failed, wrecked by the rooted prejudices of sept and clan, and Hermann was assassinated, he, of whom Tacitus with brief precision said; pro libertate bellantem, favor hahehat. Then followed a long, almost uninterrupted reign of mutual toleration, with a growing com- merce, the building of the great Roman wall of protection from Ratisbon to Cologne, and with it 56 Europe's Handicap — a change of the tribal discontinuity to something like confederation, a process aided both by the appreciation of results and the sense of security. We are told (Sidney B. Fay) "when the Germans again appear in the third century of our era, we are surprised to find that the names of nearly all of the tribes with which we are familiar have disap- peared, and new names of much wider significance, have taken their place. Instead of twenty or thirty small divisions, we now find the race con- solidated into four chief nationalities, with two other inferior though independent branches". The multivarious clans have consolidated and congealed into the Alemanni, (all men), along the Main and in south-western Germany; the Franks on the Lower Rhine and stretching over Belgium and Westphalia; the Saxons between the Harz mountains and the North Sea, from the Elbe westward to the Rhine. The Goths issued from the Baltic and pressed southward and eastward, and finally covered the territory north of the Danube and the Black Sea, behind whom, over the trackless depths of Russia, dwelt the Slavonic races; the Thuringians were in central Germany, and the Burgundians finally came to rest on the west bank of the Rhine between Strasburg and Mayence. The Goths in their two great divisions of the East Goths (Ostrogoths), and the West Goths (Visigoths), rivet the attention of the historian from their ensuing collisions with the Roman Em- pire, and the forthcoming developments that Tribe and Class 57 shaped the embryonic and figurative outlines of the dawning nations. Driven from their homes by the invading Huns, the Ostrogoths crossed the Danube and settled in the provinces of the Roman Empire. Their treatment was severe, and odious, and rising, with the help of arms secretly procured, they conquered their masters, and under Fridigern laid waste Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessaly, and remained in the latter country. Later under the opposed captains of two roman armies, the Franks from the West and the Goths from the east, met in the battle of Aquileia. This victory of the eastern emperor Theodosius was shortly followed by the rise of a remarkable warrior Alaric who actuated by rage, or ambition, or jealousy, started a large body of his people on a systematic excursion of pillage, and finally took the city of Rome and ransacked it, liberating some forty thousand slaves who escaped to his camp. Three times he repeated this exploit, and with successive repeti- tions of outrage and extortion. The Visigoths continually moved westward, and came to rest on the Atlantic, in southern Gaul and Spain. The tribal pressure had become intense, and the motion of the Huns had unsettled all of the promiscuous populations, and inaugurated fresh brigandages. The Vandals, Alans, Suevi, and Burgundians, under a chief named Radagast crossed the Alps and demanded territory for new homes. They were repulsed, and then, diverted to Gaul, separated, and confiscated new lands, the 58 Europe's Handicap — Vandals subsiding in the present Andalusia, the Alans in Portugal, the Burgundians in western Switzerland, and the Suevi in Galicia. In the fifth century the Marcomanni seem to occupy Bavaria, between the Danube and the Alps, and Thuringia and established a kingdom in central Germany, while the restless tides of Hun and Slav impetuously drove hither and thither on the eastern boundaries of their domain, until Attila plunged through Europe with his swarms of savages, numbering, with the quickly attracted Goths, perhaps seven hundred thousand fighters. We have rehearsed his defeat at Chalons. The bewildering spectacle of rapine, brigandage, and freebooting-adventure, continues, and, invited by the Empress Eudoxia of Rome, the Vandals under Geiseric leave Carthage in Africa where an arm of this people had penetrated, and plundering the shores of Sicily, march on the imperial city, take it, and rifle it of its treasures, and desert its inhabitants, plucked of the last vestiges of liveli- hood. As an excellent summary of the events reviewed. Dr. Fay's own words may be quoted; "during the fourth and fifth centuries the great historic achievements of the German race, as we have traced them, were performed outside of the German territory. While from Thrace to the Atlantic Ocean, from the Scottish Highlands to Africa, the new nationalities overran the decayed Roman Empire, constantly changing their seats of power, we have no intelligence of what was happening within Germany herself. Both Tribe and Class 59 branches of the Goths, the Vandals, and a part of the Franks had become Christians; but the Ale- manni, Saxons, and Thuringians were still heathens although they had by this time adopted many of the arts of civilized life." The Ostrogoths came into Italy under Theo- deric,and then, after his death, under the renewed hopes of the eastern Emperor to recover Italy, ensued a desperate combat between the goths and the empire, while the tribal allies — the Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians, and Alemanni, all greedy for plunder — served both sides, flocking to the standards of both armies. This titanic conflict lasted for over eleven years and ended by the annihilation of the goths near Vesuvius whose despairing remnant — one thousand strong — left Italy. With them the name of the Ostrogoth, like a quenched star, vanished from the page of history. Invited by the great general Narses, against whom the perfidious courtiers of Constanti- nople were plotting, the Longobards (Long beards) were introduced into Italy. These tribes, en- compassed with hostile neighbors, welcomed the chance of escape from their perilous position, and, under their chief Alboim, entered through Italy, across the unprotected passes of the Alps, with their flocks and families and household goods, and established themselves — only again after inter- mittent struggles — in northern Italy, in the province of Lombardy. The germanic tribes were thus scattered over Europe, and had encountered the civilization of 60 Europe's Handicap — Rome at many points, while the ameliorating In- fluences of religion, in some measure, had softened their barbaric impulses, but the great central por- tion of Europe wherein was to grow the germanic kingdom was yet inchoate, and undetermined in its national form. Its development was con- tingent upon the establishment of government and a national existence in France, and the great Charlemagne as king of the Franks, started the movements and supplied the regional require- ments, that crystallized there into a labyrinth of minor sovereignties, interwoven states, and free cities. But the extreme and accentuated tribal discord and perplexity meets us in the regions from the Baltic to the Danube, and eastward over Russia, when the Lithuanian, the Pole, the Cossack, the Slav, filled the voids left by the disappearing Goths and wrestled savagely with each other, under chieftains animated by motives, that were pa- triotic, or selfish, or purely personal and fantastic. Here also, as Jeremiah Curtin tells us, "the ad- vance of the Germans on the Slav tribes and later on Poland presents, perhaps the best example in history of the methods of European civilization. The entire Baltic coast from Lubeck eastward was converted to Christianity by the Germans at the point of the sword. The people of the country deprived of their lands were reduced to slavery: and if any escaped this lot, they were men from the higher classes who joined the conquerors in the capacity of assistant oppressors." Over this Tribe and Class 61 fated area as Sienklewitz describes it, in his lurid tale of war, extermination, spoliation, and rivalry — to the eye, in the reading, rendered more pre- posterous by its consonantal jargon — the incessant concussion of tribe and tribe, in frantic combats, had carpeted the ground with the dead. "How many struggles were fought in that region, how many people had laid down their lives there, no man had counted, no man re- membered. Eagles, falcons, and ravens alone saw these; and whoever from a distance heard the sound of wings and the call of the ravens, whoever beheld the whirl of birds circling over one place, knew that corpse or unburied bones were lying beneath." Mr. Curtin has attributed an extraordinary value to the history of Russia, as involving con- siderations connected with that country's over- whelmingly increasing influence in Europe. He says (Preface to translation of The Fire and Sword.); ''the Slav history is interesting to the man of science, it is interesting also to the practical statesman, because there is no country in the Eastern hemisphere, whose future may be con- sidered outside of Russian influence, no country whose weal and woe may not become connected in some way with Russia." This opinion, we suspect, may be attributed to a personal and an emotional interest in the enormous dramatic intensity of the historic episodes, and to the mastery of its author of the language and chronicles of these eastern barbarians. Russia 62 Europe's Handicap — is in mass impressive, in individual distinction and in genius phenomenal, in its mere numerical human contents formidable, but it is governed by an outrageous despotism, controlled by a fanatical bigotry, and inflamed by dreams, which rhetoric decorates with illusions, and an antique statesman- ship, replete with fatalism, makes plausible with epigrams. Russia remains to-day tribal, and is still paralyzed with the rigidities of Class. The nucleal Russia, which by conquest and treaty and absorption, became the Russia of to- day, was situated north of the Volga, and east of the Vistula. It was governed by princes whose disintegrating methods of succession kept it most diversely ruled, and embroiled it in chronic dis- turbances, while frontier collisions with enemies, who begrudged it its land, or from whom, with a reciprocal cupidity, it desired or needed to acquire more territory, were continual. With the Finns on the north and east, with the Turks — Khazars and Petcheneks — on the south and east, with the Lithuanians on the west, the friction was incessant, and the methods of tribal warfare were literally reproduced. We are told (Morfill and Fryer), that "the initiative lay with the princes who, with their drujinas, or armed bands, wrested the land from the original inhabitants, and protected the settlers, to whom they granted the privilege of occupation. Thus the conditions under which these new principalities were created tended to exalt the position of the prince, and fostered the assumption of an autocratic power, which has Tribe and Class 63 flourished with varying degrees of vigor ever since." In the middle of the Ninth century Slav tribes covered the area of the Baltic coast west of the Vistula; ''a line drawn from Lubeck to the Elbe ascending the river to Magdeburg, thence to the western ridge of the Bohemian mountains, and passing on in a somewhat irregular course, leaving Carinthia and Styria on the east, gives the boundary between the Germans and the Slavs at that period." (Curtin). North of Bohemia, in a land skirted on its southern margins by the Carpathian mountains, lived the men of the plain, the Polyane, and this region became afterwards Great Poland, which is now South Prussia. This region under ambitious counts was extended westward, and its greatest extension was about half way between Stettin and Lubeck. The Slav tribes were beyond towards the Elbe, while the invading Germans, with an incessant pressure, marked by more energetic and fruitful encounters, thrust out their hands for the territory of the Slavs. East of this roughly out- lined district of Poland was Russia. Later the Germans continuing their encroach- ments drove the Poles from the Baltic, and ''turned the cradle of Poland into South Prussia", (Curtin). The Poles allied themselves with Lithuania, and attempted the hopeless task of appropriating or assimilating Russia. Russia, Mr. Curtin avers, dates from the year 862, when Rurik came to Novgorod to rule over 64 Europe's Handicap — the people. Then succeeded Kieff on the Dnieper as the metropolis of the country and the capital of its interests, political and religious, which was later in 1157 displaced by Moscow. In 1240 the Tartars subjugated Russia, and half a million of these destructive bandits swarmed over it, but were repulsed in their western drive into Silesia and Moravia. The Tartars ruled 250 years, and when Russia was liberated, its dimensions had woefully shrunk, as compared with the vast region previously acknowledging the supremacy of Russia. The area taken away embraced the rich country of Little, Red, Black, and White Russia, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. This was Lithuanian Russia, which had arisen from the amalgamation of a dozen or so of tribes, later reduced to servitude by the Teutonic Knights and by the Knights of the Sword, with two excep- tions, (Curtin), the Lithuanians proper and the Samogitians. In the first unrelieved anarchy and disunion their troubled condition invited strong or artful men to attempt their rule, and under a suc- cession of princes their slender property was handsomely enlarged, until it acquired the con- siderable proportions mentioned, "extending to the Crimea, and including the whole basin of the Dnieper, with its tributaries, together with the upper Dvina." The Struggle then naturally ensued, under the controlling impulses of action which animated the Tribe and Class, for one or the other — Poland or Lithuania — to absorb each other. However Po- Tribe and Class 65 land and Lithuania became gradually united through interests and processes, more or less ambitious, simply, or conventionally arising from the heraldic association of the Lithuanian families with Polish nobility, and finally — against of course protest and dissent and violence — the Polish efforts culminated in complete success, with the balance turned in favor of the Polish nobility. Then the further struggle developed of Poland endeavoring to maintain itself, crushed between an aggressive teutonic power on the west, and a formidable acquisitive realm of barbarians on the east. The historian points out the blunder of Poland in fighting the Cossacks and Russians, in- stead of conciliating them, and turning their atten- tion to moderating or expelling the german reten- tion of the Baltic coast. "The Polish nobility, who were the state, possessed at the time of Yagello's coronation all the land, and owned the labor of the people; later they ceased to pay taxes of any kind." To enjoy this indulgence and eminence of position and privilege, was a great temptation to the nobles of Lithuania and Russia. There was still an item of permanent discord, and it was religious. The eastern christians belonged to the eastern church, which did not recognize the supremacy of the Pope. The attempt was suc- cessfully made to effect a union of the eastern and western catholics, and while the eastern congrega- tions might retain eastern customs and eastern liturgies, the Pope was to be accepted in his ecclesiastical sovereignty. 66 Europe's Handicap — The Russian inhabitants of the subsidized and enslaved country, where Poles or Polanlzed Russians absolutely tyrannized over every cir- cumstance, station, and holding of the people, fiercely resented this control and enforced submis- sion to a material and religious oligarchy. The Poles and all of their adherents were ranged in conflict with the Cossacks and the Russian people, with the Lithuanian protestants, recalcitrants, and the original land owners. The complexity of violence, bloodshed, deceit, conspiracy, and rapa- city, is further confused by the infusion of the Tartar interests, who were solely intent upon forc- ing their domination upon the entire realm of Russia. The Poles whipped the Cossacks at Berestechke but the triumph was short lived in its effects. A singular love-affair enters the tangled skein, and the Poles contend with each other at a critical moment before their enemies, the Cossacks, who suddenly realizing their opportunity, smite the Poles with a ruthless vengeance, and suffer less than five hundred to escape from an army of twenty thousand. "The peasants in all of the country about killed the fugitives with scythes and clubs." There was a further battle with Mark Sobiesky who was overwhelmed. The Poles now confronted the Cossacks and the Tar- tars, but averted the hostility of the latter by plentifully distributed bribes of gold, which momentarily released them from the added incur- sions of these oriental savages. The Russians combined, put to flight the Tar- Tribe and Class 67 tars, who had for over two hundred years intimi- dated and oppressed them, and at the critical moment the Polish king resigned; finally Russia winning now with an easy, and almost unmolested hand, under Katherine II, brought about the union of western to eastern Russia, and the desti- nies of Poland darkened and finally, under later events, distinguished by the inexpugnable traits of European tribal rapacity, disappeared, in a quartering, whose able and self-complacent butchers were Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Were we inclined to prolong much further this review of the tribal origins of the European nations, the forcible impression of, that fact would be greatly confirmed in any inspection of the areas of south-eastern Europe, which Mr. Harry De Windt has appropriately named Savage Europe, (though for that matter it is not difficult to see that Savagery, less flagrantly and visibly, afflicts all of Europe), and which embraces Rumania, Monte- negro, Servia, and Bulgaria, while much of its history is also bound up with the slowly evolving dual kingdom of Austria-Hungary. For the tribal nature of the populations of Austria is well illus- trated by Freeman's remark "that there is no such thing as an Austrian language, that a whole crowd of languages are spoken within the dominions of the sovereigns of Austria — German, Magyar, Italian, Ruman, and the various dialects of the great Slavonic majority". And in the same con- nection the dominant influence of Class in this kingdom is also relentlessly exposed, when the 68 Europe's Handicap — same writer tells us ''such phrases as 'Austrian interests', 'Austrian policy', and the like, do not mean the interests or policy of any nation at all. They simply mean the interests or policy of a particular ruling family, which may often be the same as the interests and wishes of particular parts of their dominions, but which can never represent any common interest or common wish on the part of the whole". And in the same way no one is correct in speak- ing of Turkey as the consolidated expression of a single people, for the history of Turkey remorse- lessly shows that to-day its nationality has been an artificially super-imposed rule of a conquering tribe over a patch-work of less powerful and con- sequently subjugated tribes. This sort of thing generally has also been picturesquely character- ized by Freeman, as "a collection of scraps, with no natural connection, brought together by the accidents of warfare, marriage, or diplomacy". As regards Austria, the purpose of this essay need not be further distended by any reference to the historic incidents of the rise of this kingdom. We should encounter the recurrent presence of many of the tribes, whose migrations and wanderings, invasions and repulses, we have already met, with the intermixture of a few others, and much addi- tional interpolation of uncertainty. The tribal heterogeneity of Austria is significant, and the tribal autonomies, so far as tradition, language, and clannishness, goes, remains, deprived of that solidification that elsewhere, in the tribal elements Tribe and Class 69 of European nations, has so largely obliterated primal contrasts, and secured an ethnic result approximately or superficially uniform. Here again is the Celt, who under such tribal names as the Boii, the Taurisci, the Scordisci, the Ambrones, occupied different parts of the original territory. Here are the lUyrians on the shores of the Adriatic. Here we find the omnipresent Goth or German, under the familiar names of the Suevi, the Marcomanni, and the Hermunduri, fighting the persecuted Celts; here also the problematic Dacian, along the Danube, thoroughly tribal in his instincts, for he robbed the lands of his neigh- bors, and profited by their dissensions. In the ever changing tribal confusion we meet Sarma- tians, Alemanni, Quadi, Jazyges, with the cata- clysmic advent of the deluging Avars, Slavs, and Hungarians (Magyars), and later the now familiar avalanch of the Huns. We find the Slavs follow- ing the Germans in the lands deserted by the former, and broadly constituted of Poles, Ruthen- ians, Slovens, Servians, Croatians, Czechs, and Slovaks. The Hungarian or Magyar state, so large a part of the Austrian dominion, was founded by the tribes coming from the Volga and the Ural Mountains, and whose tribal covetous- ness impelled them, to invade Europe further west, while as mercenaries they were employed by the eastern roman emperors against the implacable Bulgarians. History thus records their move- ments, "few examples of a migration so vast are to be found in the history of barbarian invasions. 70 Europe's Handicap — Two hundred and sixteen thousand men bearing arms, which implies a total population of almost a million, are the numbers mentioned in the na- tional traditions, where it is said that this multi- tude took nearly three years to cross the Car- pathians." (Leger and Lingelbach). These hordes were Mongolian in ethnic affinities. Rest- less, unsubdued, prompted by the racial belliger- ency, which was not only fierce but skillful, they pushed outwards against Germans and Slavs, the inhabitants of Italy, and even to the limits of France in Provence and Champagne, until finally chastened by awful defeats and wholesale slaughters, in which their tribal neighbors fully satisfied themselves that they had extorted the last possible payment of their hate, the Magyars became christianized, settled down, and founded the kingdom of Hungary. The internal tension of Austria to-day is well understood, and the diffi- culty of maintaining a political equilibriumx is pretty well realized, when we learn that this tribal condition is "not a mere matter of dialects or local idioms, as is the case in Germany or in Italy, but of forms of speech fixed in literature used by the church, consecrated by usage, in political assem- blies, and made familiar every day in the press. Austria is a veritable Tower of Babel. It pub- lishes German, Hungarian, Polish, Ruthenian, Czech, Slovak, Ser-bo-Croatian, Slovene, Ruman- ian and Italian newspapers. And these news- papers are in languages, as a rule, unintelligible to all except those immediately concerned, and very Tribe and Class 71 frequently represent diametrically opposed ten- dencies" (Leger and Lingelbach). Finally in this tribal dissection of Europe let us look at England — the United Kingdom — and con- clude this inspection, which may become futile through its laborious monotony. England — understanding by that term the United Kingdom — more favorably perhaps than any other country in Europe impresses the American observer as distinctly civilized, in the sense, observe, that in it the ethnic mosaic of parts are not so conspicuous, and that the traces of that tribal violence which startles the American in other sections of Europe are not so formidable. The tribal origins of the English state are unmis- takable, nor were they more exempt from those circumstances of warfare and bloodshed, with the attendant consequences of carnage, plunder, and enslavement, which marked the beginnings of all national life in Europe. These opening chapters of the rise of organized social government were everywhere in Europe engraved deeply with the characters of violence, spoliation, and oppression. Through the ines- capable action of heredity which no influence, short of extinction, can quite neutralize — and the Christian Church was a substantially amel- iorating or indeed a revolutionizing protestant against much tribal savagery — the strain of that earliest ferocity has been retained in European character up to this day. The survival, not in- deed bluntly or realistically noticeable perhaps, 72 Europe's Handicap — is yet clearly seen in a harshness, a coarseness, or an absence of sympathy, and in an immoderate rejection in practice, of the theory — to put it so vaguely — of the Brotherhood of Man, and every new stride towards a complete or an extended national existence dishonors it altogether. Again the exasperating sway of Class is evident, retaining much that might have dropped away, of tribal crudity of sentiment, and contaminating much by its degeneracy of feeling. Songs of Hate are to-day vibrant in the countries of warring Europe, and where they are not heard probably their meaning is not unrecognized nor unfelt, in hearts too cautious of appearances to admit their vocal enunciation. And more probably still, such ruinous and disintegrating sentiments prevail more largely amongst those who wear the insignia of Class, and carry the names of obsolete and in- sulting priority over their fellow men; names which are not expressive of virtual preeminence, but have become tinselled with the glitter of a purely temporary and ancient artifice. The first inhabitants of England were a problem- atical race living in the stone age, and vanishing in a geological perspective like an extinct family of mammals. The Celts succeeded, and their tribal dissensions, the merciless inroads of their northern members — the Picts and Scots — who assume to the imagination the shaggy horribleness of some wolfish denizens of cliffs and forests, kept them in turmoils of conflict. These ancient British tribes seem to be indicated in the names of the Cantii, Tribe and Class 73 Iceni, Atribates, Regni, Trinobantes, and Silures. Rome controlled England later, paved her marches with good roads, built cities and administered Roman law. Here the Roman general Suetonius had discovered — as Mr. James might say, had become sublimely conscious of the racial tension — when the infuriated Britons destroyed London — it is awe-inspiring to think of its antiquity — and reduced it to ashes, while "such of the inhabitants as remained in it were cruelly massacred: the Romans and all strangers to the number of 70,000 were everywhere put to death without distinction." Rome's final desertion of the island permitted the northern marauders to renew their pillage and destruction, and the Briton confronted a new dilemma, which however was solved, to their own discomfiture, by their inviting the Anglo-Saxons to deliver them from their dangers. These last tribes speedily repulsed the Picts and Scots, and then in a succession of irrupting bands, from the continent, evinced their tribal facility of plunder, by seizing England, and quite definitely evicting the Britons. "A long chaotic period of savage warfare ensued; and nearly two hundred years of slaughter and suffering passed away before our Saxon ancestors established their Octarchy in the island; and even then, a considerable portion of the western district remained in the possession of the British, or, as the Saxons termed them, the Welsh." (E. S. Creasy). The Danes next made their appearance, and 74 Europe's Handicap — their disposition was accurately anticipated by all the outrages that had preceded them. And their outrages were characteristically exasperated by perfidy. "The original affinity that had existed between the Danes and the Anglo-Saxons by no means mitigated the ferocity of the Scan- dinavian invaders towards the Germanic occu- pants of the island; it rather was a cause of aggravation. A change had taken place in the Anglo-Saxons, since their settlement here, which had broken off every tie between them and their Scandinavian kinsmen." That change was the christianization of the former. The Norman followed, and his pride of caste (tribal), his cruelty and brutal domination (tribal), have been im- partially mentioned; "even the aristocrats of ancient republican Rome were surpassed by the Norman nobility in pride, in statescraft, in merci- less cruelty, and in coarse contempt for the industry, the rights, the feelings of all whom they considered the lower classes of mankind." (Creasy). William the Conqueror is also detected in the exercise of an overweening avarice, (tribal), asso- ciated with that presumption of the prerogatives of monopoly which has characterized the Class formula down to the last century certainly, and probably within our own. "He obtained for him- self, and it may be presumed without trouble, a large share of the profits of the Conquest. His domains comprised fourteen hundred and sixty- two estates in land or manors, as well as the prin- cipal towns of the kingdom. The impositions Tribe and Class 75 exacted from the Saxon rebels constantly swelled these possessions. Throughout the length and breadth of them he imposed taxes at his will, and by the same arbitrary means established custom dues on the importation and exportation of merchandise. Fines, penalties for crimes, the sale of public offices, as well as of the royal protec- tion and justice, were the source of considerable revenue, whereby an extraordinary and independ- ent power was assured to the king." (J.T. Abdy). From the amalgamated tissues of these different populations, involving their habits, tastes, accom- plishments, and previous civilization modern England has evolved. But almost at no point, in its glorious growth, would the analytical mind fail to trace the rude sequences of its tribal origin. The TRIBE is the heritage of the past; the form of the earliest possible social aggregation, and the expression, in its psychology, of the retinue of the unsubdued and yet immoderate passions of primal man. It doubtless is associated with a group of virile virtues, which comprehend the perennial splendor of courage, and endurance, and sacrifice, but these too are entwined or vitiated by the riotous growth of fiendish emotions, the sullenness of rage, the insensate thirst for cruelties and desperate assault, the ruthlessness of ven- geance. Under the influence, subtle, deteriorating, and shamelessly selfish, of CLASS, which also presupposes a conviction of individualistic sacred- ness, the symbol, arrogant and extortionate, of the predestined selection of a CLASS, intrenched 76 Europe's Handicap — in their position by the conventional allegiance to a fixed succession, the tribal expression changed into something more contemptible and degrading. The device had its value and was a stabilizing motive in early societies. Around it grew the worst impulses of human pride, human selfishness, and human blindness. It humiliated the victims of its outrages, while it planted the seeds of a dull sycophancy in its admirers and subjects, and the natural consequences of its unopposed sway were a practical slavery of mind and body. Nations became the play-things of individuals and the interests of multitudes the unguent for the con- solation of wounded vanities. European civiliza- tion, developing alone under the dual control of tribal obduracy, self-sufficiency, and sternness, and of class arrogance and implacable greed, would have resulted in the most rigid and abominable social petrifaction. A wonderful religion saved it, though that same religion did not escape the infection of its turbulence, its vice, its bigotry, in other words its TRIBE and CLASS. Were we now, with the aid of reinforcing details, not given in these imperatively fragmentary sketches of the tribal state of Europe in Europe's formative stages, to estimate the tribal Character, and by that we mean to gauge its emotional con- tents and its habitual mental attitude, we should not hesitate to identify its dominant features as. Irritable Pugnacity, a predisposition to fighting; Intense Racial or Caste Pride, an irreducible self- consciousness; and Sterility of Heart, which Tribe and Class 77 means many things, as duplicity, intolerance, brutality, covetousness. If we were interested in its better traits. Courage, Endurance, Vivacity, and Individual sparklings of Fidelity and Self- Sacrifice, might be assigned to the European ab- original, as among his virtues, while yet a tribes- man. All of these qualities — both good and bad — were strengthened and widened in their scope, as the tribes were constantly confronted with new experiences, in their clashes with each other, and in their clashes with Rome, wherein a sophistica- tion, not previously apprehended, added to their virtues and their vices, while a new and beautiful Religion complicated both. The Irritable Pugnacity cannot be questioned. It started aggressions and collisions on every side. The Racial or Caste Pride was never more sub- limely shown than in the indomitable resistance of the Nervii, who immortalized their name in its extinction, or in such instance of self-destruction as the deaths of Hermanric and Arbogast. The Sterility of Heart was all too thoroughly demon- strated in ravages and rapine — one recalls the fiendish cruelty of Attila, of Alaric and the ferocity of the marauding Goths, the Vandals, the Franks, and Saxons; in treason and malice — witness the killing of Hermann (21 A. D.) by mem- bers of his own family, the murder of Ataulf, king of the Visigoths, the murder of Odoacer by Theodoric, as also that of Boethius; in covetous- ness — recall Ariovistus demanding one-third of the territory he had defended, or the prompt 78 Europe's Handicap — appropriation of England by Hengist and Horsa; in duplicity and caprice — these less obtrusive quali- ties, in the first engendering motions of modern Europe are less conspicuously seen in the first rude social elements of its composition, but the constant internal dissensions of the tribes, the beginnings of the promiscuous intrigues that were later to dis- figure the moral aspect of Europe, are certainly evidence of them, and they appear even in the tribal state in those terrible years of confusion and strategy when German, Lithuanian, Cossack, and Pole with wavering, extinguished and rekindled fortunes, fought each other over the broad table of Poland and Hungary, through the Black Country of Russia, and up and down the land, from the banks of the Vistula to the waters of the Danube and the Sea of Azov. The more subtle and more contemptible vices of feeling and conduct were yet to be grown upon the robust and sanguinary ruffianism of the barbarian, were indeed to vitiate much of his coarse and violent disposition with deceit and selfishness, and the lewd skill of meanness and self-indulgence, as well as to distort his strength into oppression and his mastery into intolerance. This later stage in the moral evolution of modern Europe was ushered in as the Class System completed its formal out- lines, and the Feudal System — necessary, inevi- table, and protective — evolved the domination of the INDIVIDUAL, the overcrusting of the social compact with the scintillating surfaces of title, decoration, dynasties, degrees, forms, appanage, and the fictions of Divine Rights. Tribe and Class 79 The result variously tempered, variously quali- fied, variously restrained, in its different parts, is seen to-day in Europe, and though we may confi- dently expect that this last scientific and barren struggle will extirpate its continued usurpation of the plain rational and equivalent claims of sense and culture — call it civilization — yet this war with its brutalizing and decivilizing influence is the sequence of the Tribal Instinct, and illustrates the perpetuating force of the Class System. That does not mean that individuals alone have caused it — much as individuals in parlor councils and bed- room alcove conferences, drawing-room conversa- tions, and cabinet conventions, regulate things in Europe to-day, as they ever have done — for it is certain now that whole nations are interested and vitally in earnest, but it means that the Irritable Pugnacity, the Racial or Caste pride, and the Sterility of Heart remain and the posture and im- portance and the imposture, as well, of Class. We have hastily glanced at the tribal promis- cuity of Europe at the beginning of our era, and have suggested, in the patched and somewhat dis- ordered mosaic of historic references collected, the justification of our belief that the tribal nature representing the condensed expression of all the individuals in the tribe, in those aspects of it relative to this discussion, is found in the three qualities we have mentioned. Let us now inspect more closely, with reference to its rudiments and its results, the Class System, and at its conclusion review decisive or important 80 Europe's Handicap — epochs in European history that proclaim the deteriorating or disturbing influence of the Tribe and Class, with some demonstration, at the close, of the involution of both as causae verae in the present war. CHAPTER IV The Origins of Class Pride in its paramountcy in human failings has been the source of man's chief sins, in its suprem- acy in character has been the noblest of his attributes. It's gratification furnishes the first incentives to personal ambition, and it has played the most destructive role in the devastations of human happiness. Class distinctions minister so naturally to pride, are so indubitably its consequence, that in the earliest groupings of men when the emotional complex has developed suffi- ciently to admit of ideal feelings, eminence of some kind was sought for, and in such stages of society it came with the display of strength, ability, robust power, muscular endurance, mental massiveness. The tribes in their vagrant state, and in their settlements, had their chief men, their leaders, who were either chosen in some general assembly or were hereditary. The patriarchal principle pre- vailed perhaps in the sedentary, agricultural, or nomadic communities, the survival of the fittest among the fighters. Guizot separates the original horde of barbarians into the tribe and the band, the former remaining more or less stationary and vegetative, the latter wandering, battling, en- gaged in pillage and in conquest. The tribe, under these limitations, may have been usually 82 Europe's Handicap — governed by the patriarch, or if the tribe was a congery of families each submissive to its elder then "Its primitive element, Its political unity, so to speak In the language of publicists, was not the Individual, the warrior, but the family, the chief of the family." But the chieftains of the hand were the foremost warriors, and at the chief's table sat the "Geslthas", of the Anglo-Saxons, who received from their chief presents of horses, weapons, or portions of the subdued countries. Again King- ship, In a primitive fashion, was early evolved, and, as with the Homeric kings, who boasted a celestial lineage the Scandinavian or the Germanic kings claimed a supernatural descent, while a restricted elective system determined the succes- sion. "The three Scandinavian countries, that ultimately became the monarchies of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, were originally subdivided Into numerous petty kingdoms. In each of these whenever the king died, his successor was elected out of the descendants of the sacred stock by the choice of the asembled freemen of the State. Part of the population was In a state of slavery or thraldom, the Inevitable result of the perpetual wars and piracies In which the Scandinavians Indulged. These unhappy beings w^ere of course destitute of all political rights; but every freeman capable of bearing arms might attend at the 'Ting' as the popular assemblies, both for legislative and judicial purposes, were called, and every freeman had an equal voice." (Creasy). Tribe and Class 83 Most logically hereditary claims soon estab- lished themselves, and all the more readily as the simplicity of the method provided at critical mo- ments, when a choice was difficult or impossible, an instant continuation of the sovereignty. But the results of war in bringing vast regions under personal control, and investing a person with vast properties, determined a tendency, easily dis- tinguished in the antecedent groups, and an hered- itary kingship issued naturally from the slowly crystallizing materials of government. Then the tribal wars were continued in the disputes, san- guinary and cruel, of rival petty lords, from whose gradual extinction sprang .the omnipotent power of the king of the nation, wherever the principle of Monarchy could exhaustively locate and perfect itself. When the tribes began their incursions, when against the more settled or better circumstanced populations about them and beyond them, they started those intentional depredations, and exer- cised their tumultuous restlessness, pugnacity, and self-esteem, to acquire fresh possessions, they turned an organized world of men into a chaos of warring parts. Lands, towns, and countries, were overrun, divided, and the spoils of victory assigned to a multitude of followers. Chiefs of tribes be- came local potentates, whose faithful clansmen sur- rounded them with a hedge of belligerency, which impinged on every side with other hedges of belligerency, and laid upon the lands subdued, the most frightful and persistent plague of discord, 84 Europe's Handicap — strife, confusion, and confiscation. It was throughout the periods of alternating tribal ex- cesses, and momentary Roman dominion, that more and more the differentiation of parts solidi- fied into a class society, which much later again, from the eighth to the thirteenth century became a firmament, as it were, of foci, each controlled by a Count, a Viscount, a Duke, a Baron or any other form of proprietary chief. Guizot graphically recounts the order of events in these surging and distracted days, when a new^ order of things was about to be ushered in, and the embryos of new social states were forming under the supremacy of might and force, the supremacy of individual and collective cupidity, against which with a transcendent or transcendental power, the spirit of Christianity unceasingly strove. Guizot says; ''after the invasion of the empire an im- mense territory was thrown open to the expedi- tions and eager avidity of the conquerors. They dispersed themselves throughout it in every direc- tion. The chief of them occupied vast domains. They were too far from each other to meet often, and deliberate in common. The political sovereignty of the general assembly became impracticable, was doomed to perish, and in fact did perish, giving place to another system, to that hierarchical organization of proprietors, distinc- tive of the feudal association and its institutions." Class became a necessity, all previous ten- dencies towards class distinctions were superla- tively intensified, and slowly, surely, with a Tribe and Class 85 deepening root of appreciation among the masses everywhere — and the masses everywhere through- out Roman rule also, had been pretty well flogged into understanding it, and almost into assuming its absolute legitimacy — the fabric of Aristocratic Oligarchy rose upward, more clearly and clearly seen, as the turmoil and noise of the first confu- sions faded from the ears, and the dust and attri- tions of the first shocks of appropriation settled before the eyes. The tribal instinct of force, as the arbiter of place, ruled in a rough confederacy of lords, who affirmed their prerogatives with the emphasis of the tribal self-consciousness, and who, in a hun- dred ways, illustrated also the tribal Sterility of Heart, in covetousness, in cruelty, and in treachery as well. And yet the rougher power of the tribal sincerity of might and force, as a wholesome contrariant to the pruriency of personal malice and selfishness, gave to many of these first Lords of Creation, a half tone of manly honesty of intention. The later objectional heartlessness, the over- weening arrogance, the hideous bigotry of self- importance, which were later seen in Class, came as culture, and civilization itself, furnished the incen- tives to self-indulgence, self-glorification, self- assertion, and selfishness of all sorts. Perhaps we might use Guizot's words, employed in a different context; "the social condition of those ages was deplorable; human morality very in- ferior, according to what is told us, to that of our times. But in men individuality was strong — will, energetic." 86 Europe's Handicap — Each thread of motive, each tendency of circum- stance, all the conditions of life, which favored the erection of Class, received from the Feudal system their complete ratification and enforcement. Then sprang into existence a varied panoply, so to speak, of officialdom, which dressed the suzerain in the livery of a superior being, and bred in the bone, marrow, and blood, of the common folk, the laborer, the slave, the retainer, the coloni, a vital consent to an irrevocable social structure of Top and Bottom. And there was, and there could be at the time, no humanizing, emancipating in- fluence, but that of the Church, which — no matter what were her blemishes — did stand for the ultra revolutionary principle of men's equality, under the limitations of merit and endowment. Then came the castle, with its household of many elements, and many names, the whole equipment conspiring to the maintenance of the greatness of the Lord and his estates, an extraor- dinary entourage of referendary, seneschal, mar- shal, falconers, butlers, cup-bearers, chamberlains, porters, harbingers, pages, varlets, grooms, and squires, and these last of many sorts. The castle appeared with its mighty walls, its wandering complications of outline, its moats and towers, with its splendid isolation on a peak or hill top, and its incessant dread, for the times were tribal, and war, force, invasion, spread far and wide the tremor of possible disaster. The castle we are told (Monteil) "must be seen when at sunrise, the outward galleries glimmer with the armor of the Tribe and Class 87 sentinels, and the towers are shown all brilliant with their large new gratings. These high build- ings must be seen, which fill those who defend them with courage, and with fear those who should be tempted to attack them. "The door presents itself all covered with heads of boars, or wolves, flanked with turrets, and crowned with a high guard-house. Enter, there are three enclosures, three moats, three draw- bridges to pass. You find yourself in a large square court, where are cisterns, and on the right and left are the stables, hen-houses, pigeon-houses, coach-houses; the cellars, vaults, and prisons are below; above are the dwelling apartments; above these are the magazine, larders or salting- rooms and arsenals. All the roofs are bordered with machiolations, parapets, guard-walks, and sentry boxes. In the middle of the court is the donjon, which contains the archives and the treasure. It is deeply moated all round, and can only be entered by a bridge, almost always raised. Although the walls, like those of the castle, are six feet thick, it is surrounded up to half its height with a chemise, or second wall, of large cut stones." That castle was the symbol of a central- ized Aristocracy. The feudal system represented the dismember- ment of political unity and in the fluid state of social conditions when, as Guizot says, "the ele- ment which became dominant was that of con- quest, of force," the unprotected, the defenceless, the timid, the weak, sought the guardianship of S8 Europe's Handicap — the strong feudatories, and thus by a concretionary action, started through the disorganization of government, centres of administration were scattered wide-cast over the land. These were the Lords, around whom had concreted a host of dependents and leudes, whose relations to the lord were distinctly those of obligation. The slave — Servi — was not wanting of course, the tiller or landsman, the villein — coloni, adscriptitii, censiti — the free men — ingenui — and the knight or com- panion in arms, whose personal relations were most intimate, but always subservient and which character "they sought to give it by the ceremonies of homage, the oath of fidelity and investiture". For centuries the oppression of Class deepened under the necessitous position of the vassal to his seigneur, whose territorial rights were great or small according to his rank in the army of pro- prietary chiefs, and were further accentuated by reason of the incessant friction between adjoining feudatories. "The possessors of fiefs were always in a state of disunion and war amongst themselves, continually obliged to have recourse to force, because no supreme truly public power was pres- ent to maintain between them justice and peace." (Guizot). This unbroken warfare only served the strength- ening of the claims and the importance of class, and more and more deeply engraved in the mental impressions of men its reasonableness. The majesty of Class, while its fortuitous and lesser lights faded before the eyes of the people, with the Tribe and Class 89 rise of the King, became endowed with a sublimer prerogative, as — in France at least — the king opposed the land Barons, and slowly, through art, and bribery, and force, absorbed the galaxies of subordinate rulers as regards supremacy, though with respect to recognition and degree, these lords retained their social priority. Chivalry appears a dissonant feature in the feudal system, because of its romantic loftiness of vows, the rectitude of its professed purposes, and the idealism of its legends. But the tribal and the class nature had little share in its creation, so far as its creation reflected a generous consecration of effort for the relief of distress, and the succor of the lowly and helpless. It has here also been shown by Guizot, that the noble essence of chivalry was practically instilled into it by the inspiration of the Church. Chivalry was in part a reaction against the wholesale rapacity of Feudalism. Abdy writes "there can be no doubt (for the chronicles and the laws prove it) that from the seventh to the tenth century the proprietors of small alods were little by little robbed of their small holdings, or reduced to the condition of tributary tenants by the rapacity of the great proprietors." Not a step forward in the history of the develop- ment of the final preeminence of the King in France, who gathered together in himself the privileges of the great feudatories, but served to illustrate the ubiquity of Class, its exorbitant exemption from fiscal burdens, and its monopoly of the benefits of national existence. The rise of 90 Europe's Handicap — monarchy in the midst of an aristocratic assem- blage of titles, tributary to its central effulgence was effected slowly in France, and it arose from the slow disintegration of the Feudal System. That system had perfected the Class idea, and elaborated its utmost possible divisions of place, which now clustered around the king himself, as the summation of the equivalent stations that had dignified the Lord. True Democracy is the last political evolution of civilization. The democracy of the Tribe is that of the herd, and in it, of necessity, the Class formula rises and maintains itself. All of the rudi- ments of government, as the Old World has dis- played them, involved the assumption of class superiority in groups of individuals, and the processes of Feudalism enlarged them, making the individual ruler, small or great, hereditary and despotic. In France the solution of the State into a congery of lesser governmental units, including even fiefs of the Church, controlled by Bishops, was most noticeable, and the slow extension of Kingly rule over these subordinate, often resistant and mutinous fractions of the nation, was a his- toric feature, whose operation was accompanied with disturbance, and all the unfortunate inflic- tions of craft, conflict, and conspiracy. The regnancy of the King compressed this anarchy of parts into a political solid. But the Class institution remained, and the impress of terraced social structure was permanently made, while to the King progressively flowed the united Tribe and Class 91 emoluments and prerogatives and prestige of the consolidated factors, whose partial disappearance his own elevation advertised. They became the King's vassals, in place of being absolute suzerains themselves, and their wounded vanity, or their disabled powers of acquisition, received a com- pensation in territorial possessions, still consider- able, and in the establishment of groups of noble families. Feudalism, as well epitomized by Abdy, was "a. confederation of little sovereigns, of small despots, unequal among themselves, and yet possessing and owing, each towards the other, rights and duties, invested in their own domains, over their own immediate subjects with absolute arbitrary power." An undivided Monarchy replaced it, but all of the stigmata of its past emblems and symbols were perpetuated. The people, the na- tion, gained, in many ways, which does not con- cern this thesis, but Class continued, and with it a spurious conception of human relations, treacher- ously subversive of any ideal liberty. It was com- bated, it was denied, but practically its validity was unimpaired until the Revolution. And throughout the feudal period, with vassal and suzerain, in an ascending chain to the King — him- self a great suzerain, momentarily powerless to restrain his obstreperous and avaricious or purely bellicose (tribal) satellites — throughout the Tribu- tary system of lands, which Abdy asserts preceded the feudal in form, though surely identical in spirit, throughout this epoch, force was the sole guarantee 92 Europe's Handicap — of rights, and the indelible imprint on the Euro- pean consciousness, that Might make Right, implicitly, if not explicitly, rules its political theories to-day. Let us now turn (our reflections have been applicable almost solely to France) to England, and note how there also Class became introduced, in a historic process, somewhat diverse from its use or rather genesis in France, but nurtured by similar conditions not indeed always congenial to human vanity, to the venial sin of the love of power, domination, self-importance. Without re- garding the Britons, in whose social organization the chief, rudely adumbrated Class, the Bretwalda, with his "glib of matted chestnut hair, and moustache, broad-chested, long armed, high- cheekboned, with plaid thrown loosely about him, living among his clan in patriarchal fashion, with fighting men ready to do his will, and with none to share his power save the druid and the bard," without considering that dim and Druid-haunted past, consider the social fabric under the Anglo- Saxons. There was the King (cyning) his wife (cwen), and the attendants of the court, whose functions imitate or anticipate, with an equal vivacity of invention, the numerous supernumer- aries in the continental feudal lord's household. These were the chamberlain {cuhicularius , earner- arius), the marshal, (comes stabuli), the steward (dapifer, disciferus), the butler, (pincerna). And these were not simply useful domestics. The positions, assimilating a peculiar dignity from Tribe and Class 9?t their proximit}' to the King, and to the immaterial mifiiiiia that guarded him, were held by noble men, could only so be held. And Mr. Kemble asserts, "as the kingly power rose in influence and strength, so these offices attained to distinction, and became dependent on the royal favour. When the freemen perished, and the notion of thaneship took the place of freemanship, these officials, as the trusted friends of the King became his agents in the administration of the country." And in the growth of their importance, the holders of these offices graduated, by the most natural increase of effrontery, into critics and opponents of the king himself. We are told (Abdy, Lappenberg) that nobility "by birth was not observable among the Anglo- Saxons save in the case of descendants of the military king or sea-king". That is disputed, (Kemble), and a nobility by birth insisted on, which was later overshadowed by the growing power of the king. And Abdy suggests, "possibly nobility by birth among the earliest Anglo-Saxon people draws its source from the military or sea- king, and it is not impossible that in course of time the numbers of their descendants would increase so much as to form a considerable body of nobles by birth, the aethelings of the Anglo- Saxon communities." The tendency, as was inevitable, and in the very constitution, as a germ, of the original tribal rela- tions — a tendency greatly reinforced by events — was constantly towards the creation of Class, and 94 Europe's Handicap — the ealdormen of the Anglo-Saxon, became almost pretentiously influential. "He was a noble of the first rank, having armed retainers of his own," and his house was almost inviolable. "Thus", says Mr. Kemble, "the position which his nobility, his power, and his wealth conferred upon him was a brilliant one. In fact the whole executive government may be considered as a great aristo- cratical association of which the ealdormen were the constituent members, and the king little more than the president." Thus long before the Danish invasion, the movement towards Class distinction was pronounced. Such designs are natural in communities or in nations, where a native arro- gance, (tribal), abets the necessities of govern- ment. Perhaps then the apparent notableness of being separated from the populace, the herd, stimulated a pleasant self-conceit, as to-day, in the immature or childish minds of American women, who marry for title. But also it had its stern reasonableness. The fierce pride of chief- tainship at that time is illustrated in the superb contempt of Sigurd the Dane who cried out, "I fear not death, since I have fulfilled the greatest duty of life: but I pray them not to let my hair be touched by a slave or stained with blood", and Abdy narrates that Siward of Northumbria, whose profession of Christianity deterred him from sui- cide, "stood armed and erect out of his bed, in his last moments, that at least he might not die huddled up like a cow". Tribe and Class 95 The tribal ferocity of the Danes of whom the Normans were kinsmen, is well known; Count Witikind came of a regal strain, And roved with his Norsemen the land and the main Woe to the realms which he coasted! for there Was shedding of blood and rending of hair, Rape of maiden, and slaughter of priest. Gathering of ravens and wolves to the feast: When he hoisted his standard black. Before him was battle^behind him wrack. And he burn'd the churches, that heathen Dane, To light his band to their barks again. (Harold the Dauntless). Temperaments of that kind, harshly contemptu- ous of weakness, the lowliness of position, and the disgrace of dependency, were best adapted for forming separate orders, and bestowing upon them the stamp of exclusiveness. Under King Canute, the Dane, these were fully maintained. The Dane's transplanted kindred, the Normans, then entered England, as conquerors, helped by the treachery or the timidity of two northern earls, Edwin and Morcar, and England passed into her final ethnic phases, which Mr. Pearson has thus expressed "England without the Normans would have been mechanical not artistic, brave not 96 Europe's Handicap — chivalrous, a state governed by its priests instead of a state controlling its Church". Chivalry which was introduced by the Normans into Eng- land, and which embodied the loftiest ideals of conduct — loyalty, courtesy, liberality, justice — was still a marked auxiliary and promoting in- fluence for the legitimization of caste, of Class; for ''the character of knighthood widened the separation between the different classes of society, and confirmed that aristocratical spirit of high birth by which the large masses of mankind were kept in unjust degradation." The Norman Conquest was another demonstra- tion of the vindictive ruthlessness, extirpating- violence, and rapacious egotism of the tribal spirit. William's devastation of Northumbria is thus detailed by a monkish chronicler; "he extended his posts over a space of one hundred miles. He smote most of the inhabitants with the edge of the avenging sword: he destroyed the hiding places of others: he laid waste their lands: he burned their houses, with all that was therein. Nowhere else did William act with such cruelty: and in this instance he shamefully gave way to evil passion; while he scorned to rule his own wrath, and cut off the guilty and innocent with equal severity. For, excited by anger, he bade the crops, and the herds, and the household stuff, and every description of food, to be gathered into heaps, and to be set light to, and utterly destroyed altogether: and so that all sustenance for man or beast should be at once wasted throughout all the region beyond the Tribe and Class 97 Humber. Whence there raged grievous want far and wide throughout England; such a misery of famine involved the helpless people that there perished of Christian human beings, of either sex, and every age, upwards of a hundred thousand." The whole episode of the Conquest was convinc- ingly tribal in its unjustifiable robbery of land. William the Conqueror received the allegiance of the Anglo-Saxon feudatories, was properly en- throned and crowned, and confirmed the authority and supremacy of the Kingship, which in England had maintained its superiority and compass of control over the people. It was not so painfully evolved as in France, through the successive dissipation of subsidiary rivals, though in England again the nobles subjected the King to submission to public rights, a submission frequently more or less omitted. What exactly was the efifect of the Norman Conquest, that is its moral or cultural or political efifect, while much discussed, has nothing to do with the quest instituted here. The fact and the status of Class only interests us, and as they were adjusted by it the result is best given in the words of its most celebrated historian, John R. Green. "For two years William was able to busy himself in castle building and in measures for holding down the conquered land. How effective they were was seen when the last act of the conquest was reached * * It was as the unquestioned master of Eng- land that William marched to the north crossed the Lowlands and the Forth, and saw Malcolm 98 Europe's Handicap — appear in his camp upon the Tay,to swear fealty at his feet." For William at once set about organizing his own ring of supporters, and he did it in the ap- proved and tried method of boss-rule. Nearly six hundred immediate vassals swore fidelity and homage to him, and, in order to pre- vent any independence on the part of those whom he most enriched, he took care to disperse them in their domains throughout the different counties of the kingdom. The Norman aristocracy was established twenty years after its first settlement. We are afforded by a contemporaneous writer William of Malmesbury a picture of the meeting of the Class, the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, thanes, and knights or as Abdy seems inclined to call them, the Barons. "By the royal edict there were convoked to the curia de more all the great men of whatever condition, in order that the envoys from foreign countries might admire the splendors of that assembled throng and the pomp of its feasts". The Barons attended periodic and regulative sessions, presided over by the King, which may or may not have been of great public utility, but at any rate were magnifi- cent and showy occasions. Over these barons the King apparently exercised a very real restraint, and enjoyed a lucrative relation also, as the levies in his favor in a number of contingencies were un- disputed, and were valuable; as when the heir attained majority, during his minority, and the ''right of selling in some sort of form to the very Tribe and Class 99 best bidder the hand of the female heir of a fief of whom the King was guardian." Of course the Class idea culminates in the grandiose station and authority of the King, and the king-fact was a very ancient one in European custom, while in Norman time the magnitude of the King's power was almost unlimited. "The king was himself richer and more powerful than any of his vassals. He could of his own will make laws, levy taxes, dispossess proprietors, condemn or banish unfortunate men — exercise, in short, on many occasions all the right of an unlimited sovereignty. A feudal association practically existed in Anglo-Saxon tirne; the finished product came over to England with William the Con- queror, and the homage of a vassal to the king, as late as Henry VI, contains the words, 'I become your man from this day forward, of life and limb, and of earthly worship; and unto you shall be true and faithful, and bear to you faith for the tenements that I claim to hold of you.' " Thus we see plainly that in England as in France by the time a Nation in its concrete pro- portions of ruler and people, with the functions of law and defence, were established, society was partitioned off into Classes, and the graduated series rose from slaves at the bottom to a King at the top, with an intermediate bond of freemen, and a shaded nobility.' The whole organism was responsive to this fundamental theory, that or- ganized government was and must be Aristocratic. Returning to the continent any, the slightest, 100 Europe's Handicap — curiosity, as to the efficacy and ubiquity of Class is abundantly satisfied. Perhaps only in the free cities such as composed the Hanseatic League was the class pressure definitely relieved. That pres- sure certainly was experienced in the so-called Italian Republics, though here tempered, poorly, coarsely, by a popular oligarchy. But the fact is important, as a little longer extension of our review will help us to appreciate the deeply inwoven strands of that peculiar superstition of the relevancy of Class to domination, which for two thousand years has enthralled popular sentiment, and which though noticeably dying out to-day, is again, by this present war, stupefyingly thrust upon our attention. Beginning at once with the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we find over the entire area of middle Europe, when the magnificent co- ordinating genius of Charlemagne had partially reduced a chaos, a wild whirling storm of dis- membered and fractious principalities, to a tem- porary expression of unity — , we find the uni- versality of Class, the feudal relation fully fixed, and most variously developed. The lists of princely houses alone are interminable — Hohen- staufen, Babenbergs, Welf of Brunswick, Wittels- bach in Bavaria, Ballenstadt in Brandenburg, Zahringen in Baden, Lowen in Brabant and Hesse, the Counts of Habsberg, Luxembourg, Wirtem- berg, Hohenzollern, Nassau; south of the Alps the Earl of Savoy, the Visconti in Milan the Mar- graves d'Este in France, in Hungary the royal Tribe and Class 101 house of Arpad, the old Slavonian races in Bo- hemia, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, and Silesia (Menzel); while the records indicate throughout this crowd of aspirants and powers, prevailed an unrestrained license of manners, the endless pro- lixity of strife, riotous in the East with the ferocity of the Hungarians, Servians, Wallachians, and less manifestly barbarous in the west, and everywhere agitated with uprisings and reprisals. A few paragraphs from Menzel quite graphically depict the tribal confusion and the class regimen — self- seeking and portentous — of the times, with the incidental reminder that the Emperor, struggling amidst his contentious subjects led a worried life; "the rule of the princes was most despotic in the Slavonian frontier provinces, where the feeling of personal independence was not so deeply rooted among the people; the princes of Brandenburg, Bohemia, and Austria, con- sequently, ere long surpassed the rest in power. In the western countries of Germany there were a greater number of petty princes. After rendering the emperor dependent upon themselves, the princes had to carry on a lengthy contest with the lower classes, the result of which was the institution of the provincial estate". "The tyranny of some of the princes, like Frederick the Quarrelsome, and Henry Raspe, occasioned confederacies to be set on foot be- tween the provincial nobility, the cities, and the peasantry against the princes." 102 Europe's Handicap — "In the empire itself the officers of the crown had become hereditary princes, and their support of the emperor depended entirely on their private inclination. The emperor grasped but a shadowy sceptre, and the imperial dignity now solely owed its preservation to the ancestral power of the princely families to whom the crown had fallen. The choice of the powerful princes of the empire therefore purposely fell upon petty nobles, from whom they had nothing to fear; and even when the crown, by bribery and cunning, came into the possession of a great and princely house, the jealousy of the rest of the nobility had to be appeased by immense concessions, and thus, under every circumstance, the princes increased in wealth and power, whilst the emperor was gradually impoverished." "According to the mystical fashion of the times, the different grades in the empire were illustrated by the number of the planets. The empire was represented on a great camp with seven gradations, and seven shields, the first of which was borne by the emperor, the second by the spiritual lords, the third by the temporal princes, the fourth by the counts of the empire, the fifth by the knights of the empire, the sixth by the country nobility, the vassals of the princes, the seventh by the free citizens and peasantry, the serfs who were incapable of bearing arms, being excluded". Tribe and Class 103 In the cities of the league or bund of the Hansa, which at its most prosperous extension embraced almost seventy cities, with fleets ruling the North Sea, with sovereigns tributary to its power, and countries obedient to its commands, when, we are told (Menzel), "the air bestowed freedom; who- ever dwelt within their walls could not be reduced to a state of vassalage, and was instantly affran- chised, although formerly a serf when dwelling beyond its walls," in these homes of Jacobinism and democracy, in the great Guilds, (Labor Unions), the contagion of class pre-emption and substitution made itself felt, since it not infre- quently happened that a son succeeded to his father's presidency of the guild of which he was a member, and these successions became per- petuated to such an extent, that the jealous arti- sans fearing some attack upon their liberty, de- vised a curb upon the president's power by qualifying it with a civic committee. The tangled, even very much snarled and involved drama of German history, illustrates quite luminously however, we think, the out- rageous and intolerable growth of a titled class, which monopolized government, perpetuated a divided, it might almost have been called — a pulverized State, and, in the exorbitance of its needs, with the added requisitions of an extrava- gant Court, besides the necessary expenditures for an army, wrung from the people the uttermost. Taxes were monstrous, and the superstructure of bureaucrats, princes, and nobility, weighed de- 104 Europe's Handicap — structively upon industry and thrift. The confu- sion and the iniquities multiplied, and the picture presented seems a maddening, chaotic, or almost intricately composed. Bedlam of King, princes, electors, prelates, nobility, ofiftcers, lawyers, sol- diers, with a crushed proletariat that lay motion- less beneath. A troop of princes ruled, under a nominal sovereign, the various principalities, into which Germany was so disastrously apportioned. They had their courts, their armies, their clergy, their diplomacy, and their treasuries. The national Diet, itself two thirds aristocratic, was composed of three colleges or benches, those of the electors, princes, and cities, but it slowly declined, and the independence of its component parts, especially the princes, replaced it with an infinite confusion of Force, Caprice, and Envies. We read, ''the powerful princes pursued a perfectly independent course." The cities, whose coalition had been so effective in the fourteenth century, fell apart, became separately the prey of the attacks of the princes, or lost prestige and wealth through the encroachments of commercial rivals, while even in these, the original depositories of liberty, an aristocratic usurpation had handed their rule over to a few restricted families, whose relations again were made subservient to the idle vanities of pedigree, and age, wealth and kinship. The period was grossly barbarous in feeling at least. Force and compulsion (tribal) ruled the day, and extortion and cruelty mockingly insulted justice, Tribe and Class 105 as two complementary figures of the times, placed high enough for all posterity to note their shame- less effrontery; ''Central and Eastern Germany was peopled with slaves, unpossessed of honor, wealth, or knowledge, the produce of whose toil was swallowed up by the nobility, the clergy, and the court," while "the simple punishment of death no longer satisfied the pampered appetite of the criminal judge. Torture was formed into a sys- tem, and the horrors practiced by the ancient tyrants of Persia and of Rome by the American savage in his warlike fanaticism, were, in cold blood legalized by the lawyers throughout Ger- many. The chopping off of hands, the cutting out of tongues, blinding, pinching with red-hot tongs, cutting slices out of the back, tearing out the heart, empaling, wrenching off limb by limb with the iron wheel, quartering with four horses or with oxen, in order to lengthen the torture, modified the simplicity of beheading, hanging, and burning." (Menzel). Conditions of this demonic wickedness were not peculiar to Germany. They were found every- where modified by circumstance, by individual preferences and nature, and they everywhere — if the logic of cause and effect is to receive from his- tory the credit of the recognition allowed to it elsewhere — were derivative from the Tribal heart and mind, which no changed circumstances of civilization had much ameliorated, and to the hardening influence of Class which, acting on the savage instincts of the tribesman, kills their seeds 106 Europe's Handicap — of mercy and exasperates their bitterness. The ineradicable viciousness of the Class System is the emotional exaltation it imparts to its subjects, which converts them into literal human Molochs. Interference, contradiction, criticism, insults their infallibility, and reduces their self-esteem, making them obdurate and implacable. Class is only the artificial refinement of extreme vulgarity. To-day in the light of the emancipated wills and minds of this country, Kings become toys or nuisances, and all forms of hereditary title, the dull sophistry of expediency and affectation. The Tribal spirit of conquest and domination, and the Class spirit of supremacy and intrinsic distinction, from name or family, have been the prolific causes of Europe's persistent disorders, and the root of that inex- pugnable Militarism which now as a name so cornmonly stands for these very things, but is defective in accuracy, as it does not touch the genetic causes of this pestilential craving. Certainly Class-claims prevailed all over Europe, and the whole feudal system was itself the very embodiment of the Class ideal. Royalty was the ultimate expression of Class, and even where Royalty did not exist as in the northern cities of Italy which shot up as Bryce puts it, ''in the absence of the emperors and the feuds of the princes", still the ineradicable heritage of both nullified their superficial and supposititious de- mocracy. It cannot be gainsaid. Burckhardt intoxicated with his subject, elated with his ad- miration of art, and dazzled with the brilliancy of Tribe and Class 107 the individuals encountered, has written of the Renaissance, which was most luxurious in its products in Italy, as a period when — to quote Gooch — "the fetters of a thousand years were burst, self-realization became the goal, and new valuations of the world and of man became cur- rent". It was a period of tropical exuberance in mental growth, but its unlicensed excesses of con- duct and of opinion, contained no real seeds of a lofty and genuine democracy. Neither in Venice or Florence, Pisa, Genoa, Milan, or in any of the Lombard cities, any more than had been the case with the Grecian communities was there attained a condition of enlightened self-government. The Lombard cities were brothels of continual disturb- ance, factional collisions, and incessant rivalries. They were fortified camps, and permeated with the tribal animus of belligerency, and in them Class, differentiated indeed greatly from the same thing under the monarchies of the rest of Europe, pre- vailed. They were in a perpetual hubbub of external animosities or internal confusion, and they did not excape the influence of the Class pretensions, for the very nobles, whom they compelled to live away from their castles for a certain time in the cities, "imbibed a new ambition of directing the munici- pal government of the cities, which consequently, during this period of the republics fell chiefly into the hands of the superior families" (Cabot). Everything was yet also tribal, although the sup- pression of Class for short intervals secured a 108 Europe's Handicap — seductive appearance of liberal government. Certainly there was a spirit of resistance to tyr- anny most observable, but it was the tribal spirit after all, and the inflictions upon their vanquished foes, by these free cities, partook of the abomin- able rancor of the most hardened despots. "They played over again the tragedy of ancient Greece, with all its circumstances of inveterate hatred, unjust ambition, and atrocious retaliation, though with less consummate actors upon the scene" (Cabot). The turmoil of family brawls, and irre- concilable resentments, flavored the times with the geniality of class murders, and recriminations. At Genoa it was the Grimaldi, the Fieschi, the Doria, the Spinola; at Bologna it was the Giere- mei and the Lambertazzi; at Florence the Buon- delmonti and Uberti; at Pistoja the Bianchi and Neri, and Hallam tells us that "the members of each distinguished family appear to have lived in the same street; their houses were fortified with square massive towers of commanding height, and wore the semblance of castles within the walls of a city. Brancaleon, the famous senator of Rome, destroyed one hundred and forty of these domestic entrenchments, which were constantly serving the purpose of civil broils and outrage." The fires of freedom as an emotional tendency of course never have died out in the indo-european heart and mind, and the free cities of the past, the Italian so-called republics, the Hanseatic towns, the Swiss compact, and the splendor of English rebellion against tyranny, the Rise of the Dutch Tribe and Class 109 Republic, with many minor incidents of the recrudescence of the primal instincts of liberty, have, in the European drama, maintained the indefeasible rights of men. Those fires attained a climacteric of retributive fierceness in the French Revolution, in the iconoclastic terrors of "the beggars", the wantonness of the English Round- heads, and in the late salient flarings of Italian nationalism. But the superincumbent mass of inheritance and tradition has overwhelmed these impulses; they never have acquired static perma- nence, for, except upon some tabula rasa of place or condition, they never have escaped the insidious perversion that springs from the Tribe and the Class. Pure Democracy never can flourish in Europe; its contemporaneous culture even rejects it with scorn, and the omnipresent genius of its institutions, which are tribal and aristocratic, repels it. In these free Italian republics Class gained its inevitable and pernicious sway, and where the nobility of family was denounced, through the inextinguishable pride of the human heart, the nobility of wealth was substituted. There could be no escape from it. Class from one end of Europe to the other subjugated the imagination, chained political adventure within the fetters of precedent, and, invading even the arteries of literary or philosophical speculation, poisoned them with the narcotics of its adulation. Litera- ture postured before Nobility, and philosophy craved with bended knees its acquiescence. To- 110 Europe's Handicap — day the over shadowing impressiveness of these United States of America threatens the supremacy of the idea of class, and ameliorates the obstinacy and the cruelty of Tribe. But it matters little. Both will remain, unless by some titanic upheaval the world of Europe moves forward Into the areas of idealistic equality. Nobility there always will be, but It will be something different from heraldry and title; It will come to every one who can carry its proud insignia of character, and obey its sum- mons of sacrifice and duty. The policeman in his rescues, the fireman in his dangers, the Iron-worker at his task, are thus ennobled, and the aristocracy of mind can never die. We should not be accused of a flagitious and pedantic search for the traces. In the earlier days, with the rapid rise In later ones, of the Institution of Class, including all shades of Royalty, In Europe. Admitting that primitive conditions, wherein an emotional life begins to stir, was pro- pitious for its growth, and that only along Its track could follow the achievements of economic, Industrial, artistic, and literary genius — which we do not for a moment admit — admitting this pre- posterous assertion, our argument or demonstra- tion turns to proving, that these deeply burled roots of class pride and class Injustice, we have hastily Inspected, are alive to-day In Europe, that the effects of two thousand years of such distinc- tions, no matter how absurd they may seem, In the matter-of-fact light of simple common sense, can- not at once be cancelled, or erased, that they are Tribe and Class 111 cherished now, and that the archaic vanities, still craving a historic continuity with the past, flourish abundantly and exercise an injurious influence, foment an imperious spirit, and endanger peace. That they still embody the tribal pug- nacity, irritable and ofi^ensive, the tribal self-con- sciousness, egotistic and intolerant, and the tribal sterility of heart, covetous, encroaching, heartless and unrepentant. Of course a duke is not to-day cutting off the hands and feet of his complaining subjects, nor burning out the eyes of his prisoners, nor confiscat- ing the wife and daughter of his vassals, but it is true that in 1868 (?) — notsp long ago — the Marquis of Stafford in Scotland evicted the poor crofters from his land, some 15,000 herdsmen with their wives and families, and subjected them to most undeserved and revolting sufferings, in order that he might more regally enjoy the widest indulgence to hunt deer; it is true that the English Govern- ment intended and did steal the land of Venezuela in 1895, and only refrained, because the voice of a president of a country, which is without Class, protested; it is true that the King of Belgium — King Leopold — practiced revolting cruelties upon the defenceless blacks of Africa, for his personal enrichment; it is true that the peers or landed nobility of England to-day object to a just taxa- tion of their lands, on the plea perhaps of their ancestral freedom from bearing the just burden of state; it is true that the King of Spain maintains expensive retinues while, in the language of a 112 Europe's Handicap — student of the inward condition of his dominion, the wretched peasants who, to endue them with enough strength to undertake the labor of the vineyards, must be previously fed for a week or so, "are born starved, live starved, and die starved"; it is true that the Czar of Russia and the serried ranks of the high and mighty in Russia, apparently close their eyes to the enormities of burning, and looting and torturing the jews; it is true that in this same most adequate example of the modern perpetuation of Tribe and Class, for the preserva- tion of its class and its royal organization, for the satisfaction of its tribal pride, ''the Government first set the example of lawlessness in Russia, by arresting without warrant, by punishing without trial, by cynically disregarding the judgments of its own courts when such judgments were in favor of politicals, by confiscating the money and the property of private citizens whom it merely sus- pected of sympathy with the revolutionary move- ment, by sending fourteen-year-old boys and girls to Siberia, by kidnapping the children of 'politi- cally untrustworthy' people, and exiles, and putting them into state asylums, by driving men and women to insanity and suicide in rigorous solitary confinement, without giving them a trial, by bury- ing secretly at night the bodies of the people whom it had thus done to death in its dungeons, and by treating as a criminal in posse if not in esse, every citizen who dared to ask why or wherefore" (Kennan); it is true that the tribal and class spirit, its venom and its unfairness came to light Tribe and Class 113 even in republican France, when after nearly two thousand years of oppression, wreaked upon the jews, whose injustice and wickedness had become the trite homily of every essayist upon religious bigotry, Alfred Dreyfus, a jew, was shamelessly conspired against by the officers of the french army and authority, and the public organs of opinion worked together to destroy him, where "in the last weeks of 1897 the men of the etat major had on their side the people who shouted loudest, and the french middle class were ready to believe, that a syndicate of Jews, eager to vindicate a Jewish traitor was vilifying the army", when, from begin- ning to end, the accusation was a fabric of lies, when a mockery of a trial condemned Emile Zola for his high-hearted courage in defending this un- fortunate, and where at every stage of the indecent persecution the instrumentalities of official in- fluence perverted the dispensation of Justice; it is true that the Turk of yesterday and to-day whose misgovernment and massacring facility terrified two continents in 1876 suffered no incon- venience from his atrocities, because the crowned heads of Europe at that time, and the convenient textual relations of nations at the same time, as managed by ministers and bureaus, could not be disturbed, at a time when the "basest and blackest outrages upon record within the present century if not within the memory of man", were committed whose "fell satanic orgies" branded the Turk as "the one great anti-human specimen of humanity" (Gladstone) ; it is true that the most abominable 114 Europe's Handicap — injustice was practiced and the most heartless punishments inflicted upon Italian patriots by Austria, who left six or seven thousand state prisoners to perish in dungeons, and when sick prisoners, men almost with death in their faces, toiled upstairs to see the doctors, because the lower regions of the prisons, were too foul and loathsome to allow it to be expected that profes- sional men would enter (Morley), when a King violated the law and the constitution he had sworn to be faithful to, when corrupt tribunes of justice hurried the noblest (Poerio for instance) into irons for four and twenty years! All of these things and many others similar in degree and nature, which have transpired in Europe, are attributable, not always particularly to a member of the so-called upper classes, the titled and hereditary nobility, but to a toleration and approval generally or a not too loud con- demnation of wrong, because throughout the nation the atmosphere and the habit, the mental habit, is a direct genetic deduction from these long estab- lished (no matter how much modified from, their first unabridged excess) Class customs, reinforced by, or overlaid upon the still regnant Tribal spirit. War was the business of the Tribe, and the warrior represented the tribe's protection. Rule was the purpose of Class, and the nobles graduating into and surrounding the conception of Monarchy was the ideal of government. A group of pure democ- racies without either the Tribal spirit or the Class institution never could have in this day and hour, Tribe and Class 115 started the present war, which, observe, began with the death of a member of Class and with the ambitions of Tribes. This awful and desecrating and senseless (except so far as its consequences imply the cleaning out of the Tribe and the Class in modern Europe) war rages to-day for nothing but material gain, possibly land, possibly trade, and the maintenance of dynasty. This book has been prompted by this latter spectacle, and only written as an attempted proof — well warranted — of the reference of the present war to the still surviving passions of the Tribe and Class. It has also been written with the convic- tion that any kind of governmental system or social contract, which is not controlled by the suffrages of the people, not vicariously through representatives but directly through appeal, is to- day a baleful subterfuge. But again these suf- frages MUST be the will of a people emancipated from the influence of Tribe and Class. No people to-day in Europe is practically free from either. The changed environment and the accumulated experience of many centuries has made Americans otherwise related to every topic they discuss, every posture they assume, every resolve they endorse. They are a New people; literally so, though in their blood flows the natal germs of every european nation, for they have undergone the transfigura- tion of liberty, of education, of self-use. As human beings we are full of faults, as a nation we are SUPREME. Our generosity to Cuba liberated 116 Europe's Handicap — and rehabilitated by us, was magnificent, its superb altruism, or, in better language, its un- selfishness, paralyzed with incredulity the Tribal states of Europe, whose stuttering acclamations of approval, evinced the niggardliness of their own temperaments. Our whole-souled helpfulness at all times, as in the last cruel necessities of Belgium and the outcasts of Europe to-day, still more firmly expressed the fine ardor of American sym- pathy, and our protest to Russia against the dis- crimination hostile to the jews, sprang from our implanted hostility to unfairness. Oppression and selfishness have gone hand in hand, and with them public extortion and plunder, in the public conduct of affairs in Europe, and it is largely referable to the organization of their Class system, conjoined with the unavoidable transmis- sion of the tribal qualities which are coarse and cruel. England exploited shamelessly in the past the riches of India, and probably to-day would utilize, or does, her temporal advantages there for her own profit. She was inclined to do so with these American colonies. She has done so with Canada. Froude has drawn — and with no sym- pathy for Ireland or any constitutional respect for irishmen — the horrible misconduct of England towards Ireland in the 17th century, the conse- quences and continuation of which misgovern- ment lasted until the 19th century, and was only ended by the formidable championship of Ireland's cause by Gladstone. It was the desire to keep its balance of trade on the right side of the ledger that Tribe and Class 117 made Christian England force, at the mouth of the cannon, upon a hopelessly weaker people a demoralizing drug, when she, as Treitschke puts it, "advanced to the conquest of an Empire with the Bible in one hand and an opium pipe in the other." The scandal of the DeLesseps' exploita- tion of the humble possessors of small and carefully hoarded means would seem scarcely possible, by reason of its far-reaching, all embracing enclosure of high society in its agents, abettors and bene- ficiaries, in any truly noble or just-hearted com- munity. American politics have been pretty thoroughly pilloried as corrupt before the world — though the picture is absurdly exaggerated, and much of it exactly reproduced in the public misde- meanors of other countries — but no group of American public men could have stooped to practices of such ineffable meanness as character- ized the efforts of so-called noble families of France to induce working men and working women to part with their scanty savings in an enterprise every agent of which realized its irremediable collapse. The political manipulators of this country, among those unquestionably irregular, have at least an attractive sense of human co-operative- ness, and are munificent in their helpfulness to their less happy friends and neighbors, unless indeed, as a Croker, they repudiate the country which gave them what they own. Our political Robin Hoods usually, and cheerfully, rob the comfortable, but spare the needy. The same degeneracy of feeling marks the conduct of many 118 Europe's Handicap — of the foreign business men, who to-day have established private banks in New York to fleece their countrymen, which again in a lesser way re- appears in the crafty villainy of the Padrone sys- tem. It is a well accredited observation and a significantly fruitful theme as well in psychology, that social institutions mould temperaments, modify the sympathetic systems of men, inducing in them qualities responsively suited to their position, they occupy in those systems. A fact of this sort is apparent in a kind of moral degener- acy amongst some foreigners who become con- trastedly obsequious or supercilious and are stained with a depravity of motive in what they do and think. One irresistibly recalls the hunting for rich wives, an utterly opprobrious and despic- able business, and the recognition of vice in the capitals of Europe, where municipalities divide with the proprietors the profits of gambling, where a government actually is supported by the nefarious trade, running a roulette, a policy shop, on an enormously opulent scale, and where public treasuries do not hesitate to accept the proceeds of lotteries, and the sale of virtue. Class to-day lives in Europe in the cast-off clothing of an earlier time, when it was more necessary and more imposing and also more in- human. Let it he utterly abolished. In the first chapter we have reviewed cursorily the original and fundamental tribal elements of Tribe and Class 119 European nationality; in this we have similarly observed the universality of the Class system. We shall now consider some Tribal wars, and ex- pressions of Tribal feeling, and with them examine Class domination, and thus arrive logically at the present war, which we assign to both. CHAPTER V Tribal Wars and Class Domination The most amazing and distractingly confused page of history or — if the image seems absurd by reason of the interminable length of any page which could embrace the subject — the most bewildering pages of history are those which record the Thirty Years' War. And the same pages, re- viewed by any one not professionally engaged in a mere tabulation of events, would produce the strange impression, allowing for the change of a thousand years or so, that he was reading the annals of the combats and battles, wars and alliances, of the ancient savages, whose blood had transmitted its almost unmoderated qualities of cruelty and truculence to their descendants with also, in the case of Gustavus Adolphus, its noblest traits. The names sound less romantic or more familiar, the duplicity is more frequent and ingenious, the punishments more acutely shameless, but the un- assuaged passions, the brutal enmity, and the un- sparing contempt seem unchanged from the primal exhibitions of identical tempers. It has been called a religious war, which, considering its features^ implies in its litigants an unparalleled depravity . Of course it was a religious war, but it was a bigotry of faith or allegiance or opinion Tribe and Class 121 rooted in Tribal natures, made more vehement in their lawlessness by Class pride, and it was too a war of adventuring brigands. The inflamed madness of the barbarian was there, and the embittered scorn of the aristocrat as well. It is inconceivable that a phenomenon so incredible, to-day, in its wickedness of persecution, in its fiendish heartlessness, could have originated in natures from which the tribal curse was completely expelled. The horrors of the Thirty Years' War came from the gratification of personal, or class or religious Hate, a very essential tribal emanation. In it the unfortunate inhabitants of the ravaged lands suffered unexpected,, undeserved desolation. The Thirty Years' War was a squabble (of rather large dimensions), of Class, with religion as a motive force, and with a machinery of action — its dynamic units — large gangs of tribal ruffians, and throughout, the tribal and the class struggle for place was a dominating influence, a meaner substi- tute for the primitive racial ambitions of a Canute, a Hengist and a Horsa, a Vercingetoric, a Theo- doric, a Clovis, a Martel, or a Harold. The dominion of the emperor Charles V in the 16th century in Central Europe was a loosely con- nected fabric of States, which the shock of religious controversy rapidly disintegrated. It represented a group of princes, dioceses, and cities, where, for the major part, or entirely, the individual prefer- ences of rulers — it might be their convictions — and especially the interest of houses, directed public conduct to the exclusion of the needs, desires, or 122 Europe's Handicap — happiness of their subjects. The Thirty Years' War with its increasing terrors of desolated homes, burned towns, and revolting outrages, was quite avoidable, had the terms of a possible agreement between Catholicism and Protestantism been submitted for discussion to the people. One of the wisest and most illuminated of historians has written; "there is every reason to believe that if Germany had possessed anything like a popular representation, its voice would have spoken in favor of some kind of compromise. There is no trace of any mutual hostility between the popula- tions of the Catholic and Protestant districts apart from their rulers," (S. R. Gardiner). The arrogant and unimpeded supremacy over personal inheritances constituted an utterly un- practical political organization. In the Empire — so-called — the Emperor was a shadowy pretence, veiled indeed within the jargon of traditions, and recognized in the pomposities of coronation rites. No such centralization as was accomplished in France or England, had been or could be effected. All that only was permanently attained when, in the 19th century, the fact of a consolidated unified Germany threatened the solidarity of Europe it- self. Gardiner authoritatively outlines the per- plexity; "the immediate vassals of the Empire, in fact, were almost independent sovereigns, like the Dukes of Normandy in the France of the tenth century, or the Dukes of Burgundy in the France of the fifteenth century. They quarrelled and made war with one another, like the Kings of Tribe and Class 123 England and France. Their own vassals, their own peasants, their own towns, could only reach the Emperor through them, if anybody thought it worth while to reach him at all." The plausible rigmarole cujus regio ejus religio was affirmative of the aristocratic, the class, judgment, and whether it was protestant prince secularizing catholic property, or catholic prince supporting catholic prelates and bishops, over protestant congrega- tions, the fallacy and its injustice were precisely identical in each case. Again the tribal instincts were invoked, we believe, in the fratricidal enmities of Calvinist and Lutheran, inasmuch as we attribute much of the religious bigotry of Europe, during all of the centuries before the last, to the doggedness of conviction exasperated by the traits of tribal ferocity. At the outset of the war there were three leaders, the Catholic Duke of Bavaria, the Calvinist Prince Christian of Anhalt, and John George the Lutheran Elector of Saxony, and these men were at variance, as much in their temperaments as in their sympathies. The very first act — an act of aggression — of Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria, was to bring rapidly to a head the slumbering animosi- ties of sects, and the flame of dissension rapidly ran its tortuous course between the hostile sec- tions, flaming high in one place and fed with fuel of combative or revolutionary zeal ; less conspicu- ous elsewhere, when the temporizing expedients of fear or conservatism held it in check. 124 Europe's Handicap — The protestant Union was formed, confronting it was the Catholic League. A duke dies, con- testants for his place and patronage appear, and while both pretenders are Lutherans, a Catholic army, under the Duke of Bavaria, marches to settle the dispute by seizing the country. The french king observes his opportunity, and, under the guise of disinterestedness, turns his batteries upon Spain. One young pretender has his ears boxed, and, infuriated by the insult, renounces protestantism, and adopts the catholic faith, while the Elector who administered the blow, accepts Calvinism as a more emphatic protestant protest. In just such accidents of conduct does the resent- ment of Class, and the irritability of Tribe precipi- tate disaster, where either accentuates the course of government. "That immediate war in Ger- many did not result from the quarrel is probably the strongest possible evidence of the reluctance of the German people to break the peace." (Gar- diner). Intrigue, plot, compromise, hesitancy, threats, blows, darkened the councils of the great, with disorder and incertitude, sometimes with violence. The people wished no war, profited by no war, would have had, upon their collective initiative, no war, but — the whole thing in a nut- shell — ''the subjects and the rulers had no thoughts in common," (Gardiner). And Christian of Anhalt, a bellicose calvinist, ceaselessly upset every project of a peaceful settlement. There was violations, snap judgments, indiscretions, and usurpations. Tribe and Class 125 In the parcelling out of the various royal land properties, we find the descendants of Ferdinand I, brother of Charles V, assigned to them, and the archduchy of Austria, the realm of Bohemia and Hungary, the Tyrol and Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, figure in the political and religious confu- sion of the rapidly tangling threads of this deplor- able war. It was a chess-game of policies, a dis- sembling of aims, contrivances and counter- contrivances, with wavering lines of fidelity, and with the chief men at loggerheads over place and title. The Jesuits were expelled from Bohemia, king Ferdinand felt his dethronement was intended, a revolution starts in Prague, and the war began. We then consider a phenomenon truly tribal or worse. The protestant commander Count Ernest of Mansfield led about an army which subsisted on pillage. His opponent Buc- quoi followed suit, and the people supported both. "Starving armies are not particular in their methods of supplying their wants. Plunder, devastation, and reckless atrocities of every kind fell to the lot of the doomed peasants, Bucquoi's Hungarians being conspicuous for bar- barity." There was more swapping and bargaining, and the war settled into a headstrong strife with some leaders gleefully exclaiming, ^^we have now the means of upsetting the world.'' The Dutch began to help the protestants, and from a distance Eng- land expressed interest. Vienna might have fallen before the protestant army but trafficking 126 Europe's Handicap — between its general and the Austrian nobility was unsatisfactory. Lutherans and Calvinists stumbled against each other, and things grew worse, with the bread-winners becoming more and more impotent and beggared. Ferdinand was made Emperor, but the 3^oung elector of the Palatinate was chosen by the Bohemians for their king, and the drawn swords were now more sharply crossed. Maximilian of Bavaria enters the em- broglio, but with a concession — a string we would call it — tied to his partisanship. The Turks loom up and an actual self-confessed tribesman glides in, Bethlen Gabor, protestant prince of Transyl- vania, who developed a vicious appetite for all of Hungary and Austria, and "in the first days of November, his hordes in friendly alliance with the Bohemians were burning and plundering round the walls of Vienna." Then the Lutheran John George, found he had no appetite for the success of protestantism, if his own glory was dimmed thereby, and contracted an agreement with the catholic League. The Spanish auxiliaries were next summoned, and the Walloon Tilly, a capable man organized an active campaign. Frederick who had been rather too hastily made King of Bohemia, discovered that the privileges of the Bohemian aristocracy to sleep late, interfered with the promptness of his measures of defence. Tilly won a disturbing victory which ended the Bohemian revolution — the chiefs perished on the scalTold. And now the conflagration spread, and on all sides the en- Tribe and Class 127 venomed flames ate their way into peaceful lands, a lurid tempest of desolation. Mansfield, a soldier of fortune fought for the protestants, with a flock of mercenaries, lured by pay, and indifferent to consequences, depraved in their conduct, and ravenous in their hunger. "As soon as his men had eaten up one part of the country, they must go to another, if they were not to die of starvation. They obeyed, like the elements, a law of their own, quite independent of the wishes or needs of the sovereign whose interests they were supposed to serve." England and Spain were expected to defray expenses, and the dreary conflict continued. Then came from the south the Margrave of Baden- Durlach, "notorious for the skill with which he had found excuses for appropriating ecclesiastical property, and for defeating legal attempts to embarrass him in his proceedings", and a Christian of Brunswick an aspiring military hero — a 17th century Alaric — who was not embarrassed by con- victions, but wanted one thing — money. "Castles, towns, farmhouses, were ransacked for the treasure of the rich, and the scanty hoard of the poor." "Burning masters appear among the regular officers of his army; and many a village, unable to satisfy his demand, went up in flames, with its peaceful industry ruined forever." It looked, among the protestant commanders, like a military pool for the division of property. The imperial forces were winning fast under Tilly. 128 Europe's Handicap — Mansfield fled to Alsace and the Netherlands. There was fighting, looting, and an enlarged circle of disorder, bringing in some new elements of dis- sension — the Lower Saxon Circle. The fire-brand Christian met with defeat, and of 20,000 only 6,000 of his army escaped, and their commander made his way into the Netherlands. There was again considerable hauling and pulling with embassies and messages, but Gardiner bluntly states the case, "it was the old story. With the Empire and the Diet and the Church in the hands of mere partisans, there was nothing to remind men of their duty as citizens of a great nation. Even the idea of being members of a circle was too high to be seriously entertained. The cities strove to thrust the burden of defence upon the princes, and the princes thrust it back upon the cities. The flood was rising rapidly which was to swallow them all". And now came the outbreak of tribal issues. England and France had claims and purposes — with James I in the former role and with the superlative, designing, intrepid, and forecasting Richelieu in the latter — then Christian, king of Denmark, and the challenging and noble Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. The complications of politi- cal and personal motives drew them into the eff"ervescing cauldron of disputes, alarms, and reprisals. But to add the requisite touch of law- lessness — as if it was not all barbarous enough — a mercenary again, of a type more recondite and Tribe and Class 129 distinguished than Mansfield, he in whose mouth Schiller puts the words; As the sun, Ere it is risen, sometimes paints image In the atmosphere, so often do the spirits Of great events stride on before the events, And in to-day already walks to-morrow, rose imposingly over the horizon of events. Wallenstein climbing upward with a pretty well formed expectation of higher things, and a complacent conclusion that politics was a better mistress to serve than religion, was asking for a united and strong empire, with the Emperor as an absolute ruler. Wallenstein won repeatedly against a freshened protestant coalition, and Christian of Denmark was willing to give up Silesia, but the enemy insisted on larger conces- sions and Holstein was the price of peace. Thus a new terror assumed more and more ominous dimensions, as Wallenstein's victories grew, for a a grandiose conception of Empire was rapidly shaping itself not only in the mind of that extrava- gant schemer, but in the minds of his officers; his "army threatened to establish itself upon the ruins of the authority of the princes and the electors, and to set up a military despotism of the most intolerable kind. Every where Wallen- stein's recruiting officers were beating their drums. Quiet episcopal cities in the south of Germany, which hoped to have seen the last of their troubles, 130 Europe's Handicap — when Mansfield vanished westward, out of Alsace in 1622, found themselves suddenly selected as a trysting-place for some new regiment. Rough men poured in from every direction to be armed, clothed, lodged, and fed at their expense. The alarming doctrine that the army was to support itself, that men were to be raised for the purpose not of fighting the enemy, but of pressing contribu- tions out of friends, caused universal consterna- tion. Wallenstein's officers too, had been heard to talk with military frankness about pulling down princes and electors, and making a real sovereign of the Emperor." The siege of Straslund proved to be a turning point, and from its unreduced walls Wallenstein led his army away, although he had sworn to make it as flat as the table he smote with his hand. Denmark was weaned from her natural ally Sweden, through diplomacy, accompanied by a successful bribe to the King of Denmark, who recovered his hereditary possessions, while Maxi- milian of Bavaria and Ferdinand, made a fresh dicker, and the pressure of the repression increased for the protestants. The french, guided by the astute Richelieu, were aroused by the danger of a too powerful neighbor, albeit of the same faith, and were quietly fomenting the resistance which might curb his power. Spain also came into collision with France in Italy. There was the usual espionage, envies, and state complications, controlled by selfish motives or the whims of individual ambitions. Tribe and Class 131 Wallenstein's army swelled into an alarming size and a clamor of dismay arose to the Emperor from those who divined its irrepressible purposes which meant probably a coup of such sweeping energy as to leave nothing as it was. Wallen- stein's mind was inflamed by strange visions, and his concupiscent eye lit upon Rome itself, as he exclaimed "it is a hundred years since Rome has been plundered and it is richer now than ever"; and all the time the excesses of the soldiers were turning Germany into a grave-yard. "Cases had occurred in which starving wretches had main- tained life by devouring human flesh. A woman had even been known toieed upon her child." Wallenstein was frankly felt to be a fire-brand, some irreconcilable innovator whose plans con- templated an upheaval, and a new creation. There was remonstrance and protest, and Richelieu, not altogether relishing the pan- germanic crusade, assisted with alacrity for the overthrow of Wallenstein. And now Sweden, represented by that astonishing man Gustavus Adolphus, became engaged in the vast embroil- ment, and this last new leader was helped by the cameleon-minded Richelieu who found in this fresh agent, encouraging support for his schemes — for the great cardinal had but one underlying and coercing motive in his apparently circuitous and fickle manoeuvres, the establishment and exaltation of the Monarchy in France. His scheme at the Juncture when Adolphus came to his hand was to keep Ferdinand restrained, or at least restricted. 132 Europe's Handicap — Magdeburg was besieged by the imperialists, and fell, presenting a picture in its sufferings which would have shamed the most ruthless savage; "scarcely had the first rush taken place over the walls when, either intentionally or by accident, some of the houses were set on fire. In the excite- ment of plunder or of terror no one thought of stopping the flames. The conquerors, angered by the thought that their booty was being snatched away from before their eyes by an enemy more irresistible than themselves, were inflamed almost to madness. Few could meet that infuriated soldiery and live. Whilst every form of death, and of outrage, worse than death, was encountered in the streets, the shrieks of the wretched victims were overpowered by the roaring of the flames. In a few hours the great city, the virgin fortress which had resisted Charles V. and Wallenstein, with the exception of the Cathedral and a few houses around it, was reduced to a blackened ruin beneath which lay the calcined bones of men, of tender women, and of innocent babes." Tilly the imperial general was then employed in coercing John George, the Lutheran Elector of Saxony, threatening worse things to Leipzig, than had visited Magdeburg. In this extremity Gustavus Adolphus was summoned by the Elector, and promptly obeyed. The battle of Breitenfeld defeated the ring of authority that had overridden the wishes of a majority of the people, but intro- duced however a fresh motion of protestant self- assertion, while the discarded Wallenstein was Tribe and Class 133 quite willing to go over to the enemy, and the veering Richelieu, watching the sinking of the scales, again devoted his efforts to minimize the new success. Tilly was killed in battle, the Swedish king kept on his victorious course. But Wallenstein was restored to power as the best possible substitute to stem the gothic invasion, and true to his precedents he was not slow in making his terms expensive. The war went on with wide spread misery mark- ing its eventful way. Nuremburg endured starva- tion and pestilence, and Tilly "established him- self firmly in Saxony, plundering and burning on every side". The battle of Lutzen was a victory for the Swedes, but purchased all too dearly. Gustavus Adolphus was killed. Germany fell apart; the dislocating tendency of groups, the divergent interests of princes, the tireless intrigues of policy, denied to it coherence, forbade even the attempt to secure it. Later hands were to weld it into a whole, wherein indeed the tribal fires of pugnacity ceaselessly burned, and were all the more formidable because of their unital convergence. Wallenstein was regarded as a danger, and sud- denly expiated his recklessness of aspiration in death. He was assassinated. Imperialistic vic- tories followed, and the increasing intrusion of the hand of the french cardinal, while Spain and Sweden contributed disastrous elements of selfish- ness and sedition. As Gardiner acutely explains all ideals were lost; "the great quarrel of principle had merged into a mere quarrel between the 134 Europe's Handicap — Houses of Austria and Bourbon, in which the shred of principle which still remained in the question of the rights of the southern Protestants, was almost entirely disregarded." And the horrors, the outrages, the inhumanities multiplied. One illustration is enough to expose the depthless misery of the time ; "when Augsburg was besieged by the imperialists, after their victory at Nordlingen, it contained an industrious popula- tion of 70,000 souls. After a siege of seven months, 10,000 living beings, wan and haggered with famine, remained to open the gates to the conquerors, and the great commercial city of the Fuggers dwindled down into a country town." More pronouncedly became the insatiable rival- ries of potentate and policies. France and Spain, with a minor participation of England, wrangled together over the blood stained fields of Germany, and hopelessly tore its too loosely aggregated sections apart; "the nobler motives which had imparted a glow to the work of Tilly and Gustavus, and which even lit up the profound selfishness of Wallenstein, flickered and died away, till the final disruption of the Empire was accomplished amidst the strivings and passions of heartless and un- principled men." (Gardiner). France used the military successes of Gustavus for its purposes, and of a soldier of talent and ambition, Bernard of Weimar, his successor, and Spain, the prejudices, affiliations, and resources of Ferdinand. The war, now waged, concerned possession of Alsace and Lorraine, that rose as Gardiner avers Tribe and Class 135 "into primary importance, not because, as in our own days, Germany needed a bulwark against France, or France needed a bulwark against Ger- many, but because Germany was not strong enough to prevent these territories from becoming the highway of intercourse between Spain and the Spanish Netherlands." Spain won in the south, as against France and the Dutch; France was invaded, and Paris placed in the strange peril of subjugation. On the north the Swedes under Baner devastated North Germany, and later both Bernard and Baner fought the french for the con- quest of Alsace, and when it was won the french government ordered its. relinquishment into its own hands fearing the triumphant Swede might start an independent realm in Alsace, too near itself. It was refused by Bernard who in 1639 died of a fatal disease, and the fortresses of Alsace and Breisgau passed into the possession of the French. Bernard's army came under the control of french officers, and fought over the distracted and ruined Germany. The french were winning, and a Spanish fleet chased by the Dutch, took refuge in english waters, where, for a time, in- terned, as it were, its destruction became the sub- ject of diplomatic barters, a most signal illustra- tion of that Curse of Class and Tribe which this essay is intended to emphasize; "Charles of England saw in the occurrence an opportunity to make a bargain with one side or the other. He offered to abandon the Spaniards if the French would agree to restore his nephew, Charles Lewis, 136 Europe's Handicap — the Son of his sister Elizabeth, to his inheritance in the Palatinate. He offered to protect the Spaniards, if Spain would pay him the large sum which he would want for the armaments needed to bid defiance to France." The upshot of the whole business was that Richelieu fooled Charles, and the Dutch, indiffer- ent to consequences, and utterly contemptuous of the claim of England's neutrality, dashed in, and sank or fired the Spanish vessels as they lay at anchor. The french successes continued, and Richelieu with the adamantine resolve of solidify- ing the Monarchy on a throne of absolute inde- structibility, kept on playing the pawns on the political chess-board with almost unbroken profit to his policy. Richelieu and Louis XIII died, and the war continued, while the new king, a child who was to embody the most imperious conception of kingdom, ascended the throne. A great victory at Rocroy under Enghien swept into the hands of France more lands, while Maximilian, in Germany itself, contended with the french commanders auspiciously, and the Swedes struggled indus- triously in the north. The battle of Freiberg — one of the bloodiest of the frightful war — was fought out, and that of Nordlingen followed. A new military genius, in the mind and person of the frenchman Turenne rose to the ascendancy of the french arms. Slip- ping past the enemy, he entered the very heart of Bavaria; the Bavarians were defeated, and Ferdinand the III saw that his cause was lost, the Tribe and Class 137 imperialists were ground between two millstones, the Swedes on the north and the triumphant frenchmen on the south, and there was nothing to do but sue for peace, while a worn-out, demoralized, and pauperized country, the victim of innumerable private animosities, petty schemes of aggrandize- ment and the pervasive craft of weazel eyed diplo- macy, waited sorrowful and discouraged. The treaty of Westphalia closed the Thirty Years' War, and what was the condition of Germany at its termination? Read the pathetic and eloquent words of its best historian (Gardiner) "whatever life there was under that deadly blast of war had been attracted to the camps. The strong man who had lost his all turned soldier that he might be able to rob others in turn. The young girl, who in better times would have passed on to a life of honorable wedlock with some youth who had been the companion of her childhood in the sports around the village fountain, had turned aside, for very starvation, to a life of shame, in the train of one or the other of the armies by which her home had been made desolate. In the later years of the war it was known that a body of 40,000 fighting men drew along with it a loathsome following of no less than 140,000 men, women, children, con- tributing nothing to the efficiency of the army, and all of them living at the expense of the miserable peasants, who still contrived to hold on to their ruined fields. If these were taken, to live they must steal what yet remained to be stolen; they must devour, with the insatiable hunger of locusts, what yet remained to be devoured." 138 Europe's Handicap — And the moral degradation, the loss of social equity and justice, was inexpressible; "courts were crowded with feather-brained soldiers whose highest ambition was to bedeck themselves in a splendid uniform, and to copy the latest fashion or folly which was in vogue at Paris or Versailles. In the country district a narrow-minded gentry, without knowledge or culture, domineered over all around, and strove to exact the uttermost farthing from the peasant in order to keep up the outward appearance of rank. The peasant whose father had been bullied by marauding soldiers dared not life up his head against the exactions of the squire. The burden of the general impoverishment fell heavily upon his shoulders. In all ranks life was meaner, poorer, harder than it had been at the beginning of the century." The treaty of Westphalia put an end to a war which apart from religion had been instigated by tribal motives, indissolubly bound up with class interests, wherein the land most involved in its actual execution was overrun by foreigners, for Wallenstein was a Slavonian, Tilly a Walloon, Gustavus a Swede, and Richelieu a Frenchman. The wretchedness of the European system is further suddenly accentuated to the reader when, as the curtain falls, he learns that the Treaty of Westphalia also coincided with the termination of an EIGHTY years' war in the Netherlands, waged against freedom by the intractable bigotry or pride of a king, whetted to a degree of ravenous cruelty, almost unascertainable elsewhere than in the Tribe and Class 139 practices of barbarians, by the tribal instinct of hostile extermination. One aspect — as we shall see — of European tribal feeling is Bigotry. But war still lingered, as if, nourished for ages on the blood-saturated fields of Europe, like some overgrown vampire feeding too nutritiously on the juices of its victims, it was clogged with its own satiety, and could not raise its sluggish wings to visit other but less distinguished banquets. Spain and France fought on, Cromwell entered the con- tests, and the end came with the surrender of Spain, in an unequal combat, when Dunkirk was was given over to England, and Gravelines, Oudenarde, Ypres, with the cities of Roussillon, Landrecies and Avesnes, the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and Artois, were incorporated in the kingdom of France. And turning now to the history of the reign of Louis XIV for which the labors of Richelieu and Colbert had prepared the groundwork of national greatness, as properly estimated in public happi- ness, the triumphs of peace and toleration, the elevation of subject, and the dissemination of the wholesome influences of enriching industry — turning to this reign, inaugurated upon the very close of the Thirty Years' War, let us see how completely Class Domination, as visualized in an absolute king, precipitated fresh miseries on the unfortunate and ever bickering nations of Europe. We see also the irrepressible greed of family, and the subjection of national welfare to the barren claims of Class magnificence, for Louis had given 140 Europe's Handicap — his hand to the sister of Philip IV of Spain, who, for so splendid an alliance, was to renounce all claims to the Spanish crown, to which she became heiress upon the death of Charles II her brother. And this marriage — a state affair of interested motives — was to bring in its train more distress to the class-cursed denizens of Europe. The contemplation of the reign of Louis XIV leaves a most extraordinary impression of luxuri- ance, luxuriance in mental products, in Artistic wealth, in prodigal expenditures, luxuriance in the crowded annals of its seventy two years of commo- tion, war, persecution and indulgence, luxuriance in pomposities and adulations, luxuriance in egotisms and parade, and in wicked brutality of power, where indeed the tribal qualities of aggres- sion, cruelty, vindictiveness, — all masked under an enamel of wit and elegance, and courage too — are mingled with the vanities of Class, and that again is swallowed up in the blinding effulgence of a Tyrant King. The Curse of Class, as embodied in this ultimate apotheosis of an unrestrained monarch, is vividly realized in Louis XIV, who filled his years with impieties of conduct, afflicted his people with despair and want, and sent thou- sands to their graves in wanton wars or tortured them with pain. The last monstrousness of an immeasurable incredible vanity abided in this man, as the poison of the Belladonna abides in its resplendent blossoms. His reign expresses all the ruinous consequences of the Class idea, because the quintessence of that idea is a foreordained and an Tribe and Class 141 irrellnquishable personal superiority, by reason of PLACE. In Louis XIV that idea culminated in an exorbitance that insulted God and Man. The egotism was so sublime, that before its dazzling effrontery criticism or reproach almost seems childish; pageantry disguised its hideousness and talent its coarseness. The opening years of Louis XIV reign, during the regency of Anne of Austria were violently dis- turbed by civil strife wherein, apart from the natural unwillingness of the people to endure fiscal exactions, the subversive petulance and presump- tion of the nobility, under the suppressive neglect of the Regent and her favorite Cardinal Mazarin, contributed to the intestinal confusion of the state. The Wars of the Fronde were serious, and pro- longed, though curiously also characterized by gasconade and humorous fooling, and the princes of the realm, fighting on both sides, formed and dissolved cabals, whose shifting phases reflected their changing opportunities of advantage. Madame de Chevreuse plotted the assassination of Mazarin, the Prince of Conde enlisted at first with the Parliament, but combined later with the Court, and once there his pretensions became intolerable. He formed a new faction of discon- tented nobles, and, through the sudden afifiliation of a group of intrigues with the Court, was arrested and imprisoned. The great general Turenne, with a Spanish force as allies, always favorably disposed to add confusion to french politics, entered the civil war, and was defeated. Then there was more 142 Europe's Handicap — shifting of sides among the principals, Turenne assisted the Royalists; there was treachery, desertion, and infinite duplicity, with Conde finally an exile, and Mazarin and the Court triumphant. In all of this turmoil of affairs the distinct im- pelling motives were Class perpetuation and exaltation. It was the revolt of nobles against growing absolutism in the monarchy, but whether it was king or noble, the struggle emphasized no principle of action disinterestedly patriotic, but only the superlative demands of pride, of ambition, of place. Louis XI V came of age, and closing every avenue of remonstrance, became the State also, which in reality was a more fortunate conclusion to these conflicts, as the immoderate injustice of Class, embodied in one man, became thereby more conspicuous, and as a historic fact was more vulnerable. The aspect of the reign of Louis XIV, which it is desirable to exhibit or lay stress upon, for the purpose of this thesis, is the utterly abandoned and lawless manner in which this man — exempted by the traditions of Class as he was permitted to interpret them, and he stopped at nothing, deriv- ing his place and functions from Heaven itself — threw Europe into confusion, and made its coun- tries military camps and its fields and cities slaughter-pens. When Philip the Fourth of Spain died, the french king at once claimed Brabant, Flanders, and the Spanish possessions of the Low countries; Tribe and Class 143 so hopelessly was Europe cursed with the inde- fatigable cupidity of its rulers, a cupidity quite discernable to-day. France did not need this extension, the grounds of Louis' claims were most questionable, as his wife had renounced hfer inherit- ance, upon marrying the french monarch. But the immoderate violence of his despotic will, and his self-complacent greed, had no considerations for a plea of reason or humanity, nor indeed, in the interminable broils, collisions, and plots of Euro- pean rulers and governments, have they ever availed much. Louis was successful, through the brilliant work of the Prince of Conde, and "Spain surrendered to France all^ her conquests on the Sambre, the Scheldt, the Scarpe, and the Lys, together with Bergues and Furnes on the sea- coast; France restored Franche-Conte, but in a defenceless state, its principal fortresses having been dismantled." Louis was incensed with the Dutch Republic for its interference, and while he signed the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle with one hand, he held the other ready to strike the offending republicans, whose very pretensions to freedom insufferably vexed him. Intrigue as usual in Europe — the so- called diplomacy of its greatly overrated states- men — accomplished the capture of Charles II for Louis' purposes, and Holland was invaded — the king of England's price for his treachery was $600,000 — and the prospects of the french king looked very bright. The germans became in- volved — and here again secret promises were 144 Europe's Handicap — quite publicly and flagrantly broken — Spain fol- lowed, and a European war was under way. Louis' general Turenne performed prodigies, and totally discomfited the germans, while the Prince of Conde and William of Orange heaped up the battlefield of Seneffe, with over 20,000 corpses. The contest raged on land and sea. Six years of fluctuating success on either side, left the french king in the ascendency, and the Peace of Nimeguen was signed after Louis suddenly assaulted and carried the cities of Ghent and Ypres, which confirmed his paramount importance in the settlement. There was a little more blood- letting, and France gained large concessions from Spain, who paid practically for the peace. The whole acerbity and atrocious egoism of Class, blazed forth, after this, in the deified potentate. As excellently related in The Student's France, "his courtiers worshipped him as a demi-god; foreign governments regarded him with servile awe; and it is not wonderful that in this proud zenith of his fortunes he should have shown him- self little disposed to practice moderation and forbearance. The conclusion of peace produced no abatement in his projects of aggressive domina- tion; on the contrary, he took advantage of his position to push his arbitrary encroachments, beyond all bounds of reason and wise policy." Tribal covetousness raged in his nature, and the outrageously impudent Chambres de Reunion, were created, for the express purpose of forcing new claims upon his intimidated neighbors. Tribe and Class 145 Twenty towns were added in this way to his realm, and the free city of Strasburg, made almost invulnerable by the genius of Vauban, became the eastern bulwark of France. Of course these depredations started new coali- tions, and the Dutch States, Sweden, Spain, and the German Empire attempted to stem the un- governable tide of the french usurpations. Un- opposed he trampled upon all rights, invaded, seized, confiscated, and bullied, until patience and even timidity became restive and belligerent. The truce of Ratisbon for twenty years, was arranged, which of course meant nothing else to any body, but a breathing spell to prepare more undeserved sufferings, for the abashed and help- less people. The abominable profligate then began his unreasonably, viciously wicked and hatefully cruel persecution of the protestants at the instigation of a mistress. The dragonnades began their atrocities, the conversions, extorted by the infliction of every bodily torture known to human butchery upon the naked bodies of men and women, encouragingly mounted into tens of thousands; the Edict of Nantes was revoked, and this wretched and inexplicable cynosure of fame and infamy felt no remorse, for, as Guizot has written, ''he had dispeopled his kingdom, reduced to exile, despair, or falsehood fifteen hundred thousand of his subjects, but the memory of the persecutions inflicted upon the protestants, did not trouble him ; they were for him rather a pledge of his salvation and of his acceptance before God." 146 Europe's Handicap — It was not long, before the inevitable revulsion against these outrages assumed form, and one too of imposing dimensions. Europe was still to be torn with conflict, by reason of the intolerable personal direction of national issues, and the almost ineradicable vice of tribal instincts in rulers and in people. The League of Augsburg (1686) brought together, in a new coalition, another and hostile sphere of influence; Spain, Sweden, Bavaria, Saxony, England, Holland, and the Palatinate. Then, incensed at his threatened losses, the french king ordered his generals to destroy the Palatinate. It was done. The fires of the royal incendiary lit up the fair provinces with the glare of burning cities; Heidelberg, Manheim, Spires, Worms, Oppenheim, Bingen, were reduced to ruins, and a homeless population wandered despairing and desperate over the land, which had been blooming with orchards or laden with har- vests; one hundred thousand abject creatures, in whose hearts entered the inextinguishable fires of vindictive hate, or who became embruited by the bitter anguish of unmerited afflictions. The Grand Alliance was formed, and seven years more of war, full of wretchedness, of wasted lives, and annihilated fortunes, suffered absolutely for no other reason than the rebuke and retention within bounds of a tribal maniac, brought Europe and especially France, to the last extremes of exhaus- tion. The treaty of Ryswick was signed by the great signatories of the Alliance, and England was guaranteed the non-molestation by France of her Tribe and Class 147 new king William III. Louis XIV endured some wholesome pangs of wounded vanity, but his mind turned with resignation and hope towards a new scheme of plunder and spoliation. Charles II of Spain was dying, childless. The french king intended to dictate the disposition of his property. There were other aspirants to the same task, and the mischief of this rivalry of houses or dynasties, with all the inseparable subterfuges, and wire- pullings, was significantly shown. Three candi- dates appeared, and with approved justifications for their claims, which cannot detain these pages, but the upshot of course was a new war — that most infallible product of-European politics — and the War of the Spanish Succession broke out, and intrigue, the balancing of interests, and the coolest imaginable bargainings between governments over property, not theirs, illustrated anew the be- nighted position of the populations of Europe. And all this culminating in a repudiation of solemn — solemnity with a king seems generally to mean just dignified shamming — promises, for Louis broke his word flat and finally, and England was accused of treachery, and this done, as always, with the intention of preserving the Balance of Power, a semi-mythical entity, which is so often adjusted and never stays put. It is a phrase and a policy which most forcibly suggests an organized group of cut-throats, who never feel sure of each other, or of TRIBES whose boundaries and behavior are precisely such as their strength en- ables them to hold, or their comfort influences them to exhibit. 148 Europe's Handicap — The War of the Spanish Succession has left the records of four great battles — Ramillies, Blenheim, Oudenarde, Malplaquet — the illustration of a military genius — the english general the Duke of Marlborough — and m^arked, practically, the term of life of a man who accumulated horrors upon horrors, for the gratification of his pride, his own unique Class. The Thirty Years' War, and the Reign of Louis XIV, are sufhciently removed from the earliest stages of tribal culture, to awaken the expectation that the psychic — if that expression is correct — features of their periods, would be vastly con- trasted with the primitive times of rude assault and of devastating inroads. In the material beauty of their civilization, of course they are, and in the products of mind and of imagination, but surely the tribal instincts of aggression have not been extirpated, while added to these, and, in a more or less complicated fashion influencing them, is the willfulness of Class, in groups of men or in one man, separated from their fellow beings by an artifice of spurious promotion. This is unquestionable, and were we to traverse more widely, following a longer range of time, the history of Europe every one know^s that it pre- sents the bitter conflict of the tyrant and the freeman, with the slow emergence into plainer and plainer sight, of the inalienable rights of man to Life, Liberty, and Happiness. But the conten- tion of this essay would decline into an unwished for commonplaceness, if we did not show, that Tribe and Class 149 while all the time civic conditions were ameliorated, yet intrinsically the tribal and the class residues — if we may so denominate them — of feeling and of action remain, and in the Europe of to-day the un- democratic spirit of both animate the governors and the governed. We have in some excitatory sentences already alluded to this. Let us now pass to centuries nearer our own, when, with per- haps the exception of Russia — at all eras ap- parently irredeemable — the torture chamber, the rack, the stake, the pillory, the dungeon, the thumb-screw, starvation, have been abolished everywhere, and have become for us inconceivable horrors of an almost inconceivable age, and see whether we do not still find, certainly in the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth the clear evidence of a state of mind — tribal or class — which the spirit of America in the wholesale, not particularized in a few, utterly repudiates. But first, is the tribal spirit discoverable in the people themselves as the executants of that spirit. The armies, the populations of the time who witnessed and condoned the outrages we have reviewed, were themselves guilty of complicity; they too were as tribal as the instigators of the previous crimes against themselves. When, with tables turned they too held power, was its use any more merciful? The French Revolution was the harvest of the unthinking government of Louis XIV, and it is the meaning of our thesis to believe that its atrocities were not purely the excesses of retribu- 150 Europe's Handicap — tion, the rage of retaliation, but showed that the unfortunate subjects of ruthless kings and nobles, were afiflicted with the same violence of feeling that distorted normal humanity in their perse- cutors and lords. There were two moments in French history when the common people as we say came Into the control of affairs through revolution. The first was a temporary and restricted event the Jacquerie in 1358, and the second was the French Revolution in 1789. Both periods were marked by savage violence. In the first the condition of the peasantry had reached a state almost beggaring description. The endless fighting between the English and the French, with all the commingled treachery of counts and dukes, pretenders and aspirants, had wasted the country, and made wild animals of the hunted and ravaged inhabitants decimated by famine, pestilence, and the sword. There was a propitious interval, and a band of peasants, most ironically called Good fellows {Jacques Bonhom- mes), because of their long suffering, took up arms, and soon swelled their numbers to the respectable size of five thousand, and seized some castles and promptly proceeded to slay all of the inmates, omitting, we believe, as the nobles in their turn did not omit, the aggravating circumstance of torture. It was all barbarous and cruel, but its mitigation in the average estimate of men will be found in the fact that those who committed the crime, had themselves undergone the extremes of undeserved misery inflicted upon them by the Tribe and Class 151 barbarities of Class. The incident proves nothing for our purpose, except that both lord and subject were savages, the former particularly so as the king of Navarre having captured a chieftain of the peasants, one by name William Karle or Callet, "had him beheaded, wearing a trivet of red-hot iron, by way of a crown", while, with much indif- ference, seven thousand of the rest were put to death. Here the cruelty of the peasants might be justly attributed to the natural promptings of revenge. Any mob to-day would do quite the same thing to their oppressors, if they had endured at their hands the miseries of the poor french peasants. There was certainly nothing to choose between the educated nobles and their unedu- cated subjects, in the matter either of decency or mercy. But was it not different in the later outbreak, when the King of France was dethroned by a constitutional assembly, and the period — late in the eighteenth century — was characterized by learning, the spread of enlightenment, and the movement was national and intelligent? Cer- tainly it passed through decreasing stages of moderation, and culminated in wholesale murders, contrived too in the provinces with disgraceful aggravations. The first friends of the Revolution as Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Moor, Camp- bell, Crabbe, in England, soon became ashamed of its extravagances, and might have been willing to assent to Burk's fine accusation; "they have made no sacrifices to their projects than their 152 Europe's Handicap — shoe-buckles, whilst they were imprisoning their king, murdering their fellow-citizens, and bathing in tears and plunging in poverty and distress thousands of worthy men and worthy families. Their cruelty has not even been the base result of fear. It has been the effect of their sense of per- fect safety, in authorizing, treasons, robberies, rapes, assassinations, slaughters and burnings throughout their harassed land." Now it is evi- dent that the men who consummated the later and worse aspects of the French Revolution were men of civilized experiences, and had met such conjunctions of circumstance as to save them from any of the physical miseries endured by the peasants of the Jacquery. Except as they mentally rebelled at the perversion of justice in the abominable servitude of the masses to an aristocratic minority, they had no reason to feel the exacerbations of personal retaliations. But what did they do? "Up to the law of Prairial (10th June) there had been 1220 executions in Paris. You may add to these a hundred or so at the most for the period before the Terror. In the seven weeks succeeding the law there were 1376" (Belloc). There was plenty of slaughtering elsewhere, in the provinces, and in other cities than Paris. Barrere ordered the extermination of the inhabitants of Lyons, and because the scaffold involved delay — a mechanical retardation purely — they were mowed down with musketry. Toulon, Caen, Marseilles, Bordeaux, underwent similar castigation. At Orleans the Tribe and Class 153 leading citizens were slain. There was the butchery in the streets of Paris on the Second of September, when the horrible "jail-deliveries" were perpetrated and probably 2,000 persons, among them the most innocent, harmless, and defenceless, were massacred by cut-throats. And all of this came about, not because of mere mad- ness, a delirium of fear; the men who figured in these awful murders who permitted and ignored them, were sane enough, and their personal condi- tion suggested no necessary resort to retaliation for their emotional satisfaction. Read the names. Among the Girondists Vergniaud, Brissot, Gaudet, Louvet, Petion^ Barbaroux, Roland. Among the Jacobins, Robespierre, St. Just, Couthon, Collot d'Herbois, Carnot, Cambon, Barrere, Fouche, besides the legalists, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Philippeaux, Lacroix, Wes- termann. These men were most diversely tuned in temperament, most oppositely equipped in talent, and some or most of them enjoyed the indulgences of life, but, their passions aroused, they became TRIBAL, and on the wave, before the pressure, of the resuscitated barbarism of their natures, the original ferocity of the Celt and of the Goth reasserted itself, as it did more implacably in the populace. Thus the acts of a people inau- gurating the most stupendous revolution Europe has known against the perpetuated domination of Class, bore the impress — Nay were the replication of the savageries of Clovis. Was it not true that, as De Seze the counsel of 154 Europe's Handicap — the king said before the king's condemnation to the guillotine; "the people wished that a dis- astrous tax should be abolished, and Louis abolished it; the people desired the abolition of servitude and Louis abolished it; solicited reforms and he made them ; the people wished to change the laws and he consented to the change; the people wished that millions of Frenchmen should recover their rights, and he restored them; the people wished for liberty, and he bestowed it on them"? It is accepted that the frightful occurrences of the French Revolution were best calculated, in the procedure to subsequent events, to administer that decisive shock to a rooted and dishonored system, which shook from off a palsied continent the illusion of a name, and the continuation of an injurious convention, but the actors in these atrocities were not aiming at a philosophical solu- tion of their predicament. They became tribal, and repeated in their violence the tribal outrages that for thousands of years had marked the stream of events in Europe, and Europe cannot — any- more than a wolf, or a lion, a tiger, or any other rapacious and untamed wild beast — escape the natural laws of Heredity, and those of Environ- ment. Human nature indeed is a better zoological product than the nature of wild beasts, but it is not so much better that it can defy the absolute biol- ogy of living things, unless conforming to higher laws than those of biology, w^hen by an act of WILL it eradicates its inherited nature and rati- Tribe and Class 155 fies that act of will by obliterating its environment, and that means, for Europe, simply a social and political REVOLUTION. The french revolutionists were not driven to their acts by necessity, nor by terror — though terror doubtless added a bitterer edge to their tribal instincts — nor by memory; they started the work of a popular conquest, and they attempted to carry their conquests over Europe in tribal fashion and like all tribal con- quests it was accompanied with outrage, with the frenzy of destructiveness. The tribal nature was shown by Royalist and Republican in their con- tests with each other; . the Vendean armies massacred the republicans and the Republicans devastated Vendee by fire and sword. The intent of extermination that animated all tribal warfare animated them, for fundamentally WAR is the expression of the tribal state, and unless sophisti- cated by restraints, springing from higher motives, means Death and Destruction. What else can it mean? And after the French Revolution — salutary and desirable as it was — came a tribal chieftain Napoleon Bonaparte, the most brilliant, daring, and genius-endowed chieftain of his class; with whom was no shadow of turning before the re- morseless necessities of CONQUEST. Now con- quest is an intelligible, intellectual motive, and the great generals as Caesar, Hannibal, Alexander, may have had political reasons, wedded to grandiose dreams of universal dominion, with, 156 Europe's Handicap — perhaps not distantly related to it, of universal happiness. The lower tribal cultures do not apprehend conquest in that light — at least not usually — unless the Iroquois League suggests it among the American Indians. But the tribal nature of conquest appears in the cruelties, the enslavings, in the plunderings. These last were conspicuous with Napoleon. War as an art means science, and a successful war means fame, and this last impulse overpoweringly mingles its dolorous designs with the tribal propulsion toward war, /or its own sake, or for what it brings in gain. But there is something more mysterious, more recondite, implied in the tribe^ which we have hinted at, but not dwelt upon specifically. It is the "Bigotry of Blood" the ''Intense Racial or Caste Pride, and irreducible self-consciousness." There are the obvious commonplace phenomena of persistent imposition of the conquerors upon the conquered, with arrogance and superb scorn, but in Robespierre of the Revolution we seem, sud- denly to confront that racial intensity of feeling, concentrated in an individual with a theory. It really seems so. The analysis is dif^cult and ob- scure, perhaps, but we believe that sort of zealot is also tribal, that his temperament developes under tribal antecedents, conditions, and guaran- tees. We have treated of it less exiguously than we can here, under Religious Bigotry and the Inquisition. It is alluded to now as relative to that almost inexplicable character Robespierre, who might, under the broad glance of a superficial Tribe and Class 157 estimate, be simply called a tribal despot, but whom Belloc has taught us to regard otherwise. "No man, almost, in history so incessantly haunted his audience with his repeated per- sonality — but he certainly imagined that he was but emphasizing the equality of men, the immortality of the soul, and all the other connected dogmas of the perfect State. He was infinitely suspicious and forever seeing himself abandoned — but it was because he was quite certain of his truths, and was con- vinced (generally with reason) that others less single-minded than himself were acting against what they knew to be political justice. It was not he but justice, that stood alone in the hall; his opponents were opposing not him, but self-evident and conspicuous truths." There is a phase of sublimity here, the apotheosis of the tribal obstinacy and tribal Infatuation, but we consider It injurious for the interests of men freely organized. It belongs to tribal communi- ties, and may work their resolution Into absolute anarchy, or into an impossible tyranny. Of course It comes when society has developed Ideas, and advanced along the road of mental or even spiritual convictions. What agonies of shame it wrought in the French Revolution, the black stigma of condemnation attached commonly to the name of Robespierre fully attests; what enormi- ties of conduct it prompted In the Inquisition, we have rehearsed in another chapter. Developed in individuals more genially composed, it — like an 158 Europe's Handicap — inborn Nemesis of the tribe itself — may lead to unexpected progress and emancipation. But the object of this essay is purely denunciatory, and the tribal aspects of Europe, or of its history, that are meritorious, deserve no consideration here. We have alluded to Napoleon Bonaparte as a tribal chieftain. He was. He swept over Europe and plundered wherever he went; he antagonized almost the whole of Europe, and lived latterly in the exaltation of a dream of world-wide dominion. As a besom of destruction to superannuated and cruel monarchies, he served — let us say — the pur- poses of Freedom, but he was a tribal despot, and he flourished in the arena of battles, where his genius for accomplishing victorious slaughter, was indisputable and superb. The tribal traits were his, and though he despised — or pretended to — the ancient regime of Class, he, under the domination of the European tradition, believed it was neces- sary as a social institution. As a part of the tribal phenomena of Europe he prolongs its tribal life well into the Nineteenth century. His system of ethics is the tribal system's and is summed up in in three words. Conquest, Domination, Appropria- tion. Napoleon was a Corsican tribesman, and Rose asserts that the murder of the Due d'Enghien by Napoleon was regarded as "little more than an autocratic version of the vendetta tr avers ale" . In 1796 he imposed a levy on Lombardy of twenty million francs, although he had only two days be- fore described the country as exhausted by five Tribe and Class 159 years of war. With aesthetic discrimination he carried off the works of art from Italy in that cam- paign ; he battered down the gates of Pavia and his army, "massacred all the armed men for some hours, and glutted their lust and rapacity"; his generals amassed fortunes in Italy by prodigious thefts, and behind them came the cloud of 'Trench commissioners, dealers, and other civilian harpies, who battened on the spoil of Lombardy"; he looted Pope Pius VI, to the tune of 34,700,000 francs, and one hundred pictures, busts, vases, or statues, together with five hundred manuscripts, — all of which might be submissively attributed, by his admirers, to the pecfection of his taste, and the depth of his scholarship — ; he plundered Leg- horn, though in this instance it was the tribal cupidity of the home government, (The Directors), that profited most; he continued the usual Euro- pean method of intrigue and extortion, when he wrote to the directory, "if your plan is to extract five or six million francs from Venice, I have expressly prepared for you this sort of rupture with her"; in 1798 his general Berthier entered Rome, and in true tribal style ransacked its treasures, and departed rich; about this time the french liberators of Switzerland rifled the treasuries of Berne, Zurich, Solothurn, Fribourg and Lucerne, extorting fifteen millions of francs by forced contributions; Rose describing Bona- parte's voyage to Egypt alludes with suave irony that "after dragging Malta out of its mediaeval calm and plunging it into the full swirl of modern 160 Europe's Handicap — progress," he left it with his exchequer replenished by all the gold and silver, whether in bullion or in vessels, discoverable in the treasury of Malta, or in the Church of St. John. Alaric could scarcely have done better. It was all tribal. In the summer of 1799 there was confusion and uncertainty in France, and, at the critical moment, in the month of Brumaire, Napoleon dissolved the legislature, dispersed the Directory, and estab- lished the Consulate, with himself as First Consul. It was a propitious step for France. For then followed an exhibition of that marvellous sagacity, astute ingenuity, and diplomatic readiness, that brought peace to France, enabling her to tempor- arily withdraw^ her arms from the hostile en- counters with the nations of Europe, conciliated her internal factions, began the elevation of a meritorious order of social distinction, instituted reforms, civil and administrative, with the codifi- cation of her laws, the beautification of her capital, the rectification of religious relations with the Papacy, the founding of a system of education, designed to solidify the power of a stable govern- ment, and when the wonderful man who ruled her destinies, guided all, watched all, penetrated her smallest needs, and distributed around him in correspondence and conversations the crisp epi- grams of wit, and the profound reflections of wisdom. But yet Napoleon was tribal, and he lived among tribal states, with whom he was soon to again engage in tribal wars. It was at this time Tribe and Class 161 in this placid interval of constructive statesman- ship — wherein however the observer does not dis- cern the emergence of truly democratic principles — that this tribal warrior analyzed with an in- trinsic emphasis of truth, the essence of tribal warfare, in these admirable sentences ; "the soldier knows no law but force, sees nothing but it, and measures everything by it. The civilian, on the other hand, only looks to the general welfare. The characteristics of the soldier is to wish to do everything despotically: that of the civilian is to submit everything to discussion, truth, and reason. The superiority thus unquestionably belongs to the civilian". Jt is perhaps impossible to gauge the depths of such a composite mind, whose scope of analysis permitted him to imper- sonally solve problems of government so dispas- sionately — while, were he to reveal the reticences of his inmost thought, he would have placed his own confidence in the control of the sword, and the dictums of an irreversible sovereign. The fas- cinating study cannot detain us; one glance at the succeeding period, when embattled Europe resisted this promising professor of civic freedom, and when with a splendor of achievement, un- rivalled by all the tribal captains of earlier cen- turies he deluged Europe in blood, and fed the tribal energies of its peoples with the panoramic picture of his conquering sweep from the canals of Holland to the snow-buried plains of Russia. He drained his country of its youth and strength, starting anew the fire of race animosity, and rein- 162 Europe's Handicap — forcing, through the desperation of resistance, the ancient pride in tribal aims, while to that country of France, which had paid so dearly in moral incul- pation and material loss for its temporary expul- sion of tribal kings, he returned the degradation of an hereditary monarchy. The exorbitant energies of Napoleon, his keen intellectual vivacity, and the irrepressible imagina- tive force of his mind, soon launched him Into new designs of conquest. The tribal demon awoke portentously, and it awoke in a man gloriously endowed to gratify its appetites. Already France had acquired much, and also dominated Europe. Piedmont, the Duchy of Parma, the Rhine- provinces, Belgium were hers, and the Swiss and the Dutch were subjugated by her oppressive in- fluence, while a Franco-Russian alliance had been strongly cemented. Napoleon dreamed at first of a great western empire — Louisiana — a region of illimitable possibilities, which would absorb the young life of the nation, stir its ambitions and where new enterprise, fostered by new conditions, would yield incalculable wealth, where new enter- prises would yield new problems and new benefits. He turned also to Egypt, to India, to Australia, lured by that scenic charm of orientalism, to which a chord of picturesque excitability, in his nature, seemed always to respond. "Egypt was to be the keystone of that arch of empire which was to span the oceans and link the prairies of the far west to the teeming plains of India and the far Austral Isles." (Rose). Australia then was almost un- Tribe and Class 163 known, thither the inquisitive fancy of the First Consul was turned. But his designs failed, per- haps, to bring to him that satiety of satisfaction which the control and regulation of a civilized group of communities would offer, whose activities enclosed the widest range of interests, whose prod- ucts remain the most stable ornaments of the human mind. He relinquished Louisiana, sur- rendering It to the United States, thwarting the probable plans of his arch enemy. Great Britain, to possess It for the annoyance and restriction of the new Republic — not Indeed that Napoleon was in love with republics, but It was a necessity. In Europe Intervention and strife quickly fol- lowed. There was uneasiness and dissatisfaction, the Incessant Irritations of restless envies, while the great chieftain, feeding the vanity of his race, easily stimulated by martial glory, nurtured the military spirit, the tribal urgency for war. Eng- land and France kept their respective embassies busy with claims and rectifications, refusals and threats, and the composite net-work of diplomatic pour-parlers shook with the frequency and serious- ness of their exchanges. Napoleon was nursing vast indefinable schemes, the original tribal blood coursed In his veins with Its not-to-be-denled vehemence and passion. England became un- manageable, perhaps was jealous and apprehen- sive, and Napoleon grew vindictive. Naples was cowed, his troops drained Its resources. Hanover was taken, and Napoleon contemplated war; "having quartered 60,000 French troops on Naples 164 Europe's Handicap — and Hanover, Napoleon could face with equa- nimity the cost of the war. Gigantic as they were, they could be met from the purchase money of Louisiana, the taxation and voluntary gifts of the French dominions, the subsidies of the Italian and Ligurian republics, and a contribution which he now exacted from Spain." The French nation was startled by the ex- posure of an undoubted plot against the life of Napoleon, which, so fair a historian as Rose, believes was assisted by the English ministry. Then came the execution of the Due d'Enghien (1804), and as a climax to everything as the last reversal to the tribal and class formula, came the Empire and the ''establishment of heredity'', as Napoleon called it himself. Europe under the lead of England was now almost solidly enlisted against the incredible adventurer, though Prussia remained out of the coalition. The successive splendors of the campaigns that followed — inter- rupted by armistices, short peaceful interludes, and puzzling negotiations — are well known, each an explosive glory of martial skill, the amazing pyrotechnics of a genius whose fortune seemed sometimes to vie with, or even exceed its penetra- tion, and whose unscrupulous designs, its irritable audacities, its insolence and its vindictive passion, marked its subject as the typical tribal chieftain, though his temper accompanied talents that attained the limit of mental superiority. As in the earliest tribal warfare, the tribes suffer- ing from the inroads of some aspiring leader, who Tribe and Class 165 carried his people along in devastating triumphs, gathered together in more or less temporary groups of resistance, so did the European nations arm together against this marauder. It was then as it has ever been — the tribal dilemma of Europe — the artificial loading of the scales of political prestige or territorial ownership in the equipoise called the Balance of Power, or the massing of the nations against the exorbitant designs of some tribal monstrosity, who wanted everything. Among a collection of justly organized and emancipated peoples, dwelling equally under the aegis of a common respect for freedom and personal indi- vidual dignity, no such d:rtifice would be necessi- tated. But in societies ruled by Class ideas, where monarchies, and dynasties, and the varied appeals of vanity, greed, fame even, summon to the surface of politics the conflicting interests of this family and of that, where the inheritance of tribal instincts, is perpetually driving the people themselves into schemes of aggrandizement, ruin- ous to a just civilization, WAR is the chief con- cern of national existence, for on WAR its main- tenance depends, and by WAR the factitious dis- tinctions of martial preeminence are conferred upon individuals, and upon nations. In all of this Napoleonic disturbance, which so thoroughly vexed, despoiled, and frightened Europe, there was no appeal to the franchises of the people, who of themselves — except so far as even the populace in Europe suffer from the inseparable tribal taint — would have allowed short shrift to the sway of their 166 Europe's Handicap — bargaining and burglarious leaders. This tribal confusion served as a justification to Napoleon him- self, to aspire to be more than an Emperor of the French, for, "he wished to make his Empire a cosmopolitan realm, whose confines might rival those of the Holy Roman Empire of one thousand years before, and embrace a score of peoples in a grand, well-ordered European policy. "Already his dominions included a million of Germans on the Rhineland, Italians of Piedmont, Genoa, and Nice, besides Savoyards, Genevese, and Belgians. How potent would be its influence on the weltering chaos of German and Italian States, if these much divided peoples learned to look on him as the successor of the glories of Charlemagne!" (Rose). And in this dreadful prospect of war there was included its inevitable concomitant, the depletion of wealth. ''War must support war,'' and, like any original gothic or Celtic chief. Napoleon rifled the treasuries of the subjected countries. Forty million francs were contributed every year, as subsidies from Italy and Spain, and elsewhere forcible exactions were so contrived as to exactly meet the exigencies of his expensive campaigns, while wiping oflf the map the whole varied and interesting, and also ludicrous, little states and principalities with many of the free cities that had composed the confusion of German states, Napoleon made up his Rhenish Confederation of which he was Protector, and which was to furnish 63,000 troops, when the Protector called for them. Tribe and Class 167 The obliteration of these fantastic and aged political relics was scarcely to be regretted, though then, as Rose remarks, "German life began to lose much of the quaint diversity beloved of artists and poets." If the repeated spectacle of arbitrary and selfish acts, perpetrated by the conductors of European public affairs, the managers of the estates of the people, had not already stunned our sensibilities, the manner in which this tribal brigand handed out this province and that city, these franchises and those suzerainties, like pawns in a game, or bribes in a deal, and imposed orders of brutal harshness upon his satellites for special ends, would again awaken their susceptibility. It was an advanced or refined status over the freebooters of the Hun, the Tartar, the Frank, the Slav, the Dane, the Celt, the Gaul, but in essence it was the same ungovernable brutality. Promises were broken, duplicity spun webs of deception, and tyranny, disguised in glitter, in phrases, in barter, steadily strengthened its power. It was tribal indeed, but the art, that had developed with Class, elaborated Its technique. Napoleon assured the King of Prussia that Hanover should not be re- stored to England; at the very moment he was negotiating its transfer; a german wrote a patriotic pamphlet, "Germany in her Humilia- tion"; he is shot; to his brother Joseph, sup- pressing the Calabrian rebels, he says, ''shoot three men in every village''. This was thought, presum- ably in the operative habits of European states- 168 Europe's Handicap — manship, correctly, that "true policy is nothing else than the calculation of combinations and chances," and of course it was not probably as outrageous indeed as had been the previous practice of centuries, where Class interests overshadowed all others, and made slaves or rebels of the people. The end was approaching; Ulm and Austerlitz subdued Austria, Jena and Auerstadt over- whelmed the Prussians, Friedland disconcerted the Russians, conducing to the peace of Tilsit, when Alexander of Russia and Napoleon embraced each other with, on one side delusive beguilements, on the other with a rapture not wholly disinter- ested, — for, says Rose, "it is now known that the Czar had set his heart on a great part of Prussian Poland". Again the typical tribe and class spirit. As usual the kings cut and quartered, and Napo- leon probably lied. There was a published treaty and there were secret articles, and the partition and distribution of the public viands — with bons bouches, as entrees, of concessions and pensions — and a very fine garnishment of agreement as to what should be done with England and Turkey, with the Courts of Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Lisbon, if these unconsulted entities of state proved refractory, while Sweden and Finland were held over the watering mouth of the Czar, as future delicious morsels. The Continental Sys- tem was complete. It was all tribal autocracy, but tremendously intellectualized, or even ro- manticized by nineteenth century skill, perversion, and vainglorious dreams. Tribe and Class 169 And after all what happened? The French army was quartered for sixteen months on miser- able Prussia, the French people suffered immense privations by the exclusion of the English ships from their harbors, while Napoleon, enthralled by the vision of Oriental conquest, plunged more deeply into a repressive policy, the tribal or class ideal of "outward Compulsion". The struggle of Napoleon and England stiffened into a headstrong unyielding duel, with Napoleon epigrammatically claiming that the Land should subdue the Sea, and England coercing Denmark, seizing her fleet, in its effort to grasp the maritime supremacy, which tradition and experience- assigned to her. Then Portugal was to be divided, and the superb chief- tain nonchalantly remarked, "as for Portugal I make no difficulty about granting to the King of Spain a suzerainty over Portugal, and even taking part of it away for the queen of Etruria and the Prince of Peace," this latter sarcasm indicating a paramour of the queen of Spain (Godoy), in all of which stream of usurpations one thought governed the piratical measures considered, viz. the exclu- sion of England from the ports of the Continent, and the control of the continental fleets. Every- where was arbitrariness, willful trespassing, bare- faced chicanery, undisguised brigandage, as when Napoleon wrote — "and if the Pope commits an imprudence, it will be a fine opportunity for de- priving him of the Roman States." Then the Spanish crown was seized, Spain's king pensioned, and the Indies compressed within the omniscient range of this man's political voracity. 170 Europe's Handicap — More and more outrages were perpetrated, and at once, on every hand, appeared the unmistakable portents of revolt in the conquered countries, while English assistance — again cursed by the preference of Class — under the command of the Earl of Chatham — was decimated by disease. That incompetent commander "finally withdrew his army into the Isle of Walcheren, into whose fever-laden swamps Napoleon had refused to send a single French soldier. A tottering remnant was all that survived by the close of the year: and the climax of our national disgrace was reached when a court-martial acquitted the commanders. Napoleon would have had them shot" (Rose). The Tyrolean peasantry set an example of determined courage to their moribund monarch, emperor Francis, but were beaten down by French, Bavarian, and Italian soldiers, the conglomerate tribal offerings of as many different states. Listen to John Holland Rose's expressive summation of the Napoleonic zenith, a picture of tribal grandeur, where the chieftain however conjoined with his lighting prowess the modern skill of a consummate constructive administration. *'He had humbled Pope and Emperor alike: Germany crouched at his feet: France, Italy, and the Confederation of the Rhine gratefully acknowledged the benefits of his vigorous sway: the Czar was still following the lead given at Erfurt: Sweden had succumbed to the pressure of the two emperors: and Turkey survived only because it did not yet suit Napoleon to shear her asunder: he must first complete the Tribe and Class 171 commercial ruin of England, and drive Wellington into the sea." Spain had been cut into portions, whose taxation would lighten the fiscal needs of the tireless and amazing marauder, while their gradual annexation to France would enlarge the imperial domain; a few months later Holland was annexed to France, and amongst all of these mani- fold trangressions of justice, one absurd incident — like a transcendent touch of comedy — illustrates anew the preposterous illusions of Class, even when its pretensions are temporary, artificial, and sub- stitutional; the emperor's brother, made by him king of Holland, conceived literally that ''he reigned there by divine right!'' The grandly organized but perishable system went to pieces, its meretricious unity dissolved before the attacks of tribal patriotism, the aims of potentates dissatisfied with its restrictions, the disappointment of Russian ambitions, the bitter- ness of internal strife, the hardships of national penury, and the disintegrating assaults of England. Tribal assertions shook apart the artificial and obnoxious confederacies, the renewed aspirations of Class arose unflinchingly to uproot the destroyer who had degraded its estates. Military disaster flung from off the despot the dazzling apparel of predestined autocracy. In the Russian campaign from 600,000 only 20,000 "famished, frost-bitten, unarmed spectres staggered across the bridge of Kovno in the middle of December" (Rose). New conscriptions were in order, new levies of taxes, and the indeterminate future badly deranged his 172 Europe's Handicap — confidences in his allies, while the bursting spirit of nationalism threatened at every point the bulging and cracking dams of coalition, only held in place by bayonets, cannons, and diplomacy. That tribal intensity of racial feeling, that creates zealots and patriots of the noblest types, blazed forth and the days of the great emperor were numbered, while on all sides, for a moment at least, the rivalries of place, position and possession became subordinated to the momentous upheaval, that would cast him down. Indeed at this terrific crisis the purest nobility of feeling was shown among the masses in Germany; there the heroism of Korner the memory of Stein the exortation of Steffens and the devotion of Arndt contrasted with the tribal designs of Metternich, the Class plot- tings of Alexander, and the commercial avarice of England. As usual there was playing of cards enough, and the ministries wavered, cajoled, scraped, and bowed, insinuated and frowned, bargained and bartered before the final arbitra- ment was adjudged, upon the field of battle. Then quickly followed the victories of the eng- lish in Spain, the renewed revolts of the popula- tions against the French invaders, fresh drawings together of the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian interests, the battle of Lutzen, then Dresden and Leipzig, Napoleon's retreat, the fall of Paris, and Napoleon's abdication. That intense dramatic movement — almost fictitious in its scenic pictures- queness — which administers to the story of Napo- leon a deathless interest, culminated in his return, Tribe and Class 173 the one hundred days, the battles of Ligny, Quatre Bras, and Waterloo, Napoleon's surrender to the English, and those melancholy years of the vanquished commander at St. Helena. The shiftiness of European national policy, its evanescent sense of probity, the recurrent, if not always present, personal ends, aims, and conten- tions of individuals, or houses, or dynasties, blown with pride, or simply seditious with greed, are markedly shown in the Napoleonic drama, and alongside of it too that unquenchable spring of human idealism — the best guarantee of Democ- racies — as in the Tugimdhiind of Prussia, which was the outpouring of the^patriotism of the people. It was Metternich, a master Mephistopheles in trickery and deceit, albeit at times serving the best and truest needs of his country, who wrote in 1809, **we must confine our system to tacking and turning and flattering. Thus alone may we possibly preserve our existence, till the day of general deliverance". It was Metternich and the Emperor Francis of Austria, who supported or were subservient to Napoleon in 1813, because they dreaded Jacobinism and pan-Germanism, and because they also feared Russian aggrandize- ment, feared her sword guarding the entrance of the Danube, and her squadrons of Cossacks over- running Poland. Austria had lost the Tyrol and Illyria, and Vienna was only thinking of an equiva- lent exchange for these lost provinces. The tribal and the class instinct of acquisitiveness, of plunder, of enrichment, at some one else's expense is the 174 Europe's Handicap — habitual attitude of the European nations, and when this attitude is assumed, the whole political activity of the continent becomes a game of grab. Russia contemplated nefarious inroads into Po- land, and even further, while Europe struggled with the enveloping folds of the Napoleonic python. Prussia was worried over the eastern boundary — a boundary to-day Germany is seeking to rectify — for, the great Duchy of Warsaw once appropriated by Russia, her existence was again straightened between the Muscovite on the east and the Celt on the west. The Goth had no use for either. Again Austria held off from too enthusiastic mingling in the fray, because while posing as mediator she could claim her share in the territorial redistribution which must accompany the peace, a tribal reticence truly, after the later fashion of Class refinements. And the relentless aggressor, who had emptied Hamburg of 20,000, the young and strong as dangerous, the old and weak as useless (Rose), had kept on tightening his hold at all points, with his magnificent eyes in a hungry fever of lust, fastened upon regions yet literally beyond any man's purview. The allies were often in a ferment of distrust of each other after Dresden and Leipzig, and their greatest alarm arose rapidly at the increasingly omnivorous appetite of Czar Alexander; dissen- sions were rife, a condition typically tribal. At all times before his final submergence. Napoleon was difficult, (as the Yankees say), and the pulling and hauling in the diplomatic tug of Tribe and Class 175 Minds, and Wills, and Interests, produces a feeling of mortified exhaustion. Only Napoleon's ob- stinate blindness, his intemperate passion, unified the crumbling opposition. The Bourbons came swiftly forward at the end for the resumption of power and place; on all sides the evidence of an eager rapacity, whose hunger had been too long denied, were seen, and when the end did come, at the first abdication, there was the expected dis- tribution of lands and maintenance. The Em- peror was allotted the Island of Elba; to his wife and son was given the duchies of Parma, Placentia and Guastalla, and 2,000,000 of francs as an annual subsidy. The BonapartQS were provided for also. The inexcusable crimes which had been committed were quite forgotten, for, in Europe through its ingrained familiarity with war, with its tacit recognition of the inviolability of title, and title's predestined exemption from work, the perpetra- tors of slaughter are reckoned glorious, and the habits of indolence are esteemed as distinguished. The democratic solution of climaxes of this sort is much simpler, though less imposing. The cul- prits must suffer the consequences of their misde- meanors, and in their overthrow and reabsorption in the mass of men and women who surround them, become later simply what they make themselves to be by work and influence. And yet there is an appropriate magnanimity after all in Europe's way. The men or women who have developed, matured, and lived in the atmosphere of a social separateness from the rest of men, have acquired 176 Europe's Handicap — an unrelaxed hold pride of class, which has moulded their whole psychological nature, into a fixed retinue of feelings, cannot, without a cruelty, indistinguishable from torture, be torn from their environment, and forced to live in ordinary ways. Witness the formation of an Imperial Court on the Island of Elba for "the delectation of Napoleon's mother and his sister Pauline". This has its pathos, not far removed from a ludicrous pettiness and juvenility of feeling, peculiar perhaps to a diseased sensorium. In the same way, possibly, by the death of king Edward of England, his widow, deprived of the glamour and ostentation of a court, recreated a household of pretentious splendor, and fought ofT the ennui of her desola- tion by an affectation of pomp. And it was well illustrated in the case of James II, exiled to France from England, who maintained, with the money of the French, a court at St. Germains, with consistent decorum. It seems allied — this tyrannical craving of Class — to the insufferable needs of people, who use drugs, and have perverted nature by fictitious pleasures. When Napoleon was well out of the way, the bargainings, and dickers, and quarterings, among the other tribes and tribesmen were prolonged almost vociferously, and with ruthless thrift, and quite regardlessly too of what the people, thus negligently treated, cared for, themselves. It is impossible to rehearse it. The discord was pro- nounced, the gluttony boundless. Let us only note that Italy which had been unified under Tribe and Class 177 Napoleon, was again sliced and rent into fragments, for the Class beneficiaries. Louis VXIII who confiscated all the properties of the Bona- partes, never paid a centime of the sums, the stipulations of the Allies required him to pay, for Napoleon'ssupport; a Classexampleof royal honor. The Napoleonic drama illustrates, in a some- what contrasted way to the sketches of European conditions we have already introduced here, the contentions of this essay. Such a masterful and ruinous control by a mind of almost superhuman virility and brilliancy could only have secured its fulcrum of accomplishment, in tribal and class societies, — environments — ^ where the institutes of heredity in government, and an absence of wisdom and experience in self-government among the masses, obtained. The tribal pugnacity, the Class craving for power, centralized in an indi- vidual of superior endowments, contributed the necessary dynamic elements to bring about the vast convulsion of conditions, helped too in his case by a previous outburst of popular resentment. It all took place in a world of tribal antecedents, and class habits. And again, if Napoleon was a tribal chieftain, transfigured and illuminated by all that the pro- gress of fifteen hundred years could contribute to his personnel, to his implements, he was also a scorching, consuming, meteoric flame, that burned away much of the sophistry of Class, and relegated to the scrap-heap of abandoned mysteries, or prejudices, or make-shifts, the emptiness of social 178 Europe's Handicap — distinctions, that were not founded upon talent and upon service. To all this besides, of course in Napoleon, the dramatic sense and the poetic eye discern a master of effects, a splendid generallzer of mass movements among men, and the theatrical artist as well, on a majestic scale too, who would wave the wand of scenic transformations, and bind the storied past, with its pageantries and mysticism, with some modern macrocosm of nationalities into a world-fact of consolidated realms, and reduplicated splendors. It all ended at St. Helena. It was after all evanescent, be- cause it was tribal and personal. If we now come nearer to that terrific phe- nomenon of WAR which to-day is desolating Europe, postulating as we did from the beginning that the tribal and class features of European nationality lie at the root of her miserable con- flicts, let us enter the year 1854. It would be possible to dwell with some unction, along the lines of our convictions, upon the Divi- sion of Poland in 1777, which was a tribal act of the meanest selfishness, actuated though by the almost hopeless incompetence of Poland's Class rulers, but, that we may more securely lay the foundations of our impeachment of the present war, as the result of tribal and class conditions, we will take the next example of both, nearer our own time, viz. 1854, when the Crimean war started. The tribe and the chieftain and the moot, the former a rough horde of half disciplined but always Tribe and Class 179 formidable men, the second a romantic figure in skin-harness with shield and battle axe, the last a vociferous assemblage of dishevelled figures bran- dishing spears or smiting in a clangor of assent their metallic shields, were not discernable in the armies and parliament and ministry of England, in the Emperor and Corps L e gi slatif aiud regiments of France, or in the booted, spurred, and cloak draped form of Nicholas, czar of All the Russias, with his ministers, his generals, and squadrons of Cossacks, in the year 1854. But still tribes and tribesmen they were all together, by reasons of the predicament of position and the ineffaceable inci- dence of custom. For their position was the proximity of rival states, their customs the wary watchfulness of individual jealousy and ambition, and such a collocation of place and temperament meant war and only war — and WAR is literally the tribal state. The tribal idea is almost inseparable from the purpose and the practice of war, and the growth of natures under a stimulus so truculent, indubita- bly matures into strains of feeling that are belli- cose, aggressive, and irritable. In Europe super- added to the cultivation of the war-spirit, itself an implanted instinct in the aboriginal breast of the European settlers, was the selfish aims of Class advancement, the potentiality of the pride and ambitions of rulers. As the nomadic masses that constituted the populations of the yet inchoate and formative Europe, agglutinated intospheres of political autonomy, and became nations, they put 180 Europe's Handicap — on aspects of less lawless impulse than character- ized their rude ancestors, but the motives of action were almost identical. Something called Inter- national Law had been accumulated into a digest more or less precise, and dignitaries called Ministers handled, under the suave decorum, or should it be designated as disguise, of words, the insinuations of states which might later become threats, and the words themselves, by the most natural prefix of one letter, become swords. The somewhat recog- nized intertribal boundaries of the tribes in the middle of the nineteenth century had hardened into an intelligible and discrete bit of phraseology, as the Balance of Power, which portrayed a really variable condition, but one so influenced by the practical relations of existence, under tribal reciprocity, as to insure to each nation a com- mendable stability. To be sure much later than 1854, Germany appropriated Sleswick and Hol- stein from Denmark, Alsace and Lorraine from France, and, through the compulsory cementation of war, Prussia consolidated the communities of the aforetime Rhenish confederation. That startled Europe, but it did not completely upset her, and the Ministers and International Law maintained their official gravity unimpaired, not without — we are quite sure — indulging in some prophetic glances forwards, when their behaviour might become less sedate, and their voices less reticent. Later events did perhaps justify their confidence in their powers of verbal skill, when the issue arose, for at the treaty of Berlin, in 1878, Tribe and Class 181 many unexpected things happened, secured through ministerial bargains, rather than by the proverbial arbitrament of arms. But there was still a portion of Europe which remained a moles indigesta, and that was Turkey and the south eastern principalities, some of them at the time part of Turkey itself, and their eventual disposition lay somewhat in the laps of the gods, with a predisposition on the part of Russia and Austria, to assist the divinities at any critical moment of indecision. And there were two other circumstances ominous to the peace of Europe in 1854 both of which were related to what we have named here Glass Domination. One was a monstrous royal Thief, in western Europe — in France — Louis Napoleon Bonaparte of whom Kinglake has written, "he must have accustomed himself to hear sometimes what conscience had to say, for it is certain that, with a pen in his hand and with sufficient time for preparation, he could imitate very neatly the scrupulous language of a man of honor", and the other was Nicholas czar of Russia, who the same author tells us ''had busied himself all his days in organizing armies and reviewing drilled men, and grinding down his people into the mere fractional components of an army, until the very faces of soldiers in the same battalion were brought to be similar and uniform." And it so happened that tribal propensities in the latter, and Class dreams in the former, did precipi- tate an unnecessary and — as always — cruel war, for war even when reduced to its lowest dimen- 182 Europe's Handicap — sions, as in fisticuffs or feminine aspersions, means painful disfigurement. England was dragged into that war, whether as the dupe of France, (viz Louis Napoleon Bonaparte), as Kinglake avers, or from the importunity of her own interests, or from both, may remain undetermined. The view here adopted follows the analysis of Alexander William Kinglake, modified by the less acrimonious judg- ments of Justin McCarthy. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had reversed the will of republican France. As its president he ne- fariously plotted its destruction. He made him- self Emperor, with the assistance of a few des- perately ruthless men, and having established himself by the force of bayonets, became a partici- pant, or an accomplice, in a massacre of some twenty-four thousand citizens of Paris, which completely terrorized the country, followed as it was, everywhere, by "slaughter, banishment, imprisonment, sequestration". The tribal feroc- ity exemplified its unimpaired vitality, and was exercised upon a people in the provinces whose servility or servitude to Class, easily induced a successful intimidation. But for the purposes of unimpeachable success more had to be done. ''The army in the provinces closely imitated the ferocity of the army of Paris, but it was to be apprehended that soldiery, however fierce, might deal only with the surface of discontent, and not strike deep enough into the heart of the country. They might kill people in streets, and roads, and fields; they might even send their musket-balls Tribe and Class 183 through windows, into the houses, and shoot whole batches of prisoners; but they could not so well search out the indignant friends of law and order in their inner homes. Therefore Morny sent into the provinces men of dire repute, and armed them with terrible powers. These persons were called Commissaries. In every spot so visited the people shuddered, for they knew by their experience of 1848, that a man thus set over them by the terrible Home Office might be a ruffian, well known to the police for his crimes, as well as for his services, and that from a potentate of that quality it might cost them dear to buy their safety". In the thorough- ness of this criminal exploitation twenty six thousand men were transported — an act reflecting modern political expedients of Europe, but also authentically a reversion to tribal barbarism and Class tyranny. Once enthroned, Louis Napoleon recurring — for his mind was in a sort of subterranean perpetual motion — to an observation of his great namesake, *'the French have lively imaginations: they love fame and excitement and are nervous". Napoleon, the lesser, became portentously thoughtful. **For what he and his associates wanted, and what in truth they really needed, was to thrust France into a conflict, which might be either diplomatic or warlike, but which was at all events to be of a conspicuous sort, tending to ward off the peril of home politics, and give to the fabric of the 2d of December something like station and celebrity in Europe." 184 Europe's Handicap — The occasion for a realization of their hopes was not far off. Russia had become entangled in a quarrel with Turkey over the privileges of the Greek church in the Holy Land, and under the disguise of a religious propagandum doubtless harbored the illicit desire for territorial extension. That was also distinctly tribal in its morality, and, from the viewpoint of the Czar's personal prestige, distinctly imposing too. Of course there was friction, and then there was a collision, and the "massacre of Sinope", ensued, whereby in a sea- fight in the Black Sea, between the Russian and the Turkish fleets, four thousand Turks were killed, and less than four hundred wounded men survived. This event, and the wholesale resent- ment it caused, swept aside the dilatory measures of the diplomats, and though, for many months, the exchange of notes between the capitals of Europe survived, as a concession to the usages of the later age, the recrudescence of racial antipa- thies, combined with personal designs, brought about the Crimean war. France and England combined in defence of Turkey, and were pitted against Russia, with Austria and Prussia watchful, expectant, and not unobservant of possible ad- vantages which might accrue, in some final reas- sortment of properties; for Austria at least, at the outset, had imposed a halt upon the depredations of the Czar, in the Principalities. Under Lord Palmerston, as against the pacific remonstrances of Bright, Cobden, and Gladstone, the english, eagerly assented to the preparations Tribe and Class 185 for war. Palmerston's absolute mastery of his convictions, the unmistakable stubbornness — perhaps narrowness — of his confidence, captivated english sympathies, not averse at any time to ascertainable and measurable gains. As McCarthy describes him, he was "gay, resolute, clear as to his own purpose, convinced to the heart's core of everything which just then it was for the advantage of his cause to believe". Lord Raglan, a contemporary of Wellington, gracefully impressive, statuesque, elevated, in taste and manner, commanded the English, and St. Arnaud, the french, whose picture with skillful irony King- lake has drawn, "he was bold, gay, reckless, and vain; but beneath the mere glitter of the surface there was a great capacity for administrative business, and a more than common willingness to take away human life." The events of the war, brilliantly narrated by Kinglake, need not detain us, from our ultimate aim, now approaching, aside from a passing allu- sion to the sufferings from disease, the appalling loss of life. The war was of Class origin, in the sense imposed here upon that expression, inasmuch as it had its initiation in the selfish plans of a seditious plotter, of monarchical tendencies, the man whose malign designs this country realized, whenin its Civil War, he sent Maximilian of Austria to seize Mexico, upon a pretext. And it also came about from the ambitions of a despotic mind, con- trolling peremptorily every activity of a vast tribal organization. It involved the support of a 186 Europe's Handicap — detestable nation, whose later atrocities astounded Europe; it contained no principle of idealism in its contention, and raised aloft at its conclusion, no standard of emancipation, unless we so con- sider the participation of Sardinia in it, as prog- nostic of Italian liberty. At its close there was the usual spectacle of a group of powers apprehensively scrutinizing the articles of a treaty whereby their mutual misgiv- ings or distrusts may be pacified, or momentarily forgotten. There were indeed some rules of mari- time warfare laid down, which the present conduct of England, with regard to the commerce of the United States, seems now emphatically to re- pudiate. The sore spot in the East, was not healed, though a medicament, of some complica- tion, was applied, as an antiseptic poultice, to that recurrent tumor. The Crimean War was a plot, and tribal and Class conditions fructified the seed of its inception. Twenty-two years later Russia and Turkey were flying at each other's throats. It had been possible to have averted the whole calamity, and it is tacitly assumed here — though we admit the assumption has its qualifications — that war is a calamity, or, as Mr. Norman Angell has so earnestly striven to prove, is futile. The first discomfiture of the Russians in their battles with the Turks under Omar Pasha, and two brilliant englishmen, Butler and Nasmyth, in the Danubian provinces proved to Russia the hopeless- ness of her attempts at the invasion of Turkey, and inasmuch as England, as Kinglake points out, Tribe and Class 187 desires no territorial increase in Europe, her power, if wisely exercised, and with a disposition more allied to our democratic peaceful institutions, might have at that moment stopped the war. But the tribal momentum in England herself gained even then headway, was indeed interpreted as a healthy reaction against the protests of the extreme Peace Party. ''Therefore England, it must be acknowledged, did much to bring on the war, first by the want of moderation and prudence with which she seemed to declare her attachment to the cause of peace, and afterwards by the ex- ceeding eagerness with which she coveted the strife." (Kinglake). War. is a tribal industry, and among the utilities of Europe has been recognized as a desirable adjunct to national greatness. The intentions of this chapter have been suffi- ciently declared, and their illustration definitely given. A few phases of European history, not perhaps more convincing than many others, have been selected, and briefly reviewed, as proof of our thematic title, viz. Tribal Wars and Class Domination. Class domination could have been much more explicitly detailed, and the justice of our arraignment of its pernicious influence in European disorders in- exorably sustained. But the matter is too well understood to require excessive or even deliberate recital. The shameless profligacy of Class, its in- iquitous exactions in the reign of Louis XV of France, was perhaps the climax of the inevitable 188 Europe's Handicap — result of a criminal fallacy in the social contract, which involved a mistake in scientific genetics, and an injustice in ethics as well, viz., that there are inheritable distinctions in blood, aside from con- duct. It was the Holy Alliance that, after the Napoleonic wars, formed, as Julian S. Corbett — the eulogist of the English navy — says ''that brotherhood of reactionary monarchies intended to stifle independent national life, and free institu- tions." It was Class domination, more exclu- sively than any other influence, that brought about the American revolution, and which rather hope- fully regarded our Civil War as the predestined termination to what it conceived was an unneces- sary political solecism. It was Class domination that applied a system of exhaustive or intensive depletion of Cuba, that resulted in her final freedom — thanks to the sympathy and fruitful help of the United States. It was Class domination that wrecked the first tolerant hopes of Russian democ- racy, and lastly it was Class domination that thwarted the aims of liberal England, in very recent years. It is decidedly a Class domination in Germany and in Austria, that stifles the utter- ances of progressive sentiment, and has almost resurrected the buried remains of Divine Right. And it is the pervasive strength of the Class idea that maintains everywhere the institution of royalty, with its appurtenances, court, court in- fluences, the alluring superstitions of family ca- reers and eminence, and the scintillating pageantry of militant preparation. It is the Class idea that Tribe and Class 189 formulates the present and the future on the records of the past, and, persistently clinging to a picturesque continuity, refuses to interrupt or terminate that continuity with a plebian democ- racy. The terminology of class maintains the terminology of war, of war memories, of war-like events, and the very glitter of its heraldry arose in war and perpetuates war's rewards. Class is a menace to the dissemination of peace and peace ideals, and it derides the propriety of compromise. Class generates the pestiferous race of conquerors, and, under the protection of its apologies, the im- piety of conquest flourishes. Of course there is nobility in Class ideals, and the highest aspirations of Kingship should be Fatherhood. But the facts oppose our confidence in the invariability of their identity. Brawling democracies, with every bit- terness of hate, flimsiness of pretext, and even tyranny of prejudice, are possible enough, but it seems certain too that a progressive culture surely mellows their crudities into self-restraint and tolerance. But there is something more subtly dangerous and hurtful than the overt acts of its agents in suppressing violently the generous impulses of men. It is a contagion of feeling that afiflicts the nations, where Class Is a regulated and entrenched Institution. That feeling is really two contrasted phases of feeling. One phase Is a venomous or sullen hatred, or just simply a philosophic hostility to Class. The other phase is the contentment and pride in Class, not unmixed with a placid con- 190 Europe's Handicap — sciousness that Class is a good thing. This latter feeling degenerates into servility, an exaggerated deference, and an unconscious acceptance of the standards and precepts of Class. It perpetuates the tribal sense — always apparently strong in the European races and necessarily stronger when those races are nationalized into states — of belligerency, and establishes a currency of national ambitions, which generally means extension, territorial growth, and eliminates the democratic ideals of mutual helpfulness. The otherfeeling of hostility, or positive froward hatred, unsettles nations with its sedition, and arousing the self-preservative instincts of Class — always irritable and vainglorious — brings about the standardization of FORCE in armies and bureaucracies. About this there can be little doubt. The Mob in its worst aspects is a product of Class and Tribe. Force is its correction. Before this present war is discussed a task, far more difficult than the foregoing attempted demonstration, engages us in the next chapter. It must be condensed into a series of declarative sentences not necessarily proven, but believed by the author to be demonstrable. Its very state- ment must awaken that sort of surprise which intimates resentment and ridicule, if not the fiercer punishment of a refusal to consider it at all. It is this. It was the original fierceness of tribal feeling, complicated or exasperated and curiously solidi- fied by a sense of Duty, that developed religious Tribe and Class 191 Bigotry and the Inquisition. In an environment of Equality between men on the basis of talent and service, and in a perfectly Free State, neither would have issued into the arena of politics or civics, as an integral element of government. The reason is apparent upon the slightest considera- tion. In a state of true freedom a man's THOUGHTS are his own, indefeasibly his own, and within the circuit of his brain — be it small or large — they are permitted to assume any shape, short of madness, and their owner remains uncon- fined, unassailed. Once past his lips, if they spell ruin or disturbance to a legitimate security of his fellowmen, they become treason. With us the largess of free thought and free speech is almost unlimited. In the tribal states and under Class domination neither could exist. CHAPTER VI Religious Bigotry and the Inquisition Products of Tribe and Class The tribal mind is credulous, superstitious, and inflexible, the tribal spirit heartless, ferociously so, (many pages in this essay have demonstrated that), and the tribal heart often brave beyond computation, and inordinate in its lusts. Class privileges deteriorated earlier conditions of so- briety, or restraint, and a tide of indulgences invaded the barbaric simplicities of tribal life, as civilization increased its allurements, and estab- lished its sway over the rude hordes that had been absorbed, or later were inserted through the Roman Empire. Almost contemporaneously with the growth of Class domination, the christian religion spread its influence over these ingenuous aboriginals. (Perhaps "ingenuous" may be quali- fied, as the instances of deceit and perfidy are not uncommon.). This wonderful faith of Christianity which had subdued the repellent roughness of the savage, and had become beautifully embodied indeed in some of the finer, sweeter temperaments of the Frank, or Goth, or Celt, was itself reacted upon by a psychol- ogy quite at variance with eastern or oriental or Jewish feeling. Tribe and Class 193 The tribal spirit was, as we have said, heartless, cruel, and correspondingly intense or intolerant. A conviction became a menace, and a religious conviction imbedded in superstition, as it was, or was likely to be at the time, and consecrated too as a tie between the man who held it, and a Supreme Being who had warranted it, became as Lea says "a determining factor of conduct." The racial pride which guarded the tribe against dissolution or absorption animated, with the same preserva- tive resentment against contamination, a believer's creed. The Church represented this creed, and the Church assumed the tribal intolerance. It could not help doing so. " It soon became also a hierarchical organization, and its Class domination touched the sublimest heights of pretension. This too arose from the very terms of the Revelation it embodied. ""Princes derive their power from the Church, and are servants of the priesthood"; "The least of the priestly order is worthier than any king; prince and people are subjected to the clergy, which shines superior as the sun to the moon"; and Pope Innocent III declared himself "placed midway between God and man, this side of God but beyond man, less than God but greater than man". The assumption was perilous, but as Mr. Lea points out, "it was none the less a service to hu- manity, that, in these rude ages, there existed a moral force superior to high descent, and martial prowess, which could remind king and noble that 194 Europe's Handicap — they must obey the law of God even when uttered by a peasant's son". The progress of a purely mundane elevation was soon begun, and the human or profane elements of pride, arrogance, the tribal quest for possessions, asserted themselves invincibly. "This was especi- ally the case in Germany, where the prelates were princes as well as priests, and where a great reli- gious house like the Abbey of St. Gall was the temporal ruler of the Cantons of St. Gall and Appenzel until the latter threw ofT the yoke after a long and devastating war". The tribal warring propensities became strongly manifested in the very men whose separative functions were service at the altar. "Geroch of Reichersperg inveighs bitterly against the warlike prelates who provoke unjust wars, attacking the peaceful and delighting in the slaughter which they cause and witness, giving no quarter, taking no prisoners, sparing neither clergy nor laity, and spending the revenues of the Church on soldiers, to the deprivation of the poor." Class depravity, Class selfishness, Class insolence. Class pugnacity, marked the conduct of these incongruous churchmen. "In fact, the records of the time bear ample testimony to the rapine and violence, the flagrant crimes and de- fiant immorality of these princes of the Church. The only tribunal to which they were amenable was that of Rome. It required the courage of desperation to cause complaints to be made against them, and when such complaints were made, the Tribe and Class 195 difficulty of proving the charges, the length to which proceedings were drawn out, and the notorious venality of the Roman curia, afforded virtual immunity." It is not intended to convey the impression that this corruption or distortion of Christian morals and practice was universal. It was not, but it w^as prevalent, and distinctly point to the ineradicable heritage of tribal man- ners and habits, which infiltrated the channels, offices, and aims of the Church, and with the viciousness of Class cupidity, hardened its temper into that harshness of feeling, which permitted, encouraged, and applauded the awful savagery of religious persecution. The tribal thirst for plunder, shown in every annal of tribal conquest, was not absent from the breast of the ecclesiastical chieftain. "Clement V, after his consecration at Lyons, made a prog- ress to Bordeaux, in which he and his retinue so effectually plundered the churches on the road that, after his departure, from Bourges, Arch- bishop Gilles, in order to support life, was obliged to present himself daily among his canons for a share in the distribution of provisions. England after the ignominious surrender of King John, was peculiarly subjected to papal extortion. Rich benefices were bestowed on foreigners, who made no pretext of residence, until the annual revenue thus withdrawn from the island was computed to amount to seventy thousand marks, or three times the income of the crown, and all resistance was suppressed by excommunications which disturbed the whole kingdom". 196 Europe's Handicap — This violence belonged to the character of the times, but that character, however much it under- went progressive chastening and reduction left the irreducible imprint of its roughness, hardness, meanness, on the passions or nature of the church- men, and that character too was a legitimate in- heritance of tendencies from purely tribal days. The Church was demoralized in its temper by Class rapacity, and the resurgent superstitions of the wildmen, whose descendants filled its churches, spread over the mere physical processes of worship a supernatural efhcacy. That too was tribal; it belonged to the immaturity of the tribal mind, and suited the weakness of the tribal will. The mechanism of a performance served the pur- pose of a change of heart, as ''reciting, for the peace and prosperity of the Church, on bended knees, the Paternoster five times, in honor of the five wounds of Christ; the Ave Maria seven times, in honor of the seven joys of the Virgin, and other similar practices." Now however Heresy arose, how it is explained, what justified it — all of which belongs to the his- tory of the Church, amply displayed in books, — it is certain that it shocked the orthodox christian of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries as an impious resistance to authority, and due to the direct contrivance and instigation of the Devil. "To the Church this state of affairs was unbearable. It has always held the toleration of others to be persecution of itself. By the very law of its being it can brook no rivalry in its domina- Tribe and Class 197 tion over the human soul ; and, in the present case, as toleration was slowly but surely leading to its destruction, it was bound by its sense of duty no less that of self preservation to put an end to a situation so abhorrent." Besides, more commercially considered, it meant subversion of place, overthrow of dominion, and withdraw^al of funds. It awoke the most desperate determination to exterminate it, on the part of the Church, which inherited the tribal force of purpose, the tribal barrenness of sympathy, and was a literal example of a Class oligarchy as well. The march of the assembled Lords and their armies upon the Albugensian heretics recast in a more moderated, more familiar mould, the out- pourings of the tribesmen in the warfare on plain and city, when they foraged the enemy's country, or began their devastating migrations; "many great nobles assumed the cross — the Duke of Burgundy and the Counts of Nevers, St. Pol, Auxerre, Montfort, Geneva, Poitiers, Forez, and others, with numerous bishops. With time there came large contingents from Germany, under the Dukes of Austria and Saxony, the Counts of Bar, of Juliers, and of Berg. Recruits were drawn from distant Bremen on the one hand, and Lombardy on the other, and we even hear of Slavonian barons leaving the original home of Catharism to combat it in the seat of its latest development. There was salvation to be had for the pious, knightly fame for the warrior, and spoil for the worldly." What followed — a tribal massacre! The walls 198 Europe's Handicap — of the city of Beziers were carried — ''the army followed, and the legate's oath was fulfilled by a massacre almost without parallel in European his- tory. From infancy in arms to tottering age, not one was spared — seven thousand, it is said were slaughtered in the Church of Mary Magdalene to which they had fled for asylum — and the total number of slain is set down by the legate at nearly twenty thousand, which is more probable than the sixty thousand reported by less trustworthy chroniclers. A fervent Cistercian contemporary informs us that when Arnaud was asked whether the Catholics should be spared, he feared the heretics would escape by feigning orthodoxy, and fiercely replied, 'Kill them all, for God knows his own.' In the mad carnage and pillage the town was set on fire, and the sun of that awful July day closed on a mass of smouldering ruins and blackened corpses." As we accompany the steps of the historian along that darkened and sometimes supernally illuminated road of the Church's progress, more and more the primitive simplicity, earnestness, unselfish or even most heroic fidelity, of its mem- bers, changes, under tribal and Class inflictions into something obdurate, strained and exclusive. Persecution was at first repugnant to the sensi- tivity of the Church, and Mr. Lea assures us that in 385 the "first instance was given of judicial capital punishment for heresy, and the horror which it excited shows that it was regarded every- where as a hideous innovation". The later Tribe and Class 199 exuberant growth of heresy had not alarmed the Church in the earlier centuries, nor stirred up the implacable antagonism which admonished the arm of the State and of the Church to act in unison for heresy's annihilation. And the moment rage — that concentrated venomous species of holy rage that shrivels into nothingness all liberal, all tender aspirations — appeared, the tribal temperament, pitiless, remorseless, sullen, or hideous with an incarnate demonism of cruelty, arose appallingly. Mr. Lea's very words suggest the conclusion strikingly; "the age moreover was a cruel one. The military spirit was everywhere dominant; men were accustomed to" rely upon force rather than on persuasion, and habitually looked on human suffering with indifference. The industrial spirit, which has softened modern manners and modes of thought, was as yet hardly known. We have only to look upon the atrocities of the criminal law of the Middle Ages to see how pitiless men were in their dealings with each other. The wheel, the caldron of boiling oil, burning alive, burying alive, flaying alive, tearing apart with wild horses, were the ordinary expedients by which the criminal jurist sought to deter crime, by frightful examples, which would make a profound impres- sion on a not over sensitive population." Class cruelty entered into combination with tribal ferocity in the blood of the people to accentuate and exaggerate the awful inflictions of physical suffering. Europe has not yet freed itself from its tribal barbarism, that insensitivity 200 Europe's Handicap — to suffering, the vindictiveness of hate, the hungri- ness of stealth and rapine. Mr. Lea avers that as late as 1833 in England a child of nine was sen- tenced to be hanged for breaking a patched pane of glass, and stealing two pence worth of paint, while in its penal laws, even in its pleasures a barbaric brutality distinguished the english law, and the english holiday, as late as the eighteenth century. In the Inquisition "fanatic zeal, arbi- trary cruelty, and insatiable cupidity rivalled each other in building up a system unspeakably atro- cious." But while we beg to detect the indications of the tribal nature of their ancestors and the arrogance of Class self-love in the religious bigotry and in the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, this contention alone would afford only a partial ex- planation of some phenomena, connected with the latter, most depressing, sad, and odious. It is assist- ed though by another consideration momentously relevant, and a consideration too springing from tribal postulates. It is a universal habit of mind in tribal law to consider the accused, the prisoner, guilty, until he frees himself of the imputation. The attitude of an enlightened and humane court of justice is exactly the reverse; an accused man or woman is innocent until he or she is proven guilty, and while the difference of view may, in the statement, seem a trifling transposition of words, it in reality re- flects two opposite relations towards the prisoner almost immeasurably contrasted. The former view^ prefigures the government, or the trial judges, Tribe and Class 201 committed to an attempt to prove the prisoner guilty, because its initial conception of his position is that of a culprit, the latter quite naturally makes the court an impartial judge of the evidence. And this prejudgment works almost disastrously for the safeguarding and vindication of innocence. This tribal relation to the prisoner is characteristic of European law. It is unfair, and clouds a reputation at once with the obloquy of an unveri- fied but accredited suspicion. In this country precisely the opposite obtains, as might be almost instinctively predicted. It belongs to the whole expression and instinct of our decent and humane culture. Now in the Inquisition, the feature of its abominable and loathsome process of secret trial, that gave all of its deliberations the actual character of a foregone conclusion, was this violent assumption that the accused was necessarily guilty. This evoked that merciless exercise of dexterity, craft, and intimidation, the excruciating process of an examination, wherein the fortified skill, cunning, and determination of the inquisitor overwhelmed, confused, and prostrated the victim of these barbarous — albeit technically provided with and surrounded by provisions against in- justice — ordeals. "The accused was thus prejudged. He was assumed to be guilty, or he would not have been put on trial, and virtually his only mode of escape was by confessing the charges made against him, abjuring heresy, and accepting whatever punish- 202 Europe's Handicap — ment might be imposed on him in the shape of penance. Persistent denial of guilt and assertion of orthodoxy, when there was evidence against him, rendered him an impenitent obstinate heretic, to be abandoned to the secular arm and consigned to the stake." (Lea). Now this was all tribal, savage, conclusively barbarous and aboriginal. It represented the natural and actual prolongation into the pro- cesses of civilization of the ancient tribal custom, and of that spirit which has, and does to-day, obscure or even obliterate the recognition of the primal principles of a wise, just, and liberated human relationship under the forms of our artifice of communal government. The distortion of a proper process of law, in the inquisitorial acts of that distant time, is significant. "Confession of heresy thus became a matter of vital importance, and no effort was deemed too great, no means too repulsive, to secure it. This became the centre of the inquisitorial process, and it is deserving of detailed consideration, not only because it formed the basis of prodecure in the Holy Office, but also because of the vast and deplorable influence which it exercised for five centuries on the whole judicial system of Continental Europe." (Lea). As regards the perpetuation of tribal legal custom in Europe Sir Henry Sumner Maine says (Early History of Institutions) *T am not at all prepared to deny that recent researches, and par- ticularly those into old French customary law, render it easier to believe than it once was that Tribe and Class 203 portions of primitive or aboriginal custom survive the most desolating conquests". It is an abor- iginal taint of the legal disposition of cases to found their procedure '*on the monstrous assumption that plaintiffs are always right and defendants always in the wrong" (Maine). Maine con- tinues "Yet the assumption would not perhaps have struck the earliest authors of legal improve- ment as altogether monstrous, nor could they have quite comprehended the modern principle which compels the complainant to establish at all events 3, prima facie case. * * * the old assumption that complainants are presumably in the right was kept long alive among uS, and had much to do with the obstinate dislike of lawyers to allowing prisoners to be defended by Counsel". H. William Conn after writing (Social Heredity and Social Evolution), "in some races even till recent times, a trial consisted in summoning witnesses to swear to their belief that the accused was innocent or guilty: and if there were more witnesses who thought him innocent he was acquitted, while a majority on the other side would convict him", seems inclined to consider The Drey- fus case tried before the modernized court of France an illustration of an atavistic reversal to this measure of ancient tribal law. The injustice of arbitrary punishment, the in- fliction of impossible tests for innocence, the savage resentment against injury, the insolence of the King, "who constantly took the lands of the defendant into his hands or seized his goods, simply 204 Europe's Handicap — to compel or perfect his submission to the royal jurisdiction", were all natural aspects of tribal and class-practice law, and they remained for a long time literally in the tribal and class practice of Europe, while the temperament they had developed with them and the fashion of mind that resists change, or secession, or heresy, imbued the Church with that implacable and execrable intensity of hate, as well as of dogmatic tyranny, which most faithfully reflects in its august courts the unescap- able heritage of the passions, prejudices, and cruelty, of TRIBE and CLASS. It is only a collateral contribution to our argu- ment, but it is not a delusion to consider Religious Bigotry and the Inquisition products of Tribe and Class. If anywhere to-day the incommunicable graces of the Christian religion will most beauti- fully blossom, and bear the richest and most abun- dant fruit, it is where Tribe and Class do not exist — in these United States of America. CHAPTER VII The Present War In tribal natures it is impossible to overestimate the persistency and the obduracy of racial com- binations. In the present war, in philosophically solving its cause, the overt act of Germany, so pertinaciously emphasized and displayed, is far less important in its determination, than the political and ethnological prejudice, prejudgments, and ambitions which precipitated it, and inevit- ^ ably would have precipitated it, no matter who had been king of Germany. International relations, the reciprocal sense of danger existing for many years, previously between the countries, which became involved, and that indeterminate element of superstition as to chances and luck, which influences nations as well as individuals — and tribal nations particularly — in making a critical choice are to be weighed, as causes leading rulers to act in emergencies, not so much by legal- ized opinion, as by a calculation of probabilities. There are immediate and ultimate causes of war, and while a strictly technical judgment might con- demn a nation in yielding to an immediate impulse to make war, a deeper-sighted review might dis- cover in the ultimate cause an excuse for the priority of offence for the same nation. War is Murder, and War is Hell. This is un- 206 Europe's Handicap — questioned. The murder may be criminal or sim- ply justifiable homicide. In either case it means DEATH. It is incontrovertible that war is hellish, and the thoroughness of its infernal invention is presumably intended to make it shorter. An amiable war or a war conducted upon parlor meth- ods of deference or precedence is inconceivable. There were some buffoon wars in the Middle Ages, stage performances of pasquinade gesture, and inoffensive pantomime, but — Well there is no justification for cynicism. Civilization has con- structed some general rules governing the conduct of war, and Science has wonderfully ameliorated the sufferings and consequences of wounds. International Law has a respectable footing, and , the surgeon, the field hospital, the trained nurse, the, commissariat are incomputably glorious. A nation that goes to war means to win; on its winning depends its safety perhaps its existence, and war is to be so conducted that whether there is a minimum or a maximum of loss, in money, in property, in life, there remains at least victory, or something like victory. To-day something else counts, or is supposed to count, and that is Reputa- tion. A good name has a commercial value at its lowest estimate, and a moral weight at its highest, and that the latter is envied by governments is a substantial tribute to some ingrained intuitions towards righteousness. The present war is full of horrors. That does not exclude their perpetrators from human com- panionship, so far as those horrors are a means to Tribe and Class 207 an end, and do not involve torture. Every instinct of sanity, of manhood, of religion, forbids torture. All suffering is a torture, but the implica- tion here is unmistakable. It means intentional, improvised, physical, painful mutilation, as burn- ing, impaling, crucifying, stabbing, breaking, starving, etc. Again war absolves the sub- scriber to a treaty with an antagonist from blame in breaking it. War repeals all treaties. And the absolution is so drastic that it may include toleration for the breaking of other treaties with other nations than the immediate enemy, if again thereby from the infraction, benefits accrue to the trespasser in a struggle, the latter regards as critical. In judging of this war, and in framing any opinion of the apportionable guilt and its distribu- tion, it is necessary to recall the impression made by the review, we have imperfectly prepared, of some of the conditions of Tribe and of Class which have afflicted Europe for some two thousand or more years, and whose heritage of perversions or of selfishness, the present Europe must and does assume. The wars of Europe seldom challenge our en- thusiasm as loftily conceived and disinterestedly executed crusades for the enfranchisement of a people, the protection of the weak, or the uplifting of the unfortunate, at least so far as the wars con- sidered, were national efforts. The uprising of downtrodden and submerged people, the repeated attempts to cast off vicious and tyrannical yokes, 208 Europe's Handicap — the armed protests against personal despotism, the struggles of enslaved populations, have indeed been frequent, but these disturbances advertised the corruption or the harshness of governments, whose iniquities the restless subjects of these insti- tutions have striven to overthrow. The wars have been tribal, and behind tribe, imbibing its preju- dices, and profiting by its successes, was the vast domination of class. To-day the necessity of individual liberty, over and above what is already granted, for the most part, in Europe, is not urgent. There is a pretty well distributed liberty, and the democratic indul- gence of voting is widely conceded, but still Europe remains tribal, and still the overwhelming preponderance of class motives outweighs the plain interests of the people. For, at this very moment, were the whole question of Europe's peace to be transferred from the chambers of the kings, the emperors, the czars, the titled ministries, and the exclusive organized bodies of invested capital, to the occupants of the streets, and the inmates of the villages and humble homes, it seems most likely that, by a unanimous decision, it would be at once decreed that the war should STOP. Whatever the ultimate modifications it might cause, short of ruinous contraction for the con- testants, or of some exorbitance in the claims of belligerents for indemnity, the people of the great electorates in these countries would end the awful conflict. In Italy indeed the tribal spirit per- meates the populace it would seem, and, with no Tribe and Class 209 ostensible motives for participation in the general carnage, lured by the chance of territorial gain, and the purely racial impulse of retaliation, this mis- guided land — already suffering from the scarcely forgotten results of former expensive experiments at expansion — plunges into the sanguinary melee. This present war is the complete exemplifica- tion of the Handicap — Tribe and Class — from which, for centuries, this unfortunate Europe has suffered, an exemplification of the unescapable menace of rivalry and aggression which resides in its composition, exemplification of that play of racial imagination which fosters the designs of more or less arbitrary rulers, who conceive of master schemes in the evolution of master and world-subduing empires, or kingdoms or sovereign- ties. Bismarck understood his Europe perfectly. He was part of it, emblematic of it. He believed in it, and was affiliated with its instincts, its ten- dencies, its lineage. He knew that so long "as there are so many pike in the European carp pond, Germany could not with safety be a carp". In the process of a polemic dissection of the present European crisis the underlying protasis of Europe must be assigned an almost overwhelming weight, so that, under that control, the accusation of guilt for individual agents, while fully justifying condemnation, in a strong measure, exonerate them from shameless crime. Europe's Tribal and Class condition underlies her chronic tumult and restlessness and disorder. Germany and her Kaiser have been, In the 210 Europe's Handicap — opinion of all englishmen — with one notable and possibly malevolent exception — blamed vocifer- ously, and with burning excoriations of means, purpose, and conduct, for the entire trouble. It is certainly a pardonable feeling, as the later con- sequences of the war have been — for England — and all of the Allies, bitter and ruinous, and strik- ingly insulting. And that the War is what it is, so measurelessly vast, so portentous in contrivance, so destructive and doggedly persistent is, beyond question only attributable to Germany, while new terrors, involving the slaughter of the defenceless or of non-combatants, has added a horrific sinister madness, as of an unloosened pack of demons, or the orgiac onset of embattled Furies. The ends of war are stern and overmastering, and its instrumentalities pitiless. The sufferings in this war have not been a whit more than they have been in innumerable wars before this one, but to-day our wholesomeness of sympathy with suffering, makes every aspect of suffering, insuffer- able. These questions — all of them — while they exasperate our temper are irrelevant. Germany has imparted a strange and titanic shape to war, and not unmixed with paralyzing fears, but DID SHE CAUSE IT? Did any one cause it? Is not this war fundamentally a reiteration of the political unstable equilibrium of Europe, its myotic infection of racial egotism and Class egoisms? The question is not an academic one, it is not a quibble. It truly gathers up the expression of what these chapters have conveyed — we admit in Tribe and Class 211 hardly more than a symptomatic way — of the irreconcilable animosities of races, with the ac- companying explosions of tribal brutality, and the overweening habit of the coercive pragnatism of Kings, or anything that is allied to, or stands for them. To-day, In Europe, Kings are not the same inexcusable despots that they once were, and the mere vulgar excrescences of Class rudeness and meanness, are sensibly abated, but yet, in their somewhat sterilized capacity for mischief, they exert a peculiar disturbing influence. The mo- ment a King subtends the vision of men and women — all, as humans, more or less imaginative, and always in Europe tribally hypnotized — he becomes a fetich, a symbol of a national ideal, which each man feels himself ideally and really constrained to worship and maintain. This gener- ates a peculiar hardness of self-assertion, that, like an Ingested nucleus In an organism, keeps the national tissues irritable. ''We may", says W. A. Phillips, (The Confederation of Europe) "hold what opinion we like about the reasonableness or unreasonableness of these particularlst ambitions; the point is that they exist. They exist even In the ranks of the adherents of the peace movement, whose cosmopolitanism is often subject to serious reservations." Now, to start quite early enough, let us consider the formation of the Holy Alliance, a grouping of three major powers in Europe, which was intended to sway its affairs authoritatively, and keep its peace. That reactionary assemblage of crowns 212 Europe^s Handicap — took its rise in 1815, after the expulsion of Napo- leon, and when the opportunity seemed favorable to consolidate imperial power for the perpetual suppression of popular movements, whose excita- tion might again upset and, as it were, dissolve Europe. Later at Troppau and at Laibach it was more perfectly established as The Holy Alliance. It was formally conceived as a consecrated com- pact between Russia, Austria, and Prussia, ^Hn the name of the Most Holy and Indivisible Trinity,'' to keep things quiet in Europe, and quiet along preconcerted and conservative lines. A promi- nent, perhaps a ruling personality in it, was that of Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, of whom the famous minister of England Castlereagh, (Robert Stewart), wrote, ''it is impossible to doubt the Emperor's sincerity in his views, which he dilates upon w^th a religious rhapsody. Either he is sincere, or hypocrisy certainly assumes a more abominable garb than she ever yet was clothed in", and he describes this melodramatic and useless gentleman placing his hand on his heart, and look- ing up to heaven, and declaring that he felt him- self so tremendously inspired by religion and conscience, that it would be simply impossible for him to do anything wrong, or think anything unjust. Let the reader remember that, as summarized by Phillips, the Holy Alliance asserted that "the system of Europe was a general association which had for foundation the Treaties of Vienna and Paris, for conservative principle the fraternal Tribe and Class 213 unions of the Allied Powers, for aim the guarantee of all recognized rights. This system which guaranteed the best interests of the great Euro- pean family, was the work not of any man but of Providence. Its moral support lay in the Quad- ruple Alliance and the Holy Alliance, its material support in the armed occupation of France. Since this had come to an end, more moral support was needed. This was not to be sought in the renewal of engagements already taken; for to swear too much weakens the force of oaths. It must be sought in the elements constituting the actual European system, and in a combination which in the eyes of all the world would make the cohesion of the system evident, necessary, and indissoluble. These elements were the Quadruple Alliance and the General Alliance, considered, in reference to the case under discussion, the first as a principle, and the second as its consequence. The compact which consecrated and defined the first was the treaty of November 20, 1815. The General Alliance was to be sought in the Final Act of Vienna and the subsequent acts signed at Paris in 1815." What was the result? Did it perpetuate peace? Did it supply a rational means for allaying discord and reconciling divergent or opposing interests? Was its components strictly faithful to the larger and progressive aims of national life? Did it bring the scrutiny of a wide prevision into its councils, or adapt its theory to the evolution of human idealism in government? By no means. 214 Europe's Handicap — It went to pieces before the failure of its con- structive elements to agree, before the disintegrat- ing influence of England's rejection of its au- tocracy, and more conclusively before the Revolu- tion of 1830. It did not survive the Crimean War. It was a Class creation, and it was a dream. The disorders of Europe springing from natural tribal instincts of resentment at foreign domination, in Italy, the incompetency of Class rule in Spain, as evinced in the misgovernment of her colonies, sharply contravened the oligarchic conceptions of its founders, who attempted to stabilize old forms of control, and who themselves fell out, when the interests of their separate dynasties, or the swelling pride of national aims, brought the signatories of The Holy Alliance, into fraternal rivalries and conflict. Mr. Phillips says, "the attempt failed, but it left certain permanent effects — the tradition of respect for the obligation of international engage- ments, the impetus thereby given to the study and the application of international law, and the abiding hope of the ultimate establishment of an effective international system. Without the Holy Alliance, as we shall see, there would have been no Hague Conferences." Well, as to the Hague Conference, does it now, at this moment, loom very largely in the eyes of men as determinative of factional collisions in Europe? The permanent possibility of Peace in Europe can be attained by its abolition of Tribe and Class, what they stand for, what they inculcate, the Tribe and Class 215 atmosphere and technique they engender, the whole retinue of fatalistic dreams they nurture. Were the whole world democraticized, there would still remain the ineradicable human nature with its faults and excesses, and because of them wars might ceaselessly arise. But at least the organization of government would tend to dis- courage war, because radically — to be very frank — men would not care to, nor be willing to fight. With Trihe and Class gone, the commercial day would dawn, and — there can be no doubt about it — it would also be a day of peaceful inclinations. The way to peace is through the eradication of the temperament that makes for war, — that tempera- ment is paramount and persistent in Tribe and Class. Eliminate these through the process of democracy and through popular education, through the manifold activities of popular govern- ment, as seen and felt in the United States, and the gradual extinction of wars would follow as naturally as under the recurrent play of sunlight and of heat the sour and acrid juices of the fruits mellow into nutritious and palatable fluids. Before reviewing further the purpose and his- tory of The Holy Alliance, a glance at previous attempts at peace-producing agencies in Europe — permitted us by the excellent resume of Mr. Phillips — has interest, and is instructive as illus- trating the hopelessness of the plans proposed, plans which do not involve a structural reogran- ization of European communities. They could not. Europe must pass through the nepionic and 216 Europe's Handicap — immature phases of a tribal and class existence, until, under the tutelage of experience, and under the educational example of this republic, it puts aside childish things, and graduates into the man- hood of a just equality, when, to quote Lord Acton, (Correspondence), we see ''the doctrine of equality spring into omnipotence, see it change the prin- ciples of administration, justice, international law, taxation, representation, property, and religion." The name of Henry IV of France is associated with the Grand Design, which postulated a Chris- tian Republic. There was to be a General Council, consisting of a perpetual Senate of sixty-four commissioners, from each Great Power, two from each lesser Power, renewable every three years. ''The function of this Senate was to be to deliber- ate on affairs as they arose; to discuss matters of common interest; to settle disputes; to examine into and determine all civil, political, and religious suits either in Europe itself or arising out of the relations of Europe with the world outside." Mr. Phillips attributes the vitality of all subse- quent schemes to this utterly barren proposition. There was no real vitality in any of them. They were academic, made-to-order police regulations, deduced from the authors' historic knowledge and the plausible device of some sort of absolute superintendency, explicitly artificial, implicitly oppressive, for as Rousseau said; "One cannot guarantee princes against the revolt of their sub- jects without at the same time guaranteeing sub- Tribe and Class 217 jects against the tyranny of princes. Otherwise the institution could not possibly survive." Then followed Emer'ic Cruce's Le Nouveau CyiteCy the Grotius' De jure belli et pads. Perhaps the most significant of its sequelae was the Projet de paix perpetuelle of the Abbe de St. Pierre, from which again we are told to believe, sprang Emperor Alexander I's Holy Alliance and even Napoleon's Confederation, the latter bound together, "by unity of codes, principles, opinions, feelings, and interests." The destructive criticisms had been uttered by Voltaire — even if exaggeratedly pic- turesque — "the peace imagined by the Abbe de St. Pierre is a chimera, 'which will not subsist between princes any more than between elephants and rhinoceroses, between wolves and dogs. Carnivorous animals will always tear each other to pieces at the first opportunity." It was really reserved for the philosopher Immanuel Kant {Zum ewigen Frieden) to enunciate a self-regulative principle, an auto-directive force which ensures peace by a natural process of logic and feeling. "This basis he finds in the develop- ment of enlightened self-interest among the peoples, and the growth of the moral idea, which has already made men open to the influence of the mere conception of law, as though this in itself possessed physical power." These schemes, culminating in The Holy Al- liance (which we beg to examine a little further) were simply systems of mechanical restraints and balances, threatening also to become rigid and 218 Europe's Handicap — inelastic despotic systems as well. They were crib-works of juxtaposition, and reciprocal beams, whose architects would watch their preservation, and who would insert in them from time to time a new brace, or knock out a useless one from time to time, as they think fit, or a constellation of radiant points not bound together by any natural law of gravity in their movement, but dangerously explosive by reason of the ignition of their content, (tribe and Class), which in an instant throws the whole group into disarray, not unattended with conflagration and collisions. Now whether con- sidered as a joinery, or as a nebula, all of these schemes reveal the root fallacy of European political umpirage, the final reference to an Aristocracy, to a grouped order of inviolate suc- cession, (in the Abbe de St. Pierre's projet there was no provision made for any representation other than that of the sovereigns), or to some fabric of officialdom, not created by the people, not consanguineous with the people, and not respon- sive to the normal human antipathy (to-day) to loss and death, since on this official fabric the engineers of national destiny stand far above "the dust and smoke of this dim world which men call Earth," and, being too far off the ground, miss the meanings of simple and practical relations. The conditions of a World Peace do not come with ob- servation, their potency must be found in the human heart and mind, and result as imperiously, as does the bubbling water in a valley spring from an irresistible pressure in the surrounding hills. Tribe and Class 219 Tribe and Class are the chronic irritants of all national excitations. The Holy Alliance as a determined theory for the control of European affairs, and as a definite compact, solemnly confirmed by the signatures of the rulers of Russia, Austria and Prussia was pro- claimed on September 26th, 1815, by Emperor Alexander of Russia, "at a great review of the Allied troops held on the plain of Vertus near Chalons," and all Christian sovereigns were to be invited to join. Two things contributed to the erection of this portentous international fabric of control; one was the French Revolution- and Napoleon, and the second was the singular personality of Alexander I of Russia. The French Revolution and Napoleon had overrun Europe, violently shaken ancient political traditions, and, as a hard reality, de- stroyed the boundaries of states, and inordinately enlarged those of France. Europe was threatened with a physical and moral upset which defied tradition, and quite completely ruined its con- federative ideals. That needed correction. In Alexander of Russia a character appeared who was a peculiar, but easily analyzed, mixture of lofty motives and conservative or even reactionary prejudices and habits. He was to ''conciliate the traditional Russian policy of aggrandizement with generous ideas, by making the Russian passion for glory and supremacy serve the purposes of the general good of humanity". Alexander was a mystic, in a way, a dreamer, set on a throne, im- 220 Europe's Handicap — pressionable to religious influences, and emotion- ally sentimental, but inherently rooted in the tenacity of his adhesion to all the forms and con- viction of class, and pervasively vain and childish. "Thus it was that Alexander, though at times he seemed to realize its absurdity, was a victim all his life to what Czartoryski calls ^Paradomania, that epidemic malady of princes.' " Alexander felt himself fatalistically, as Class people do, a predestined benefactor of men, some- thing moulded to a great end by the Creator. He perhaps with Metternich inaugurated the over- tures between the Allies, upon the repulse and eviction of Napoleon, for the formation of some sort of regulative bund, which would watch things, keep everything straight, and permissively en- courage beautiful thoughts and beautiful relations. The Holy Alliance, as a police system, owed much to Metternich; as an incubator of magnanimous intentions it owed everything to Alexander. England opposed the Alliance, for she feared Russia would become too powerful in European influence, and that hypothetical condition, The Balance of Power — only conceivable under Class and Tribal states — would become disarranged to her disadvantage. The magnificent plan developed slowly amid a cloud of recriminations, and the emergence of claims and counter claims, through a succession of historic conventions wherein the diplomats of the Powers consummately exhausted their skill upon each other, and left volumes of keen characteriza- Tribe and Class 221 tions, every one of which, by the very force of its analysis, proves the ambiguity and precariousness of all European relations. There was the First Peace of Paris, then the great Congress of Vienna, then the Second Treaty of Paris, and these con- ventions slowly placed Europe back into its ante- Napoleonic status, with a German Confederation of small states, and the larger Powers mollified at least, by various acquisitions, while France formed a liberal host for their armies — in the case of the Prussians ungovernable and rapacious — and an al- most insoluble dilemma for their diplomats, some of whom might have wished to tear her to pieces. It was Castlereagh who wrote to his govern- ment; 'T much suspect that neither Austria, Prussia, nor the smaller Powers are anxious to end the present situation. Their armies are paid, clothed and supported by France, and the British subsidies are free to go into their own pockets, which nothing can deprive them of previous to April 1, 1816. The Austrians have marched Bianchi's corps into Provence, in order to feed upon that poor but loyal province. The Prus- sians have 280,000 men in France, for whom they draw rations. The Bavarians have brought troops from Munich to the Loire in wagons at a moment when their service in the field was out of the question, the transport of these troops being, of course, at the expense of the country." Phillips tells us; ''under the terms of the treaty (The Second Treaty of Paris), France was to remain under the tutelage of the Alliance. Pend- 222 Europe's Handicap — ing the paying off of the indemnity her territory was to be occupied by an allied army under the Duke of Wellington, and though this was not mentioned in the treaty, the Council of the Ministers of the Powers continued its sessions in Paris, keeping in close touch with Wellington on the one hand, and the French Cabinet on the other. Not till, after a period of this straight- waist-coat, she had given proof of having been cured of her revolutionary madness, would France be restored into the bosom of the family of nations." The Holy Alliance was published, and in 1818 the Conference at Aix-la-Chapelle was held to ex- pand or perpetuate its principles, which were intended to insure a permanent peace through the wise oversight and efficacious interference of the great Powers, whose mutual amity seemed never to be questioned. It was again the astute Cas- tlereagh whose merciless analysis exposed the narrow and easily perverted provisions of a group- ing of nations practically designed to stabilize Class government. "The idea of an Alliance solidaire, by which each state shall be bound to support the state of succession, government and possession within all other states, from violence and attack, upon condi- tion of receiving for itself, a similar guarantee, must be understood as morally implying the previous establishment of such a system of general government as may secure and enforce upon all kings and nations an internal system of peace and Tribe and Class 223 justice. Till the mode of constructing such a sys- tem shall be devised, the consequence is inadmis- sible, as nothing would be more immoral or more prejudicial to the character of government gener- ally, than the idea that their force was collectively to be prostituted to the support of established power, without any consideration of the extent to which it was abused." England at this point championed the independ- ence and the incorporation of France in the Alliance, for England really apprehended the pre- ponderant influence of eastern Europe, and her insistence upon a more elastic and adjustable status of all the powersf furnished her with a technical chance to make her own alliance in case of rupture. For instance it was impossible to pre- dict when Russia might be overcome by her recur- rent hunger for Turkey. And now the completed outlines of a European Congress or Council of Nations actually solidified into a concrete fact, as a Court of Last Resort, for the arbitrament of international and even intranational questions, for it was surprising how quickly the governments turned to the Alliance for direction, as though in- capable of determining their own domestic ques- tions, a juvenility of condition springing from absence of real self-government. "It is clear", says Phillips, "that at this period the Alliance was looked upon, even by British statesmen, as some- thing more than a mere union of the Great Powers for preserving peace, on the basis of the treaties; and in effect during its short session the Confer- 224 Europe's Handicap — ence acted, not only as a European representative body, but as a sort of European Supreme Court, which heard appeals and received petitions of all kinds from sovereigns and their subjects alike". The Holy Alliance was tolerably well inten- tioned as a device for the forcible retention of peace in Europe. It participated in a double set of intentions however; one purely secular, reaction- ary, opportunist, and materialistic, (certainly not ideal), and represented by that superb dialectician and hair-splitter, Metternich, who was one — in his own words — "positively contrary to the spirit of abstract analysis". The second group was em- bodied in Alexander of Russia, which aimed at sublime generalizations, and a kind of deistic superintendence, under whose control men and nations became transparently just and beautiful. But in fact the Holy Alliance was a convention of Class, a cenacle of crowns and sceptres, hedged with armies, and while yielding to a theoretical acceptance of liberal propositions in civics, hope- lessly fixed, from association, training, and interest in the systems of repression and alignment — in the Class system. Alexander had proclaimed his belief in liberty, "limited by the principles of order," but it re- quired no exorbitant exhibition of discontent either in his own country, or in others, to suddenly awaken the latent antipathy of a monarchical mind to anything more democratic than "order", protected by "divine right". Revolution in Greece, violent disorders in Spain, Tribe and Class 225 insurrection in Naples, and the problem of Turkey — always insistent and at intervals eruptive — developed a wide difference of opinion among the statesmen, as to the procedure to be taken in the face of an evident unrest. The Carlsbad Decrees forbade liberal demonstrations in the Confedera- tion, Austria proposed to discipline her mutinous possessions in Italy, France wished to intervene in Spain, and England watched with undissimulated anxiety the course of events in Turkey, where she certainly did not wish Russian intervention, while in Russia the mutiny of the Guard in St. Peters- burg, revealed, as with a flash of lightning, the hidden barbarian in the he'art of Alexander, who considered the sentences of the court-martial as too lenient, and ordered that the ringleaders of the mutiny — two corporals and five poor privates — should run a gauntlet between two lines of soldiers armed with sticks. "The sentence was of course equivalent to one of death under torture" (Phillips). The conferences at Troppau and Laibach con- firmed the anticipations of liberal critics, that the Holy Alliance intended, or by the force of circum- stances would become, an intractable despotism, and that, inspired by a "morality based on bayonets", it would fasten on Europe the fetters of an intolerable state — sciolism. Then came the Congress of Verona. It was a sumptuous occasion with crowns, uni- forms, and titles the corporeal presentation of the glories of Class, and there dwelt in it the spirit of 226 Europe's Handicap — monarchical dispositions, palliated, let us say, in a measure, by the English aversion to the dictatorship of national affairs by self-constituted meddlers. The immediate subject of discussion was the libera- tion by armed intervention of Ferdinand VII of Spain, from emprisonment. France under Louis XVIII was eager to send her armies into the dis- tracted country, and Alexander was not unwilling to lead the invasion with his own army, in this moral rebuke of disorder. The indirection of motives and pretences ap- peared at once. Austria at first joined hands with England in discouraging so wholesale a repression, but, with the Czar once diverted from this idea, she approved an endorsement of the French view, because "the German Powers had no interest in the particular question of Spain; they did not want war, and least of all a war which would have involved the passage of a Russian army across their territories; but they were, above all, anxious to distract Alexander's attention from the affairs of Turkey, where lay the most immediate danger of Russian aggression, and for this purpose it was necessary to humour him in the matter of the inter- vention in Spain, if only to keep him 'grouped' " (Phillips). It was only a fresh illustration of the enforced hypocrisy of states, constantly maneuvering for a positional advantage, under the stimulus of bureaucrats and kings. Then succeeded the question of the revolt of the Spanish American colonies, and the abhorrent Tribe and Class 227 erection there of a phalanx of democracies, whose very existence disparaged the venerable institu- tions of Europe. It was the professed intention of the Holy Alliance to Interrupt the spread of this political heresy in the New World, that led to the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine, conceived and verbally expressed by John Quincy Adams, the Secretary of State under President Monroe, a proclamation that coincided, (Canning did not originate the Doctrine), with the not too disin- terestedly candid views of the English minister George Canning. After the Conference at Verona, the Holy Alliance no longer remained a political cynosure, and In the later disturbances and war-clouds, and before the Iconoclastic aggressive movement of German centralization, vanished, to be finally re- placed by the complete recrudescence of the old make-shift, the Balance of Power, which after uneasy oscillations, was formulated as the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, whose fate now hangs In the larger and more perilous Balance of War, though for a long time the three eastern empires preserved a sentimental solidarity. The language of W. A. Phillips, who has guided these short pages. In this last review of the Holy Alliance, may well be quoted; "the 'sublime con- ception' of the Emperor Alexander, the visionary good in the pursuit of which he had neglected his duties to his own people, had proved itself the stuff that dreams are made of. His attempt to realize a Confederation of the World, had ended In draw- 228 Europe's Handicap — ing the Old World, worn out as it seemed with cataclysmic convulsions, farther apart from that New World, of which the fiery youth proved a centrifugal force too strong to be resisted. As for the Confederation of Europe, from the moment that Great Britain decided 'to revolve in her own orbit', the harmonious cohesion of the European system became impossible, and after the Revolu- tion of July 1830 it broke definitively into two opposing groups. On the one side were the two Western Liberal Powers, Great Britain and France, under whose active encouragement the forces of nationalism and constitutional liberty developed amid wars and revolutions, until the system established at Vienna had been shattered. On the other side were the three Powers who had signed the Troppau Protocol, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, united in a Holy Alliance which, under the influence of the Iron Tsar, Nicholas I, narrowed and hardened into a close league of which the object was to crush out, within the limits of its sphere, all motions towards national inde- pendence or constitutional change." The Holy Alliance strengthened the reactionary movements in Europe, and stimulated the mori- bund impulses of Class, amusingly illustrated in the powdered queus of the soldiers of the Elector of Hesse-Cassel, and less amusingly acknowledged in the denunciation of the subjects of Mecklenberg as serfs. The three Emperors were held by it together in a circuit of sympathy, that discouraged the liberals, and narrowed the area of popular Tribe and Class 229 demands. But the exultant return to power of the principles of restrictive government and the careless affectations of indifference to the renewed petitions for civil rights, precipitated new confu- sions. The Revolutions of 1830 were not too successful in Germany, but they accomplished something in France, and these abortive efforts were in 1848 suddenly resurrected in less easily rebuked rebellions. In Germany, "all the dis- appointments of thirty years, the smoldering im- patience and sense of outrage, the powerful aspira- tion for political freedom among the people, broke out in sudden flame. There was instantly an out- cry for freedom of speech an'd of the press, the right of suffrage, and a constitutional form of govern- ment in every state. On March 13 the people of Vienna arose, and after a bloody fight with the troops compelled Metternich to give up his office as minister, and seek safety in exile." (Sidney B. Fay) . The liberation of Schleswig-Holstein from the illiberal treatment of Denmark was frustrated at the time by the intervention of England and of Russia. In Austria the tribal animosities and the incompatible temperaments of races stultified and submerged the movement by disunion, while the unity of interests and the sway of armed support maintained the superiority of Class. But cer- tainly it did not mean peace. Kossuth in Hun- gary held out against the Austrian forces aided by the Rumanians, but the hand of the Czar Nicholas was extended in fraternal protection to Francis Joseph, and the unhappy patriots were utterly 230 Europe's Handicap — crushed by the Slavic invasion, while the victors, with the remorselessness of the savage, and the embittered hatred of the class spirit, rioted in a carnage of sinful vengeance. War raged in Italy, in the Confederation, while the jealousies of Prussia and of Austria prevented a German union which may have had incalculable results. No Holy Alliance could have quelled the storm, except by just such means as now forced back the stream of democratic tendencies, through the omnipotent pressure of shot and shell. France acquired a notorious fraud — Napoleon III — for President of its hastily concocted Re- public, whose stealthy hand later robbed her of her very fragile possession, plunged her into new wars, and led her to the destructive experiment of 1870 — Sedan and Gravelotte. The Crimean War shook apart the increasingly weakening chain of sympa- thy between the German Powers, and the Musco- vite Czar, and though Schwarzenberg had said, "Austria will astonish the world by her ingrati- tude," the Court of Vienna was willing to accept the reproach without misgivings, while almost im- mediately after the disaster of Konigraths the Germanic league of identical interests tightened the natural alliance of Germany and of Austria. Bismarck had said indeed when he opposed the cession of territory by Austria to Germany, "we ought rather to reserve the possibility of becoming friends again, with our adversary of the moment, and in any case to regard the Austrian state as a piece on the European chessboard, and the renewal Tribe and Class 231 of friendly relations with her as a move open to us." This utterance was made with keen prevision, after the campaign of 1866, and in 1876 Treitschke wrote, "Germany is immediately con- cerned in the existence of Austria." Hungary had no reason to expect anything from Russia and it only required tact, condescension, and a show of solicitude for her welfare to bring the Magyars into a tolerant attitude of reconciliation with Austria. Treitschke has insisted that "no Euro- pean state, Germany least of all, can tolerate a permanent Russian settlement in Stamboul, if only because of the feverish excitement which would be bound to flame through all the Slav races at such a movement." Turkey, its maintenance or its obliteration forms the touch stone of the solution of the riddle of the present war. Thus the formative elements of The Holy Alliance fell apart into two spheres of feeling, and their separation became more profound after the war of 1878, be- tween Russia and Turkey, forcing an implied offensive and defensive alliance between Germany and Austria, and so, by reason of Germany's phenomenal economic growth bringing about a rearrangement of the political molecules, with the unexpected issue of an identical point of view (?) between the autocracy of Russia, and the more emancipated communities of France and of Eng- land, an alliance long ago favored by the circum- stance of France becoming the banker of Russia, and considered still longer ago, as Lamartine put it, as le cri de la nature.'' 232 Europe's Handicap — A glance at the provisions of the Treaty of Ber- lin confirms incontestably the impression that Russia and Austria could no longer be grouped together, and the divergence started then has to-day culminated in a violent rupture. The Treaty of Berlin administered a freshened vitality to the ineradicable tribal aims of the Balkan provinces, and, under the fomenting exasperations of later events, encouraged the Balkan war of 1913 from which again has flowed through vicissitudes of tribal and class designs, more or less understood, the present war. By the Treaty of Berlin complete independence was given to Roumania, Servia, and Montenegro; a state of Bulgaria was created north of the Balkans, and south of the Balkans a smaller Bulgaria under the name of Eastern Roumelia; Bosnia and Herzegovina were to be ruled by Austria; Russia received back Bessarabia, lost in the Crimean war, and in Asia was allowed Ardahan, Kars and Batoum with its great port on the Black Sea. How that treaty was regarded by the dis- putants, and the diplomatic mind of Europe, can be best portrayed by McCarthy's moderative resume; "The Treaty of Berlin gave rise to keen and adverse criticism. Much complaint was made of the curious arrangement which divided the Bulgarian populations into two separate States, under wholly different sys- tems of government. This, it was said, is only the example of the Congress of Paris Tribe and Class 233 over again. It is just such another futile attempt as that which was made to keep the Danubian principalities separate from each other, in the hope of thereby diminish- ing the influence of Russia, and securing greater influence for Turkey. The simple and natural arrangement, it was urged, would have been to unite the whole of these populations at once under one form of government. To that, it was insisted, they must come in the end, and the inter- val of separation is only more likely to be successfully employed by Russia in spreading her influence, because each division of the population is so small as to be unable to offer any effective resistance to her advances. On the other hand, it was argued by the sup- porters of the Treaty that the Bulgarian question was not so simple and straightfor- ward as might have been supposed; that there was a considerable variety of races, of religions, and of interests enclosed in what some people chose to call Bulgaria, and that no better arrangement could be found than to keep one portion still under the protection of the Porte, while allowing to the other some- thing that might almost be styled independ- ence. The arrangement which gave Bosnia and Herzegovina to the occupation of Austria became afterwards the subject of sharp con- troversy. The Prime-minister himself at a later day actually declared that this step was 234 Europe's Handicap — taken in order to put another Power, not Russia, on the high road to Constantinople if the succession to the Porte should ever be- come vacant. On the other hand Austrian statesmen themselves, denied that any such intention was in the mind of the Emperor of Austria. They insisted that the occupation was accepted by Austria, out of no feeling of individual advantage, but on the contrary, at much inconvenience and some sacrifice, and solely in the interest of the common peace of Europe. Very bitter indeed, was the con- troversy provoked by the surrender to Russia of the Bessarabian territory, taken from her at the time of the Crimean War. Roumania, the gallant and spirited little State which had thriven surprisingly under her new system of government, was thus plundered in order to satisfy Russia's self-love. Russia had set her heart upon recovering every single one of the advantages, real or only nominal, which she had been compelled to sacrifice at the close of the Crimean War. This was the last rem- nant of the victory obtained over her at so much cost and after such a struggle by the combined Powers of the West. Now she had again regained everything. The Black Sea was open to her war-vessels, and its shores to her arsenals. The last slight trace of Crim.ean humiliation was effaced in the restoration of the territory of Bessarabia. Profound dis- appointment was caused among many Euro- Tribe and Class 235 pean populations, as well as among the Greeks themselves, by the arrangements for the rectification of the Greek frontier. The im- pression left in the minds of the Greek delegates was, that the influence of the Eng- lish Ministers had in every instance been given in favor of Turkey and against the claims of Greece. Thus, speaking roughly, it may be said that the effect of the Congress of Berlin on the mind of Europe was to make the Christian populations of the south-east believe that their friend was Russia and their enemies were England and Turkey; to make the Greeks believe th'at France was their es- pecial friend, and that England was their enemy; and to create an uncomfortable impression everywhere that the whole Con- gress was a prearranged business, a transac- tion with a foregone conclusion, a dramatic performance carefully rehearsed before in all its details, and merely enacted as a pageant on the Berlin stage." And the event turned out that it was exactly that, another triumphant example of the per- nicious activity and the deeply seated intrusive ubiquity of Class, while the whole quarrelsome attitude of the many competitors for place and spoils emphasized anew the prevalent appetencies of tribe. The irremediable dilemma of Europe is newly and differently protruded at every settle- ment of her disorders. Unforgetable memories surge upward in the heart of the conquerors, and 236 Europe's Handicap — the treasure of hate for dispossession rankles in the heart of the conquered. Read Treitschke's most eloquent essay ''What We Demand from France'' to realize how in the soul of this entranced German, the reclamation of Alsace and Lorraine to the fatherland was the religious duty of the victorious Germans, after the war of 1870. "In view of our obligation to secure the peace of the world, who will venture to object that the people of Alsace and Lorraine do not want to belong to us? The doctrine of the right of all the branches of the German race to decide on their own destinies, the plausible solution of demagogues without a fatherland, shiver to pieces in presence of the sacred necessity of these great days. These territories are ours by the right of the sword, and we shall dispose of them in virtue of a higher right — the right of the German nation which will not permit its lost children to remain strangers to the German Empire. We Germans, who know Ger- many and France, know better than these unfor- tunates themselves, what is good for the people of Alsace, who have remained under the misleading influence of their French connection, outside the sympathies of new Germany. Against their wills we shall restore them to their true selves." Here is the proud note of Class and the shrill scream of Tribe also. But the German tribes were nationalized, and the variegated and petty despotisms of the in- numerable lesser lords swept away before the coercive absorption of a new Germany, when Tribe and Class 237 "there grew and grew in the nation the conscious- ness of an immeasurable strength, a living inde- structible union of both intellectual and political life" (Treitschke). Before this stupendous spec- tacle the slow incubation of the designs of the Muscovite and the dreams of the Balkans mo- mentarily halted. The treaty of Berlin had ex- actly pleased no one, and the Russian bear gnawed his paws with discontent over an insufficient return for his venture. But apparently the days of the Moslem in Europe were numbered, and the next move depended upon circumstance, upon opportunity, and upon the proper accroiipissement of the Balkan dogs of war, until they might be favorably released from the leash. Meanwhile Russia, momentarily blocked to- wards the South, in her restless motion towards the sea, like a dammed river, had essayed new mouths of egress in Asia. Here again her Man- churian enterprise met the irreconcilable rivalry of Japan, and "the little yellow man" drove her off. Awaiting her necessary recuperation, she doubtless permitted herself to dream, as ever, of the crescents of Istambul replaced by the cross on St. Sophia, and with stolid and imperturbable patience watched the slow infiltration of reform-politics into the flaccid veins of old Turkey, for, as Treitschke has written, she believed that "the worst days arose for the Osman Empire when attempts at reform were started." And while she waited she was not unconscious of her duty to- wards those instrumentalities, whose hour of 238 Europe's Handicap — action the hands of the clock might at any moment strike, viz. the Balkan states and Greece, where the frenzy of pan-slavism was unquenched, and the unwillingly confessed insults to their religion remembered. Passing quickly to an inevitable denouement we encounter the war of the Balkan States with Turkey in 1913. The Balkan States present the tribal condition of Europe in its cruder and more aboriginal form. Standardized into nations and enlarged and elaborated by the application of astute diplomacy in connection with great civilizations the Tribe does not present its more usual technical wildness, however truly the tribal traits are retained. But to the Balkan states in their narrower environ- ment, and in a comparatively inchoate develop- ment, with less politely restrained evidence of greed, the word has a less repugnant appositeness. At the very moment, Bulgaria is bargaining for her price, from either party in the struggle. She wants a part of Macedonia, witheld from her by Servia, and it has rankled in her breast that Russia has refused to expel the Servians from this coveted possession. Roumania is clamoring for Transyl- vania in Hungary, although we are told that ''in annexing Transylvania to Roumania the province would prove as prickly a thorn as Venice showed itself to be in the hands of the Austrians". And it also appears that, as a matter of fact, the Rou- manian population in Transylvania "is a minority among the other nationalities". And Servia her- self is casting too envious glances at Bosnia. Tribe and Class 239 The Balkan war of 1912-13 has a vital bearing upon all the questions introduced in the present conflict, though at the moment the interest of a political diagnosis subsides before the unexpected spectacle of finding the war converted into a death struggle. The situation in the Balkans is the consequence of a historic disaster, and of an ethnic confusion of tribes. The conquest of Turkey in Europe by the Osmanli in the fourteenth century inaugurated a religious warfare, the enmity of a deadly and an irreconcilable persistent religious feud; while previously the residues of various late migrations, finding no aperture of escape westward, settled down in the peninsular, and consigned its moun- tainous regions to incessant turmoil. To-day, and for a century or more past, as the result of very deplorable relations between the Moslems and the Christians, there have been a series of out- breaks and clashes, while national wars have con- tributed to slowly detach bit by bit from the former vast territory of the Turks important frag- ments, which again, by a mixture of chance and of judgment, have formed the independent sovereign- ties called the Balkan States. Now two over- riding impressions are created from any, even cur- sory, review of the confusion of tongues, matched by a not less bewildering labyrinth of events, which distinguish this almost "savage Europe" as it has been called. And over these two impressions broods the terror of a reminiscent loathing of 240 Europe's Handicap — barbarity, and an almost simultaneous enthusiasm for heroism and fidelity. The impressions are first; that any permanent union, or even juxtaposition, of the christian communities of Bulgaria, Roumania, Servia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Macedonia with the followers of the True Prophet is a hopeless expectation, not alone from the utter immiscibility, so to speak, of faith and temperament, but as a logical impasse, since, as Treitschke writes, "it is impossible that the God-inspired Bashi-bazouk, after having ripped open the Bulgarian mother and sold her children as slaves, should now of his own accord live with the survivors of his victims as a peaceful citizen on the footing of equal rights. It would be more impossible for the Bulgarian to submit for a moment to the Bashi-bazouk's dictation." As a matter of fact Bulgaria is now independent, and its Islamic population is deserting it. The second impression is that the elements of concordance, the unifying influence that might consolidate these tribal states into a confedera- tion, is religion and race. The majority of the christians belong to the Greek communion (the Greeks qua Greeks have made both Bulgarians and Servians very uncomfortable under the ecclesi- astical oppression of the Orthodox Greek church), and the prevalent ethnic strain is Slavic, and the formation of the States, with an independent Greece, permits a gradual separation of warring ethnic ingredients into more homogeneous com- partments, as the Greeks may concentrate in Tribe and Class 241 Greece, the Slavs in Bulgaria, Servia and Rou- mania, and inasmuch as McCarthy has said "these different sects and races agree in hardly anything but in their common detestation of Ottoman rule", once relieved of their mutual repul- sion, their common hatred for Turkey gains an operative ascendency. Now Pan-Slavism is a very real political factor, and the Greek Church is a formidable fact, and both Pan-Slavism and the Greek Church obtain in Russia an unquestioning allegiance for the latter, and an enthusiastic endorsement for the former. Thus Russia, by the natural heritage of events and principles, became the protagonist of Slavic ideals, the ultimate servitor and champion of Slavic emancipation. With the moderating and liberalizing tendencies of recent years, the Slavophile bigotry and iconoclasm of the middle of the last century has been sensibly permeated — in its present humour — by political and economic motives, and the growing self-assertiveness of the Balkan states, has more dangerously threatened the proposed hegemony of Russia in any Slavic union. But yet never was the realization of Slavic ambitions so near accomplishment as at present. Disturbing experiences have interfered somewhat with the previous moral suzerainty of Russia in Bulgaria, at least, and partially upset calculations of a general Balkan understanding. The treaty of San Stefano, negotiated only six miles from Constantinople, had extorted the most splendid concessions from Turkey, and Russia, as the conse- 242 Europe's Handicap — quence of her crushing victories, arose imperiously before the eyes of Europe — as usually, trihally concerned over any preposterous eminence any- where — as the arbiter of the Eastern question, insuring a solution flagrantly at defiance of the interests of the soi-disant protectors of the Mussul- man's reign in Europe, viz. England, and Austria. The tribal nations fluttered in concert, and their officious interference, with the sympathetic neu- trality of Germany, brought about the violent dis- memberment of the San Stefano treaty, and the substitution for it of the Berlin treaty. By this rescript Bulgaria lost Macedonia, lost the provinces erected in the state of Roumelia, while Bosnia and Herzegovina were absorbed by Austria, Servia and Montenegro got less than they wanted, and expected, the important lands of Bessarabia were returned to Russia, and England accepted Cyprus, as a neighboring station for her soldiers, in proximity to the then perplexed and diffident Turk. Nobody was quite satisfied, and the range of dissatisfaction attained depths of ominous dis- content. It was all typically tribal, whatever size and dignity was incorporated in the signatories to the baffling make-shift, and yet it really could be nothing more, under those artificial conditions which Europe and her history has created. Con- ditions which continually foment jealousies, envies, the rapacity of foolish ambitions, the dreams of state-makers, the rhapsodies of race lyricists, the ingenuity of diplomatic deals, the graft of terri- Tribe and Class 243 torial extension, the cupidity of trade, hopeless disunion at the heart of things, an enamelled smoothness on the surface, and all, all, the in- tellectualized analogues of the greeds, cruelties, aggressions, deceits, of the Celt, the Goth, the Hun, the Magyar, the Roman, the Greek, in those ethnic bases of modern Europe we have hastily epitomized. After the treaty of Berlin, Russian troops filled Bulgaria, and a Russian commission organized the state. The "arbitrary conduct and domineering attitude of the Russian officials soon cooled the fervor of the Bulgarians for their deliverers", which was later followed by an open rupture. In the meanwhile Bulgaria had quietly annexed Roumelia, and Instantly a new shock and a new consternation beset the tribal plotters. But the new face of affairs exactly turned the tables of their tactics. England supported Bulgaria, and Russia denounced her. Turkey raged, but was getting ready to meet an aroused and militant Greece, while Servia, the Inevitable rival of Bulgaria, with — observe — the approval and secret agree- ment of assistance of Austria, turned against her own kith and kin. At Sllvlnltza Bulgaria under Prince Alexander bloodily defeated the Servians, who were pursued into their own kingdom, and only saved by the Intervention of the Empire's arms. Later Bulgaria and Russia patched up their disagreements, under the subservient ad- ministration of Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, and a rapprochement was effected — and wisely — 244 Europe's Handicap — between Bulgaria and Servia, while the Balkan Union widened its outlook, and perfected its designs, all of which were inimical to the territorial integrity of Turkey, Austria-Hungary, and of Russia. When the Macedonian question came up, there was a consolidated rush to arms for the spoliation of Turkey, and, after the victory, recriminations and a subsequent fight between themselves, and later amply conceived plans for further enlargements, at the expense of Russia and Austria, which by reason of the present war have now settled down into confident bids this way and that, according to the size of the bribe offered by the contestants. The unsettlement we have indicated of the Russian influence in the Balkans was succeeded by two unexpected tendencies, the gradual removal of the English protectorate over Turkey, and its rapid assumption by Germany, with the ap- parently sympathetic connivance of Austria. German officers remodelled the Turkish army, and strengthened her fortifications, while German capitalists acquired the railroads of Asia-Minor, and established large industrial interests. Eng- land, subjected to unsparing criticism for her im- modest shielding of the Turkish murderers in 1875, under Gladstone averted her eyes more and more from the inquiring and uneasy glances of the Mos- lem ruler. Her practical ownership of Egypt and the Suez canal, reassured her of the control of her Eastern communications, while it also stirred the Turkish government with a recalcitrant vexation. Tribe and Class 245 Russia regained her foot-hold in the Balkans, in a measure, but encountered also the undermining processes of German diplomacy. Still it would, or ought to be impossible for the Balkans to forget old and unrequited debts of gratitude to Russia, except that, in tribal temperaments, nothing is remembered except reprisals. The Balkan war of 1912-13 at once precipitated a crisis, which recon- stituted anew the Eastern Problem, and in its later savage fratricidal altercations led to embitter- ments which disrupted the Balkan friendships, and complicated diplomacy, as the emissaries of Russia, Austria, and Germany, hurried to their posts to turn the event to their advantage. There also at once appeared a unity of interests between the Germans and the Dual Empire, much as the german leaders deplored, and chafed under, the infliction of Austrian arrogance and heartlessness in the Balkan communities of the lately acquired Bosnia and Herzegovina, which acts murderously culminated in the assassination of the Arch-duke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenburg at Serajevo when the "percussion cap" (Servia), of the "powder-box" the Balkan Peninsula), went off and exploded the tribal magazines of Europe. Treitschke in 1876, with his political sagacity, explained Germany's position, "we want lasting endurable conditions in the Peninsula, which may pacify that part of the world, and so we want no more foreign domina- tion, certainly no annexations, either Austrian or Russian. All good Germans are united in this 246 Europe's Handicap — resolution, because what may in any way endanger Austria's existence is a blow at our own empire.'' In the Balkan War the combatants fought it out first as between the States and Turkey, and then, by a most indefensible blunder, fought it out between themselves, while the Powers, agitated with suspicion, fearful of a general conflagration, and impotent to forecast the consequences of inter- vention, watched and waited. The Balkan War which laid the seeds of Discord that have cropped out into the present monstrous garden of confu- sion, may be well and briefly summarized in the words of President Schurman; ''what was the occasion of the war between Turkey and the Balkan states in 1912? The most general answer that can be given to that question, is contained in the one word Macedonia. Hostile activities in Macedonia naturally produced reprisals at the hands of Turkish authorities. In one district alone 100 villages were burned, over 8,000 houses destroyed, and 60,000 peasants left without homes at the beginning of winter. Meanwhile the Austrian and Russian governments intervened, and drew up elaborate schemes of reform, but their plans could not be adequately enforced, and the result was failure. The Austro-Russian entente came to an end in 1908, and in the same year England joined Russia in a project aiming at a better administration of justice, and involving more effective European supervision. Scarcely had this programme been announced, when the revolution, under the Young Turk party, broke Tribe and Class 247 out, which promised to the world a regeneration of the Ottoman Empire. Hopeful of these constitu- tional reformers of Turkey, Europe withdrew from Macedonia, and entrusted its destinies to its new master. Never was there a more bitter disap- pointment. If autocratic Sultans had punished the poor Macedonians with whips, the Young Turks flayed them with scorpions. Sympathy, indignation, and horror, conspired with na- tionalistic aspirations and territorial interests, to arouse the kindred populations of the surrounding states. And in October 1912 war was declared against Turkey by Bulgaria, Servia, Montenegro, and Greece." Turkey was badly whipped, and, but for the intervention of the Powers, would have been driven pele-mele over the Sea of Marmora into Asia. But the spoils remained to be divided, and around them the tribal propensities bristled up with vivid expectations. Servia was in a truculent and disappointed humour; she had been denied the issue to the Adriatic sea, which she had fairly won. Austria put her foot down there, and prodded the other Powers to support her, illustrat- ing anew her Class character of an insufferable selfishness, her unenviable felicity of remaining the most detested of sovereignties. Well! Servia's disgust was rather stiffly deepened, when she dis- covered that Bulgaria intended to reserve the lion's share of the conquered Macedonia, that she should withdraw from central Macedonia, while the Montenegrins must be content with such fortu- 248 Europe's Handicap — itous scraps as Bulgaria chose to let drop from her overflowing banquet, appetizing but insufficient. Russia, watching for an opening stepped in at this moment, to offer her disinterested (?) and helpful service, in straightening out the tangle, while Austria got hot in the neck at the Russian intrusion. It availed nothing, and at it again, hammer and tongs, Bulgaria and Servia pitched into each other, while the adjoining kennels of Greece, Turkey, and Roumania, also let loose their howling contents upon the very imprudent and unfortunate Bulgaria. Bulgaria was hauled to the ground, and might have been atrociously mauled, if she had not surrendered. The Treaty of Bucharest brought forward a new aspirant to leadership, and especially a new claimant for concessions viz., Roumania. This interesting state with, under the circumstance, a rather unanswer- able argument, asked for the northeastern corner of Bulgaria, from Turtukai on the Danube to Baltchik on the Black Sea. She got it. This aspiring province seems to have an itching palm. The present price of her neutrality, or of her active participation on either side of the conflict, is more land, for her spokesman. Professor N. Basilesco of the University of Bucharest, asks for her, "that Russia restore to Roumania all Bessarabia up to the Dniester, as she received it from Turkey in 1812. **That all the Roumanian countries situated be- tween the Theiss and the Danube be incorporated with Roumania. Tribe and Class 249 "That the old Dacia of Trajan's time be restored within its original boundaries". In the troubled waters the Balkan states are fishing not only with long rods, but with invincible precision. The Balkan War was a surprise, and the patronizing or fulminating airs of the Powers underwent a salutary subsidence before a fresh and potential contribution to Europe's tribal dis- orders, and at a point too, where the racial cauldron was plentifully supplied with irritable and pun- gent ingredients. Servia like a Falconbridge, among the valiant tribes seemed to cry out; Let not the world see- fear, and sad dis- trust, Govern the motion of a kingly eye; Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire: Threaten the threatener, and outface the brow Of bragging horror ; so shall inferior eyes, That borrow their behaviour from the great, Grow great by your example, and put on The dauntless spirit of resolution. Conscious of her powers, but smarting under the distraint of a bullying power, Servia became a hot bed of retaliatory spirits. She was further inflamed by the misbehaviour of Austria in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh, To quote the words of Charles Willis Thompson; "indeed the Austrian hand had lain heavily upon Bosnia. The initial outrage of 250 Europe's Handicap — annexation, in violation of Austria's word pledged at the Congress of Berlin, might have been palliated by a considerate treatment of the popula- tions of the stolen states; but that has never been Austria's way. Her way with Bosnia and Herze- govina after 1908 was her way with Northern Italy in the nineteenth century, and it has ended in the same fashion. In Italy the aggrandizement of Sardinia gave the oppressed Italian States a defender; the aggrandizement of Servia by the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 gave a defender to her oppressed kinsfolk in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In both cases Austria's blind and brutal treat- ment had so angered the subject populations, as to throw them into the arms of their aggrandized friends". The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, seems to have belonged to the most scriptural of Class bigots, an idolater of the abstract sublimity of his title, and so dazed by its immensity as to possibly resent the actual exist- ence of the ordinary civilian, as an unnecessary impertinence. Such creatures are incomprehen- sible, but they have been known. This man seemed to have been one of them. Dickens knew; do we not recall, that, "the earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enterprises; stars and planets circled in their orbits to preserve inviolate a Tribe and Class 251 system of which they were the centre. Common abbreviations took new meanings in Dombey's eyes, and had sole reference to them: A. D. had no concern with Anno Domini, but stood for anno Dombei — and Son." This man Franz Ferdinand was shot to death in the streets of Serajevo on the morning of Sunday, June 28th, 1914, by a young man, Gavrio Prinzip, and that shot has since been heard around the world. To Austria it was the defiance of a people, that she had reason to fear, but behind it ranged, in the quickly operating and vindictive mind of Class and tribal men, the unfathomable depths of plot upon plot, with the stalwart figure of the Czar of Russia spectrally above them as an inspiration and as a protector. For different major reasons and for identical minor ones Ger- many and Austria were driven into a closer com- pact of understanding and mutual support. Their union was a moral and a political necessity, for it never can be too deeply impressed upon the ingenuous thought of Americans — alone in the whole world wearing their heart upon their sleeve — that the brooding minds of European chancel- leries live on intrigue, and dwell perpetually in the regions of DISTRUST. Besides was it not more coarsely apparent that the political entities of Europe — and behind them the guns of their arma- ments — had been centralizing for years, like a concretionary action in minerals and ores, around pivotal points of national policies or ambitions? Remember too that the German element is omni- 252 Europe's Handicap — present in Austrian affairs, and then recall the deeply significant words of Treitschke — their most acute politician — "hatred of the Slavs, on the other hand is deep in our blood, and it is also heartily reciprocated on the other side. For centuries we have dealt with the nations of the East only as enemies, as rulers, or as teachers: even to-day we still exhibit to them all the harsh and domineering traits of our character To tell the truth the Slav seems to us a born Slave." But how easily realized also, by any one, was the rage and incensed grief of an arrogant and superlative court at t?his vulgar death of the man who was the incarnation of royalty, so near the actual ascent to the throne that it might seem only a few breaths separated him from the splendid eminence. They made exorbitant demands upon the astounded Province, and they intended doubt- less to make them almost unbearable. Austria with her customary malignancy, the indurated hardness of her official temper, felt it was a crisis, and behind her theories of the approaching Euro- pean conflict was the unappeasible hatred she felt for this obstreperous little Servia, which had been a thorn in her side and refused suppression, and to the genius of Class the obstinacy of opposition rouses the last heats of hatred. Servia was willing to make the most considerate concessions but she would not permit Austria to ride rough- shod over her independence. We can scarcely doubt that Austria knew, that whatever the event, Germany would stand firmly at her back, Tribe and Class 253 and it does seem that Austria's demands on Servia were intentionally made scandalously insulting, simply to court their rejection — and then — the CRASH. Well the Crash came. How ready and mo- mentarily expectant and feverishly watchful were the empires of Europe, was instantly seen, when on all sides the men rushed to arms. The armed camp was filled with orders, and the rattling guns, the groaning caissons, the apparelled hosts, the convoked and anxious bankers, even, showed too clearly that Europe's long apprehensions were over. THE WAR WAS HERE. And because the WAR was on, every hidden or suppressed or half thought-out project, in the many minded chancelleries of Europe, also sprang into life, and the interests of TRIBE and of CLASS simultaneously awoke. For England it was, as Ernst Haeckel declares, the Isolation of Germany, "entirely because of competitive hatred and envy of the well-being and blossoming civilization of the United German Empire" ; for France it was the long hoped-for, prayed-for, sung-for winning back of Alsace and Lorraine; for Russia the final descent of her lecherous hand upon Constantinople ; for the Balkans almost anything that might turn up; for Italy the possible retrievement of lost lands and the appeasement of her unsmouldering vendetta against Austria; for Belgium a sudden terror, and unquiet thoughts as to the value of England's guarantee of the safety of her borders; and— for GERMANY? 254 Europe's Handicap — It is not easy, In the present frame of mind among Americans, to force upon unwilling listeners any comprehension of the exact conformation of the German thought at the extreme juncture that had arisen, a conformation that of course had its genetics — as the biogenists would say — in a long prior preparation of feeling and instruction. Not to enter into a long rehearsal of quotations two extracts from two observers, with diametrically opposed sympathies, will suffice. Jame Bryce, the englishman, says "to modern German writers the State is a much more tremendous entity than it is to Englishmen or Americans. It is a supreme power with a sort of mystic sanctity, a power conceived of, as it were, self-created, a force altogether dis- tinct from, and superior to the persons who com- pose it"; General von Bernhardi says, "we not only require for the full material development of our nation, on a scale corresponding to its intel- lectual importance, an extended political basis, but, we are compelled to obtain space for our in- creasing population, and markets for our industries. At every step which we take in this direction England will resolutely oppose us. Eng- lish policy may not have made the definite de- cision to attack us; but it doubtless wishes by all and every means, even the most extreme, to hinder every further expansion of German international influence and of German maritime power." Both Bryce's conception and von Bernhardi's vaticina- tions had been sounded in German ears by a group Tribe and Class 255 of distinguished men, all of whom were earnest and patriotic, albeit swayed by the inexpugnable tribal lust of dominion, and the historic infatuation that associates greatness with Class prestige. The names are now familiar, von Bernhardi, von Beth- man, Hollweg, von Bulow, von der Goltz, von Clausewitz, Treitschke, Hans Delbruck, Frobenius. Obsessed with the notion of her own pre-eminence and panting for expansion, Germany realized that the moment of a supreme effort had come. For not only was she very confident in her power, but a nervous dread of the omnipresent danger of enemies haunted her. The tribal instinct of preservation, the tribal dr'eam of size, goaded her into action, but the immediate impulse sprang from an actual terror which seized upon her, as it seizes upon a man conscious of concealed foes, when he sees them spring into action, as of an animal conscious of lurking snares when it hears them operate. A scream of derisive incredulity and anger will always to-day meet such a declara- tion, but the probabilities greatly favor the theory. Fear accounts for the suddenness of Germany's action, but it was a fear almost transfigured by an overweening confidence, into something not far from the exultation of anticipated and welcomed conquest. The imagination of Class, always overbearing and always boastful, felt the approach of that Hour of Destiny of which Colonel H. Frobenius has made so much, and it repeated again for the millionth time, with an amused 256 Europe's Handicap — cynicism not very different from the gloating satisfaction of ''Getting there"; Si vis pacem, para helium. Was there not reason for fear? Was anything unknown to that encyclopaedic mind and thrusting hand which determined the readiness of Germany for the throes of her final liberation from all fear? Every cabinet in Europe had delivered its secrets to her, and the argus eyes of thousands of emis- saries had watched with deliberate malice the spinning of the web that was expected to strangle those very throes of liberation. It was Russia, the prolific Slav population, whose rate of increase is 2.01 per cent as against 1.40 per cent in Germany, whose constrictions were beginning already to tighten around Austria on the east and south. In no case could Germany afford to part with the dual empire, which felt itself more acutely con- cerned in Germany's fate. It was a problematic Italy on the south, whose allegiance to a feebly expressed understanding might be as readily dis- solved, as Germany found it convenient — and all tribes and class find such acts convenient — to cancel other equally fragile understandings. It was England on the seas with her fingers on the lines of commerce, so that each twitch tremu- lously awoke the Antipodes, and would surely annihilate Germany's colonies and do anything else that would chain the young giant, dangerously drunk with the wine of self-consciousness. And there was la belle France, not to be overmuch Tribe and Class 257 trusted, and equipped, as never before, with the finest implements of destruction. Everything was tribal about her, and she was tribal too as a unit in the infernal lattice work of interests. What was on every side but FEAR? Had not Nietzsche the presumable apostle of force, said "the present so-called armed peace that prevails at present in all countries is a sign of a bellicose disposition that trusts neither itself nor its neighbor: and partly from hate, partly from /ear refuses to lay down its arms". Why indeed would there not be fear, and if fear then the quickest kind of action. But other things went with the fear, enrolled with it, mingled with it, and coloring it with pro- jects purely hedonistic; the enlargement of oppor- tunity, the acquisition of seaboard, the multiplica- tion of chances all over the world, with new posses- sions, the insistence upon a kind of economic equivalency with everyone, an absolute impregna- bility, and above all some indubitable pledge that Germany was to REMAIN. Years had evolved a stupendous egoism. Prof. Maurice Millioud has written the best about this, and skillfully and adroitly — if a little over done — shown the con- vergence of threads of moral, economic, industrial, scientific, political, military, progress whose ulti- mate composition, making up the present German nation, has created in the german individual an ideologue of something that might be labelled Pan-Germanism. But M. Millioud does not reveal what we believe is the mental mechanics illustrated here. It was a reaction, by the law of 258 Europe*s Handicap — tribal reaction, against the tyranny of other tribal hegemonies, as of the English in the earlier nine- teenth century, the French in the eighteenth, the Italian in the fifteenth, the matriculation of a tribe in the larger responsibilities of a nation. But the success of its formation, the zealotry of its propaga- tion, meant, in the tribal and class relations of Europe, but one thing — WAR. For let it be reiterated — the purpose of this whole book — that while the root principle of the tribal State viz. FORCE dominates in Germany, the same principle underlies all European order. It is less stalwart in England, and less competently man- aged, less daring in France and less olTensive, less intellectual in Russia, and less scrupulous, less controlled in Austria and meaner, less sane in Italy and more refined, and in the other states of Europe always distinguishable, but, because of their quiescence, subjected to a subsidence, that leaves it either sullen or impotent. And there was that other chronic condition of tribal relations DISTRUST. In centuries of diplomacy, where lying, under the mask of an elegant indirection, has been accounted dis- tinguished, and lying without any mask at all, by a shameless mendacity, has been always accounted unfortunate, where Class needs nourished hypoc- risy, and royal oaths furnished a new illustration of the moral indigence of kings, Distrust has in a way become the habitual decorum of chan- celleries. And perhaps every minute counted — who could tell? — Germany was not only pre- Tribe and Class 259 pared within the available resources of her country, but the Briareus armed inspection she had made of every other country enabled her to reap the best results from rapid action. She was placed between two fires, and uncertainty was a more dangerous predicament than open hostilities. Perhaps she forced the fighting. What else could she do? Her criminality is of the criminality of Europe that engenders and always has engendered WAR. Certainly the theory hinted at does not cover the whole ground by any means, and when M. Hartwig said to the author of The Near East from Within, "a kind of exasperation of public opinion has systematically taken place in your country, with the result that she is quite persuaded that war will be declared upon her one of these days, and so needs ever to be ready", he may or may not have known of what the same book pre- tends now, with much plausibility, to reveal, that Germany was actuated, not exactly as an arriere pensee, but as a vital motive for movement, by broad plans of eastern aggrandizement. These were in all probability undefined, but they were vitally operative in the upper — the Class — con- sciousness of the empire, and the King had nodded an assent neither equivocal or misunderstood. Many evanescent ebullitions, appearing on the surface of affairs in Germany, have made the whole world cognizant that there was a war party and a more pacific — not to be too euphemistic — war party in Germany, and that the Kaiser led the latter, and that at such a critical instant as 260 Europe's Handicap — arose, when the Balkan emergency culminated in the murder of Franz Ferdinand, his moderate purposes were tumultuously brushed aside before the inrushing tides of militarism, pride, ambition, and FEAR, whose reinforcement daily became more formidable, as the alarm, spreading to the lowest strata of the social edifice, suddenly merged all factions into one, with the frenetic cry upon their lips of Deutchland uber Alles. Of course no one heeds very seriously, the analysis, sarcasm, or the pretentiously circum- stanced appreciation by english writers — admir- able literary performances — of German culture, which admix, with various accentuation, the notes of ridicule, of rage, of contempt, and of defiance. The benignity of the english sense of superiority over the rest of the world, has been sadly ruffled by German impudence, and the disquieting ob- servation of German skill. Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton has surely forgotten his learning, in the exultation of venting his spleen, when he with a vicious facility writes, "if they have promised to shoot the cross off a church spire, or empty the ink pot into somebody's beer, or bring home some- body's ears in their pocket, for the pleasure of their families, I think in these cases they would feel a sort of a shadow of what civilized men feel in the fulfillment of a promise, as distinct from the making of it." This is the very mania of bam- boozledom, and our desecrating epithet might equally apply to the same author's perverted characterization, with all of its particularizations. Tribe and Class 261 of the Prussian as a "positive barbarian", as one ''who begins all his culture by that act which is the destruction of all creative thought, and con- structive action. He breaks that mirror in the mind in which a man can see the face of his friend or foe", but when he points out their tribal characteristics, while he hits obliquely indeed at all of Europe, he has felicitously put his accusative finger upon a fact, a racial fact, hopelessly real. Listen to his incinerating sentences; the Prussian character is "an egomania that is honestly blind to the fact that the other party is an ego, and, above all, an actual itch for tyranny and interference, the devil which everywhere torments the idle and the proud." This most amusing and insinuatingly plausible satirist has written much beside, and very much of its corrective irony as applied to the tribal notes of the German, seems to us most adaptable to the tribal (provincial) limitations of the englishman. Mais passons. England's involution in the war was perhaps a little sudden, unexpected perhaps to all english- men, and perhaps also unexpected to the Germans, though, while that is a current impression, it does not altogether bear analysis. Germany probably felt some natural scorn for England's military power, but she had every reason to dread her naval strength, and she could not have failed to foresee which way at least would lie her sympathies. As to England's immediate participation there was no doubt a moment's hesitation on the part of the government and a good deal of less uncertain 262 Europe's Handicap — apprehension among her people. But the most superficial consideration brought instantly to view the extreme danger of allowing Germany an un- disputed access to her designs; for there have been always two points in English policies, whose susceptibilities were so sensitive that even the approach of danger awoke an irritating pain. One was India, and the other her naval supremacy, the integrity of her merchant marine. German suc- cess, especially if it was overwhelming — and who could say it would not be — was something to be dreaded. The instant Germany over-rode Bel- gium, and Belgium enrolled herself among the enemies of the Teuton hardly the most inex- perienced diplomacy would have failed to predict the result; Belgium would be made the spoil of war, and the German seaboard, extended over Belgium's coast, would frame up against England a very remorseless combatant at her undefended doors. Is it conceivable either that the English Ministry were not acquainted with the eastern schemes of Germany? It was given more than an inkling already by the well published fact of Ger- man officers in the Turkish army, German capital in the Asiatic railroads, and the many illustrated effusions of German writers upon Asiatic possi- bilities. England did not engage in the war solely on account of her pledge to Belgium. Absolute disinterested self-annihilation cannot be asked of any nation. She could not tolerate the suffoca- tion of so vigorous and systematized a proximity. She entered the war. Tribe and Class 263 Considering now the immensity of this war, and the world-subduing motives apparently repre- sented by it on the part of the Allies, and their teutonic assailants, the question of exactly who began it retires to a rather juvenile background. It was not begun. It was simply the prolongation of that indefinitely long political disorder which attends the organization of tribes, and the mainte- nance of Class. The Norddeutsche AUgemeine Zeitung asserts that Russia had started military operations July 25, and that the Russian mobiliza- tion was under way on July 30th. In the issue of the New York American of June 28th 1915, ap- peared the reported correspondence of Emperor Wilhelm, Czar Nicholas, King George, and the Government of France, which certainly gave an impression that Emperor Wilhelm had, in a limited way, striven to hold back the outbreak of hostilities. The letters are superlatively flat in their strained affectation of august brotherliness, and the tip-toe style of statement, which per- haps pertains to the infrequency of the con- descension of their majesties to write at all, a vulgarity rather pompously, we believe, avoided by kings. These letters may mean little, or they may mean nothing. But the reckless fashion of the moment to fasten all the blame of this war on Germany is deplorable, and unmistakably igno- rant. In a collection of powder magazines in such proximity that an unguarded spark, falling on one or the other, of them, at any moment, will disrupt their restraint, the particular priority of 264 Europe's Handicap — explosion in this one or in that hardly extenuates the blame of their careless grouping, and their dan- gerous contents. But, in the case of Europe, there was nothing careless about it at all. It was all premeditated. It is the inexorable necessity im- posed upon a Tribal and Class organization, upon an unavoidable stress of national rivalry, and an enmity which involves a whole lot of things, as national whims, language, history, ideals, tastes, habits, trade. That France wished to regain Alsace and Lor- raine was an open secret for years, that she had rehabilitated and immensely improved her mili- tary preparations for war was also known, and that the rhythmical resources of revanche had been fully exploited was a literary fact. Russia, relying for centuries upon the mailed fist, or better the bludgeon and the cutlass, for her aggressions, gloried in her military resources, and her ultimate designs were gloomily guessed at by armed and apprehensive neighbors. Austria has never been allowed to forget that she has enemies, and per- haps the memories of her own frightful sins appall her with the anticipated furies of a future Nemesis. Her armies were maintained on a basis of Militar- ism, and now she clings instinctively to her helmeted neighbor, whose insuperable skill in fighting she has every reason to be thankful for this hour. England is not a military nation cer- tainly, and she has never courted in recent years the opportunities of continental expansion, for the wider horizon of ruling the ocean exactly suited Tribe and Class 265 her insular ambitions, and was also a more lucra- tive investment. She unquestionably appeals most to our sympathy, unlovable as she may be — but then unlovableness is only a demerit in the blood — and the claims of language are undeniable. It ought not to have surprised her to find herself at last at grips with an enemy whose belligerency she understood, and whose possible exploits the Battle of Dorking, a literary exploit of some twenty years ago, brought vividly to her mind, and for whose discomfiture indeed she has been at some pains to build interminable battleships. On the whole the only philosophic, rational, and purely intelligible view of this great European War, is to regard it exactly as one discusses an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, a cyclone, a waterspout, a landslide. It is a periodic phenomenon precisely deducible from the local disturbances — granting that they are known — when they attain that dynamic pressure that will precipitate the cataclysm. The blame that the newspaper editors and their prolific correspondents, both lay and professional — all tinged with a conventional religi- osity that defies the historic sense, and which may be suspected of a latent hypocrisy — heap upon the Germans, is a capital illustration of that fallacy in logic, known as the "undistributed middle". For is it not quite evident that the Germans are the victims of their predicament — King and people alike — in a class and tribal aggregate, and that the incident of one country or another starting wars is, in Europe, a function of the situation, a mo- 266 Europe's Handicap — mentary suddenness here or there, the whim of a people, a tribe, the irascibility of a ruler, a Class? Surely it is known to everyone that the French began the war of 1870 indefensibly, that the tribal spirit — doubtless whetted by bribes, or forced by intimidation — has pushed the Italians into this present conflict — and most unwisely; that Austria absolutely started the campaign that ended in her overthrow at Koniggratz, for the gratification of her claims to priority in the German states, when she favored the succession of the Prince of Augusten- burg to the recently seized Holstein, (seized by Prussian and Austrian troops), wrenched too from Denmark; that Napoleon III stirred up strife, as Kinglake has shown, for the momentary obscura- tion of his own villainy in 1858 ; that the Boer war while literally begun by the unhappy Boers, was an inevitable collision provoked by English con- cupiscence. And as regards this scornful denunciation of Germany's desire for expansion have not such de- signs been always most typical of continental Europe, England contenting herself less expen- sively with seizing the ends of the earth? The inbred, blood-indented habits have become in- eradicable, after centuries of subornation. They were and are vital tendencies in these denizens of Europe, and can no more be expelled, as they are, than the fox can lose his predatory instincts, the hawk its raptorial needs, the tiger its carnivorous appetite. Is it impossible for these cozy- cornered, silk-stockinged, and mellifluous pro- Tribe and Class 267 fessors to appreciate the ingrained psychology that grows, matures, and becomes coercive in men who contemplate a past made up of conquests, who see around them the glitter of arms from year to year, who acknowledge the impetuosity of racial (tribal) feelings, professing it themselves, who formulate a religion in the worship of a standard, and who permit the exorbitant predominance of certain groups of people, who by a legally recognized promotion, turn social policies into national propaganda? And in the tribal nature of the Germans we find illustrated to-day, as in the tribal days of Genseric or Vercingetoric, the fascinated devotion to a CHIEF. To-day indeed the chief must appeal to the much more expanded demands of modern culture, and in his appeal satisfy certain intel- lectual, moral, and physical ideals that crave the satiety of their hunger for personal idolatry. Emperor William approaches that combination in an extraordinary measure. Dr. Rose has urged that the Germans, less accustomed to the rule of law than the Romanized countries; — "accordingly until a recent time the German State has been weak and the idea of law has not dominated life as it has among the Latin peoples" ; — but the slightest inspection of historic idols show that over all of Europe, Latin and Teutonic alike, the adulation and the blind fellowship and obedience of the tribe is equally manifested, when the chieftain touches the springs of racial imagination as the embodi- ment — the beau ideal — of its proud hopes. In this 268 Europe's Handicap — admirable language Dr. Rose characterizes the living German Kaiser; ''in this power of calling forth devotion, as also in the riddle of his person- ality, he may challenge comparison with Napoleon I In both men we notice a union of imaginative faculties and practical gifts. They could dream dreams of a world-wide Empire, and also do much to prepare for their realization. .... The vastness of the resources at their command exercised a baneful influence upon minds which were equally despotic and unbending; while the neurotic strain in their natures led them to insist on immediate and unquestioning obedience both in trifling matters and in questions of high policy". Perhaps this imputation is sensibly perverted by the literary fashion of picturing historic parallels, in which the author, lured by the ingenuity of his verbal contrivance, thinks what he writes, because he writes it. The chieftain at any rate remains, and the old true words of Tacitus are again applic- able. That admirable sarcasm with which English wits, as Chesterton, Bennett, Wells, and others have attempted to sear the German, and must certainly, in some of their keener thrusts, have punctured a skin not altogether pachyderm, is of course negligible. It leaves the German worse off perhaps as an object of artistic interest. It does not expel him from the companionship of men. He may indeed claim as a compensation some distinction as an administrator, a fighter, Tribe and Class 269 and a patriot. And right here we are brought face to face with the charges that are intended to drive him outside of the pale of human recognition. The Germans have broken treaties, have com- mitted atrocities, and have invented "frightful- ness." The Germans are a part of their environ- ment, which in all of the peoples of Europe is the environment of Class; they are a consequence of their descent, which in all of the peoples of Europe is tribal. Let us note for a moment other evi- dences among other tribes than the German, in Europe, this facility of breaking treaties, and this irreparable mischief of cruelty, of atrocity. As regards the violation of the Neutrality of Belgium and the breaking of a treaty, the whole question — no matter what serious moral delin- quency it involved — is, in the light of War, and war's necessity — a necessity far more imperious than the average necessity which "knows no law" — suddenly restrained within the harsh rebuke of ''Salus populi, etc." The Germans knew exactly what was essential for their success, and time — Time the very pulse of War — was pressing. Colonel Frobenius, a year or so before, had already with military precision, foreseen the dilemma. He wrote, speaking of French preparations for defence; "they had to obviate the possibility of an invasion of German troops in violation of Belgium's neutrality, or penetrating by way of Switzerland, so that the resisting powers of their old fortresses on these frontiers had to be improved and strengthened. Thus France has kept up a 270 Europe's Handicap — line of fortifications on the whole of her eastern frontier, some 620 miles long which should stay a surprise invasion of a hostile force. It will be quite impossible in any future war to pass these fortresses without paying them any attention, as in 1870". This was the situation when Germany, plunging headlong toward her object, as she had every right to do, once war was begun, under the terrifying menace of a double invasion, with the sinister complication ahead of her, that England would probably declare war against her, asked permission of Belgium to cross her territory to enter France. Of course it was refused. That was precisely the position of honor and fidelity for Belgium to take towards her national ally France, and by implication in support of previous understandings with England. Refused, Germany, also by the paramount claims of safety, ignored the refusal, and drove Belgium into war in defense of her violated land. She might have succumbed to the superior force and offered no resistance, and for justification presented a very fair petition for clemency before the court of History in the allot- ment of blame for the transaction. She chose the more heroic alternative. She resisted, and — accepting the arbitrament of War — she was de- feated. But time had been lost, and the discom- fited, partially disconcerted Germans, were almost ungovernably incensed. The moral question of this violation, the raucous tumult raised in Eng- land over the desecrating appellation of "a scrap Tribe and Class 271 of paper" to the Treaty, by the unspeakable German, was thus characterized, in anticipation, let it be remembered, by Homer Lea, in his book, The Day of the Saxon. Lea there said that England would find it necessary to violate the same neu- trality, "that" — the protest and exclamatory denunciation of England against this same viola- tion — "is unjustified, as the British Empire can make no impression by the sanctification of neutrality. This only forms a means of with- drawing from responsibility and imposing it on those nations who give way to the self-deception that such declamations of neutrality are inviol- able. And in that respect no nation has more frequently violated neutral territory, nor has any nation more often excused itself from the duty of observing neutrality than the British Should the Anglo-Saxons occupy these frontiers that will only mean territorial but not a moral violation of the neutrality of these countries. .... Neutrality of countries under such condi- tions has never been and never will be a factor to be reckoned with in a war between the nations. That kind of neutrality is a modern illusion, and indicates eccentric aberration." Recall too the imbedded cynicism of German leaders for the sacredness of treaties, a cynicism nurtured in the propitious soil of European selfishness. And in the case of Belgium this cynicism was effectively deepened by the bequeathed impression, since the days of Bismarck, that Belgium "was the heart of coalitional conspiracies." Considered in the light 272 Europe's Handicap — of the tribal manners of Europe the violation of the neutrality of Belgium and the breaking of a treaty become simply superfluous trivialities. On a philosophical basis Prof. Hugo Muensterberg maintains that "grave doubts of the value of any plans which aim to secure future peace by the traditional type of agreements and treaties" may be most properly entertained. He added *'we live in the midst of a war in which one belligerent nation after another has felt obliged to disregard treaties and to interpret their agreements in a one- sided way. Only yesterday Italy without any reason of vital necessity, annulled an agreement and a treaty, which had appeared the firmest in European politics, and which yet failed in the first hour of clashing interests". In less superabun- dant phraseology international morality is necessarily disavowed in societies ruled by tribal and class sentiment. Much terror-stricken description has been devoted by english and french writers upon the atrocities of the Germans, especially in Belgium — the destruction of sculptured fanes and stained glass windows scarcely serve the purpose of a serious indictment, except in the circles of pro- foundly despairing aesthetes — and it can be believed. It is again the re-emergence of the ancient tribal nature. Much of this may be attributable, assuming its truth, to the irrepressi- ble outburst of suffering rage at sharp-shooters, snipers, and spies, and much too, as Prof. Hender- son and John Bigelow and others have said, to the Tribe and Class 273 Intractable demonism of impulse when manhood and mercy become syncopated under the visitation of a contagious savagery, as was known In our Civil War, in a few instances. There certainly have been the findings of the Bryce report, and there have been also such statements as those of Frank Harris, (which according to Arnold Bennett should not count for much), "the Germans have waged war like civilized human beings, their soldiers have been severe but not ruthless In Bel- gium, even when dealing with francs-tlreurs, and have shown the ordinary Inhabitants almost in- variable kindness and countesy, and have taken always all care not to destroy cathedrals or works of art". Are the shameless orgies of the Russians to be forgotten In their invasion of Polish Prussia, the remorseless and purely satanic deviltry of the mobs of Moscow, the ruthless devastation in Milan, and even the cold-blooded fury of english slums? It is, in this attempt to fasten unparalleled ignomy upon Germans, instructive to remember that In 1870, after the battle of Gravelotte, 100,000 Ger- mans, men, women, children, were driven homeless out of France, not by the government, but by the people, and that the indecent threat of frenchmen to disregard the chastity of the women of Baden was publicly applauded, and as a minor com- mentary upon English self-restraint, let It be recalled that for the death of one englishman, whose money value was placed at 500,000 dollars, (which, was paid). Admiral Kuper bombarded the / 274 Europe's Handicap — wooden town of Kogosima in Japan, and laid it in ashes, upon the rather trifling provocation of being fired upon by its impotent forts. In further illustration of the occasional frenzy and Satanic bitterness of cruelty that may overtake people as distinguishedly considerate as English- men, the words of Justin McCarthy, referring to the suppression of a really incompetent uprising of negroes in Jamaica, in 1865, may be quoted: ''meanwhile the carnival of repression was going on. The insurrection, or whatever the movement was which broke out on October 11th, was over long before. It never offered the slightest re- sistance to the soldiers. It never showed itself to them. An armed insurgent was never seen by them. Nevertheless, for weeks after, the hang- ings, the floggings, the burnings of houses, were kept up. Men were hanged, women were flogged, 'merely suspect of being suspect.* Many were flogged or hanged for no particular reason, but that they happened to come in the way of men who were in a humour for flogging and hanging. Women — to be sure they were only colored women — were stripped and scourged by the saviors of society with all the delight which a savage village popula- tion of the Middle Ages might have felt in tortur- ing witches." Perhaps it is going back too far to find fault with Englishmen on the score of inhumanity, if we re- call that Lord North and his colleagues subsidized with public money and bribed with food and brandy, "the Cherokees and the Senecas, and Tribe and Class 275 turned them loose upon peaceful communities"; "to work their will, and glut their ferocity amidst a community of English-speaking people who had not a single paid and trained soldier to protect them." All of these acts are tribal — in the case of the outrages upon the American settlers, their authors and abettors boasted of titles and had a lineage — and while part and parcel of the degeneracy of Europe have surely in England been replaced by those standards of conduct which this American Republic, more than any other agency, has triumphantly raised before the dubious recog- nition of Europe. Americans may be pardoned for not feeling too great an admiration for English clemency when they recall the death of ten thousand patriots at the hands of the english authorities in our Revolu- tion at Gowanus Basin, L. I., practically tortured to death by exposure, indecency, and starvation. Their monument in Fort Green park to-day will keep the memory of that outrage unimpaired. Only within a few weeks the Austrians have published a book recounting the abominations of cruelty and insult and neglect by Belgiums, and French, and Russians, and Serbs, while apparently the superior English have not hesitated to return to an ancient misdemeanor, of not supplying enough food to prisoners. It all is in the tribal way. But what a com- mentary these exposures make upon the improved moral sense of the world. The very mention of these shames confuses the culprits, who have 276 Europe's Handicap — perpetrated them — namely the Royal and Class governments of Europe — when, a century ago, they might only have excited the reprobation of a few enlightened and sympathetic men and women. And to whom is the appeal made? To the people of this country, where instinctively it is recognized, prevail the standards of just feeling, and the emancipated cravings of a real humanity. Again as to Belgium; the whole question of Belgium was a critical one and it had, for many years, furnished the tribal statesmen of Europe a subject of political speculation. It has now prob- ably turned out that Germany to-day feels less compunction, or none, when she reviews the conse- quences of her invasion of Belgium, because she intends to keep it for herself. The logic of Force is inviolable for all of the beasts of prey: La raison du plus fort est toujour s la meilletire. Finally the strange chimera of FRIGHTFUL- NESS rises, as it were an infernal exhalation of dreadful dreams, petrifying our hearts with the crudest fears — rises with some bewitched and tortured wand of invention in its withered hands, while with the exorcisms of its incessant impreca- tions, it summons new agonies of pain, new requisitions of courage, new vagaries of dying, new desolations, new discretions of surgery, new wealths of self-sacrifice from the earth of men and women, and scatters the baneful showers of its lurid fires of annihilation over square miles of dead and dying. It well becomes this indescribable Tribe and Class 277 Europe to cap the long centuries of its carnage and blood thirstiness, with this extravaganza of multi- plied scourges of murder and extinction. Through air and earth and water stalk the keen emissaries of Death. War was at first Europe's Practice, then it became its Profession, and now it is its Creation. Germany has, one is forced to believe, utilized the scientific refinements of her labora- tories, the mechanical perfection of her workshops, the sedulous temper of her drilled legions, to exhilirate war with the freshened energies of Bellona, to make of men the zealous slaves of the Maenads, to outrage Heaven with the brilliant blasphemies of her outrage upon civilization. And she has no sluggish rivals. They all learn quickly. The impious genius of the PIT rules, and in the wide spread chancery of his defiling hands the great world of enlightened Europe lies a struggling victim. The last energies of Tribe and Class, in their spendthrift fury of Greed and Envy and Fear and Pride have risen to this mortal com- bat, but it is no longer Greed or. Envy, or Fear, or Pride. It has become — who shall gainsay it — the death-grapple of both Tribe and Class with something urgent, implacable, massively protestant and indignant, the Rights of Human Nature. It will not be whether Russia shall extend her Slavic domination over new lands, and hold in her hand the jewelled minarets of Constantinople; whether Italy shall extend her skirts along the Adriatic, and renew a commerce lost to her since the six- teenth century. It shall not be whether France 278 Europe's Handicap — shall regain Alsace and Lorraine, and receive new franchises of conquest in Africa. It is not the extrusion of the Turk from Europe, and the new divisions of his misgoverned property among the Balkan States. It is not whether Austria shall curb the aggressions of Russia, or appropriate for her satisfaction, and her vengeance, the land of Servia. It is not whether England shall receive an indemnity for her monstrous outlays, and Bel- gium be remade with the compulsory reprisal of Germany's confiscations. It is not whether Ger- many shall lift from the seas the ban of England's monopoly, while she swells territorially to new dimensions, and she reaps the price of her efforts from the treasuries of her enemies. All such ma- terial questions may, indeed must have some sort of settlement, but the overshadowing issue is, a new international regulation of the nations of Europe, and an irreversible decree published by the people that they will no longer remain TRIBES, and be no longer controlled by CLASS. OR — will it be the same old thing over again, the chancelleries crowded with schemers, the thrones filled with dreamers, the barracks resounding to the drop of arms, and the sharp staccatos of the drill-majors, the ceaseless preparation against depredation, the ofhcious plans of piracy, the end- less intrigue of diplomacy, the cherished aspira- tions of linguistic supremacy, of tribal hegemony, the straining momentum of the Krupps and the Creusots, with unheard of, unimaginable ideas of filling grave-yards, and seeding the unturned Tribe and Class 279 ground with corpses, the attitudinizing of courts and embassies, the empty phraseologies of political essayists and pedagogic theorists, the dissimula- tions of world-makers, the plot and play of antagonized interests in trade, the survival, developed to some nth power of monstrous mean- ings, of dynastic ambitions, the old game of nation against nation, race against race, the intensive cultivation of ethnic prejudices, the aimless con- tests for place and power, the separative insignia of CLASS, the venerable routines of service and adulation, the motionless miseries of the useless and the unemployed, all of the fecund race of ills that accompany the intensification of Tribe, and the isolations of Class? The TRIBE has monstrously expanded. It has become modernly typified or re-created in Pan-Germanism, in Pan-Slavism, in Pan-Turkism, in Anglo-Saxonism, in Pan-Latinity, in the exaggerated quintessential expression of a racial idea. The idea rules the units of its vast corporeity, within whose depths the ethnic genius developes with an unappeasible intensity of self- assertion. It is a sublime egotism and a militant propagandum. It is a proposition of insanity, a national paranoism that surrounds itself with enemies, because of its incalculable repulsions. Europe has always been tribal — the Englishman, the Frenchman, the Italian, the Greek, the Slav, German, Magyar, Turk — all tribal, but this magnificent incarnation of Tribe-ism, in its iconoclastic zeal to destroy all images but its own, 280 Europe's Handicap — becomes spiritual murder, or spiritual suicide. The interminable boastings of the former are in- comparable trifling compared with this maelstrom of centripetal conceit. Listen to Mr. Chamber- lain, though in Mr. Chamberlain's thought the ascription to Teutonism was intended to embrace a wide retinue of nations, including the English even the Italian and the French, so far as he dis- cerns in these peoples the traces of that transfigur- ing teutonic genius which has remade the World. "This work of Teutonism is beyond question the greatest that has hitherto been accomplished by man. It was achieved, not by the delusion of 'humanity', but by sound selfish power, not by belief in authority, but by free investigation, not by contentedness with little, but by insatiable ravenous HUNGER." The tribal elan may in- deed carry a nation far along the path of con- quest — conquest of many sorts — not far in the con- quest of ideas, or, at any rate, it contravenes the evolutionary march of this day's political ideals. And on the high crest of Tribe-ism rides the bristling splendors of Class. The tribe presup- poses the chieftain, who is the concrete summa- tion of its character, the tribe coheres through the fused enthusiasms of all individuals for their expressive leader. Tribe-ism sways primitive sentiment, masters it with a positive idolatry, when some one, or indeed a group of notables, catches the imagination, and become the Avatar of its spirit. Tribes meant war : could mean noth- ing else, and Tribe-ism continually arrays a na- Tribe and Class 281 tional complex against another. It may be a war of plots, subterfuges, tricks, innuendoes, bargains, crafty encroachments, and delusive intentions. Sooner or later the pressure of resentment or fear breaks the tension, and it is again war, but now the WAR of MURDER. Now the relevant and mighty thing in this present war is. What next? The expenditure of scorn and blasphemy and hatred over its authors or — in the satisfaction of a concrete personality to objurgate — its author, is Incomputably wasted time and wasted words. The war long expected, long prepared for, an Infallible Index Itself of tribal and Class disabilities, and which would have come, and would have been here, whether Kaiser William was a reality or simply non-existent, for other names and other beings would have embodied the same propaganda, is, let us pray, rapidly approach- ing its end. At the moment it would seem that, there could be no satisfactory decision, as far as the needs or wishes of Tribe and of Class are con- cerned, no ecrasement, viz. the peace of annihilation. Does It not look like the conventional stale-mate? But a decision somewhat more valuable, more revolutionary, more Impregnable, as a fact, in human consciousness may be anticipated, surely may be hoped for. The Progressive Democratiza- tion of Europe, the Wholesale Eradication of Tribe and of Class. And this decision will be reached when It sinks Into the Innermost con- sciousness of men and of women, who do and dare, that this abominable and monstrous crime Is not 282 Europe's Handicap — Austria's, nor Germany's, nor Russia's, nor France's, nor even the crime of the Balkan's nor of England, or of Italy, but is the Crime of Europe, the culminant climax of its centuries of misrule, the pitiless exposure of its vast ethnic fallacy of Tribe, and of its terraced delusions of Class. And it will then be ordained that Europe shall undergo what the biologists have in Biology named a MUTATION. And what is Mutation? * Mutation is the biological analogue of the re- ligious phenomenon called "a new being", and perhaps the latter conception, as the designation of a moral revolution, might best meet the expecta- tions of those who wish to see Europe changed. It was John Bunyan who, after certain well known perturbations of the spirit, expressed a "vehement desire to be one of that number who did sit in the sunshine", and if the present season of trials will change the heart of Europe she too may desire to sit in the sunshine of peace and international comity and neighborliness. Rudolph Eucken says "the German people wish unanimously a peace which shall guarantee lasting peace and prevent further wars", but his essay does not point the way as leading to democratic * To-day the theory of mutational change as explaining the origin of species has, in high quarters, fallen into disrepute, so that an authority — Edward C. Jeffrey — has, rather belligerently, written, "the mutation theory of De Vries appears accordingly to lag useless on the biological stage, and may apparently be now relegated to the limbo of discarded hypothesis." Tribe and Class 283 institutions. England and France, were the measure of their likings determined by the men and women of the streets and common homes, doubtless wish peace, but at present only the demands of the leaders are heard, and that, in England, may be resumed in such cries of ven- geance as mean, for Germany, extinction, and, if Mr. H. G. Wells is consulted, a perpetual trade boycott against her, and in France, were we to believe M. Jean Finot only after Germany has been physically crushed, and an indemnity of $34,000,000,000 paid. Count Apponyi sees noth- ing in the whole matter but the usual struggle for possessions, this or that cc5untry has lost, or wishes to retain, and the fight for preeminence; "we in Austria and Hungary have no serious points of conflict with England and France. France after 1870 had to make an effort to regain her lost provinces from Germany, but she must now see that the attempt is hopeless England too, would have to give up her aspirations to absolute naval superiority over all the rest of the world, in a dominance which would enable her to dictate the affairs of the world." Whether the Balkans wish peace or war is with them debatable, but on all sides there is to be noted the revival of proud designs, the fanning into flame of retaliatory plots, the crude resurgence of more hatred and more vengeance. Bulgaria has been wTonged, ''Greece acting as the chief villain, and Servia as the second villain, backed and instigated by the 284 Europe's Handicap — heavy plotter in the background Russia". Servia moodily sulks in her disaster, and in her sense of impotence and defeated ambition. Rou- mania having taken advantage of Bulgaria's plight, to rob her of the province of Dobrudja, quietly sets about to await Austria's discomfiture to capture the long envied region of Transylvania, and frets over her disappointment, because Bulgaria watches her like a cat ready to pounce upon her back, should she stir, Austria has hidden in her heart cherished schemes of holding what she has, and finally swelling her southern boundaries by the effectual extinction of Servia, and the absorption of Albania. Russia moves with the predestinated craft and stealth of the skulking Bear, for the prize of the centuries — Constantinople, and now, nearer than ever, seems the vaunted goal of her sleepless hopes — the dream of Peter and Katherine. Italy seizes the instant to repatriate her thousands who have found at the hands of Austria — trusting Italian writers — a lingering death or a death even more rapid and inexcusable. And Why? The tribal cause again. "The Austrian plan is now well known, to eradicate the Italian population, and supplant it with a Croatian". The Italian has become feverish with a desire to redeem his people, as he thinks slowly vanishing under the exterminating processes of Austrian and German decimation, both physical and economic, keeping "vlgorousl}^ burning the patriotic fires of the Societies of Trent and Trieste, and of Italia Irredenta". Germany, Tribe and Class 285 obsessed to the very bottom of her soul, with the apparition — Yea! the bodily presence, of the over- powering menace of erasure, fights fiercely, while above von Bernhardi, von Bethman— HoUweg, von Bulow, von den Goltz, von Clausewitz, Treitschke, Hans Delbruck, Frobenius, sublimely soars the figure of the Kaiser, in a half God-like Assumption, and from the cloud of his trans- figuration issues the orgulous pronouncement; ^^The Army is the foundation of the social structure of the Empire.''' And again from the^ c lois tered studies of pleasant England, illumined by a wit more pas- sionate than Swift's, in a phrase more biting than Carlyle's, comes the voice of Gilbert K. Chesterton; "Now w^e, the French and English, do not mean this when we call the Prussians barbarians. If their cities soared higher than their flying ships, if their trains traveled faster than their bullets, we should still call them barbarians. We should know exactly what we meant by it; and we should know that it is true. For we do not mean any- thing that is an imperfect civilization by accident. We mean something that is the enemy of civiliza- tion by design. We mean something that is willfully at war with the principles by which human society has been made possible hitherto. Of course, it must be partly civilized even to destroy civilization. Such ruin could not be wrought by the savages that are merely unde- 286 Europe's Handicap — veloped or inert. You could not have even Huns without horses, or horses without horsemanship. You could not have even Danish pirates without ships, or ships without seamanship," or, let us add, satirists without perversion. Truly from the Man on horseback with the SWORD in his hand, to the Man in his editorial chair with the PEN, all is tribal. Slaughter in the field, and Abuse in the closet. Where is the MUTATION, the changed being, where the awakened sense of the enormity of their present relations among the tribes of Europe, where Conversion of Mind and Regeneration of Conduct — , to utilize the convenient text-book terms of religion? They certainly are not very apparent. Still only the "Gall of Bitterness and Bond of Iniquity". Must the hideous wretched- ness continue, until Europe wakes up, or rather until some nascent sense of their absolute equality as human beings, their undivided goal as workers in the solution of the world's enigma, their spiritual contemporaneity as servants of righteous- ness, suddenly convicts them of national profligacy and national murder? Such conviction will never practically subdue their particularist activities, as long as Class and Tribe survive. To the Class — man, as to the German Junker, as described by M. Millioud, "equality is equality of rank, of worth, of wealth, of force, but impersonal equality before the law is for him an unnatural thing, an invention of the professors which at heart he despises". To the Tribe and Class 287 Tribes-man, nations express best the genius of a specialized temperament, his own, and history can never be anything else but tribal conflict, in an inevitable evolution, whose exorbitant ends are finally reached with the Survival of the Fittest; with ^'fittest'' meaning the strongest, for in the tribal thought material and immaterial issues coalesce in the possession of a cosmic Force, which Force is both physiological and mental. The Class-man is intelligible, and the Tribes-man is intelligible also, but neither will bring happiness to Europe. We have hinted at a decision that will terminate both. How that decision will come — if it comes at all — no one can tell, no one even fitfully foresee. At last, somehow, we may believe, the rising tide of human compassion will become a flood, an engulfing destroying flood, and on its leaping waves, whose rolling surges will be quickened by the tornadoes of something different from compassion, the blasts of human wrath, and human execration; the ancient, the beautiful, the storied, the sacro-sanct edifice of Class will be swept from its venerable foundations, and the partitions of tribes, the walls of irreconcilable prejudice — Nay, perhaps the morticed fences of Creed, be levelled to the common ground of our common destiny, in the progress of the Ages. CHAPTER VIII America's Neutrality Overwhelmingly important is the conservation of this country from the contagion of Europe's war-fever. The preservation of our people from the slightest participation in the war is evident to every one not specifically interested in the issue of the war itself, as a partisan or an accomplice. Our position though is a trifling embarrassing, as we do not seem inclined to keep the scales of our sympathies quite evenly balanced, and the fervent protests to Germany are not quite satisfactorily — or have not been — evened up by our legitimate complaints against England's wholesale deporta- tion of our neutral commerce from the seas. The ruinous general legislation at Washington which has destroyed business, has driven our specialists in war supplies to probably regard the fratricidal contest in Europe as most opportune for business purposes, and that exposes us to very plausible reproaches, and no inconsiderable amount of envious scorn. The one way to overcome possible condemnation, is to assert the freedom of our merchandise under the limitations of an actual blockade, to all ports demanding it. No act which would help to free us from entanglements should be omitted, no matter if the act ostensibly derogates from our technical dignity. For Tribe and Class 289 instance it was surely most inadvertent for the Administration to have allowed American citizens to expose themselves — at the risk of the whole country — on the Lusitania, which was a steamer of one of the belligerents, loaded with ammunition, intended for one purpose only, the slaughter of that belligerent's enemies, and while the new method of submarine warfare has not received international sanction, it has decidedly come to stay, and no reference to previous rescripts or protocols will withdraw it from future naval adoption throughout the world. There is no intention here to excuse the German attack, but can it be possibly hidden from all, that in the preservation of our strictest neutrality the help of each citizen is important, and the avoidance of all situations likely to embroil the country with the fighting nations should be most circum- spectly regarded. While these reflections are almost commonplace, and have the hearty endorsement of all, not truculently disposed to claim unlimited privileges of movement, under the present belligerent condi- tions, unmindful or simply careless of the peril involved for the community, the general question of America's Neutrality, in expression at least, is not so commonly approved. The daily papers while giving the news from both sides with the most commendable impartiality, are very far from maintaining an irreproachable demeanor of neutrality in saying what they think, or what they wish. It seems so from the inspection of the 290 Europe's Handicap — great dailies in New York city. The actual ques- tion as to whether an attitude of Neutrality is not imposed upon us, as a moral necessity or duty, has been debated, and a serious importance given to the debate by no less an authority and profound thinker than Prof. George Trumbull Ladd, and by so ingenious and influential a writer as Mr. E. A. Bradford. Prof. Trumbull has committed his thoughts to paper under the caption of The Ethics of Morality and Mr. Bradford less reserved- ly in an article entitled The Immorality of Neu- trality. Of course at the outset, before one becomes in- volved in dialectics, and heated by rhetorical declamations, it is indispensable to understand what we propose to signify by Neutrality, to reach a practical conclusion as to its value to ourselves, and to perceive clearly the regulations of speech and conduct it enforces. If we turn to Kent's Commentaries this salutary and unimpeachable advice confronts us in the first paragraphs of his General Rights and Duties of Neutral Nations, ''a nation that maintains a firm and scrupulously impartial neutrality, and commands the respect of all other nations by its prudence, justice, and good faith, has the best chance to preserve unim- paired the blessings of its commerce, the freedom of its institutions, and the prosperity of its resources." This has an old time flavor of the sort of rhetorical platitudes which those who adopt a more picturesque manner of writing, and a less respectful demeanor towards the commonplaces of Tribe and Class 291 judicial opinion, may quite superiorly disdain. But no display of lavish epithets, or the fervor of the moralistic termagant, will at this juncture serve the practical — and the final — ends of this country, as well as an absolute reservation of opinion as between the belligerents, omitting nothing that will establish our technical neutrality, and receding not an inch from the just respects of our rights by all parties concerned, consistent, let us add, with the conservation of natural and advised safeguards to prevent collision. Now exactly what is "technical neutrality"? Technical neutrality is the absolute avoidance of all assistance to the belligerents that contra- venes the present accepted Laws of Nations. It means that ''the neutral is not to favor one of them to the detriment of the other; and it is an essential character of neutrality, to furnish no aids to one party which the neutral is not equally ready to furnish to the other". Again "the principal restriction which the law of nations im- poses on the trade of neutrals, is the prohibition to furnish the belligerent parties with warlike stores, and other articles which are directly auxiliary to warlike purposes." Again "a neutral may also forfeit the immunities of his national character by violations of the blockade; and among the rights of belligerents, there is none more clear and incontrovertible, or more just and necessary in the application, than that which gives rise to the law of blockade" ; but "a blockade must be existing in point of fact; and in order to 292 Europe's Handicap — constitute that existence, there must be a power present to enforce it. All decrees and orders, declar- ing extensive coasts and whole countries in a state of blockade, without the presence of an adequate naval force to support it, are manifestly illegal and void, and have no sanction in public law". Now the particular instances in which this country may become involved both with England and Germany on the question of her * 'technical neutrality", are most conspicuously, the exporta- tion of munitions of war to England, and the ex- portation of food-stuffs, cotton and other hitherto considered non-contraband goods to Germany. England overriding all previous considerations which have delimited the character of oversea commerce, in the vessels of neutrals, has deter- mined to prohibit almost all intercourse between this country and Germany, and has ignored the proposals of this government to adhere to those "rules of fairness, reason, justice and humanity which all modern opinion regards as imperative". Not only are the shipments of not-contraband to Germany interdicted, but the freedom of shipment of the same to other neutral ports has been summarily interfered with. Neither has she maintained any practical blockade before the ports of Germany, but has exercised the peremp- tory right of seizure on the high seas, the only justification for which must rest in some assump- tion that the circumstances of this war cancel all the recognized contrivances and regulations of neutral commerce, hitherto conceived as inviolate. Tribe and Class 293 On the other hand in retaliation, Germany devises a hitherto unused and indeed hitherto unknown method of submarine blockade, which proves terrifically effective, but introduces an entirely new set of considerations in the relations of neutrals and belligerents, inasmuch as the nature of the new instrumentality does not readily admit of the customary methods of stopping ships, and inspecting the cargoes of the suspected vessel. It is — if an enemy's boat — torpedoed and sunk. Against both of these conditions the United States has protested, and has received no satisfac- tion. Nor will she. The embittered contest between the belligerents fbrbid concessions which might prove disastrous or injurious to either, and the neutral nations must make the best of it as they can. Under these circumstances the issue is plain. The depredations from both must be borne or resisted. Resistance can take the form of war- like protection for our ships, by naval convoys, or we can withdraw from any and all commerce between ourselves and England and Germany. It is quite aside from the purpose of this essay to discuss so difficult and dangerous a question. But it is clear that the contentions of Mr. Bradford and Prof. Ladd are inadmissible. The attitude of neutrality, from every reasonable, practical, and sane point of view, is absolutely the wisest, and the best, and the immoderate claims of both of these writers — though their exact and specific recommendations are not very coherently made — must be, in the interests of the whole nation, and 294 Europe's Handicap — with deference to the very contrasted opinions held by its citizens, utterly rejected. It is an attitude of questionable propriety to inject, as some editors do, in our more prominent papers, the unreserved animus of their hostility to Germany, even though they more decorously insist that their sentiments of admiration for the German people, as a people, remain unchanged. The European squabbles, and the enraged combats of TRIBE and CLASS should have no encouragement from Americans, and no overt or foolish act of ours should lead to that most lamentable disaster of our engaging, by participation, in their settlement. CHAPTER IX Germanization It has always been regarded as a piece of in- comparable humour, delicioussatire, and admirable invention, among the various hallucinations of the invincible Knight of La Mancha, that he was bewitched enough by his lunacy to convert wind- mills into giants, to descry in a wretched inn, a castle, in its sorry wench, a beauteous princess, to make out of two clouds of dust, raised by two flocks of sheep, two great armies, one led by the great emperor Alifanfaron, Lord of the great island of Taprobana, and the other by the king of the Garamantes, Pentapolin of the naked arm, while the very pinnacle of fun is reached, in the magical story, when he of the sorrowful figure retires to the mountains of the Sierra Morena, to imitate the penance of Beltenebrose and conceives the barber's basin to be the Helmet of Mambrino. We can almost believe that the future historian of this European conflict will be inclined to catalogue, along with these madnesses of Don Quixote, the ravings of the editors, and the essay- ists, the casual letter writers, and the journalistic poets, who to-day prophecy that in the victory of the Germans, some sort of paganization of Europe will ensue, and the vast process of Germanization of the world will be begun, with the utter expulsion 296 Europe's Handicap — from it of all beauty, civilization, and the decorous relations of its inhabitants, under the sterilizing force of teutonic harshness, dullness, merciless precision, and militant despotism. This German- ization becomes to some minds, endowed with effective imagination and hysterical nerves, a most awful certainty, without their considering whether the extension of a rule, which, in its own borders, has produced a distributed content and most fruitful efficiency, is so altogether obnoxious to human needs. But how essentially foolish this terror is — and that it is a terror is witnessed by the words of such writers as Grace Atherton, Mr. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, Kipling, and even the capricious and gay-witted Poultney Bigelow, not to speak of the heavier and really tiresome Jeremiads of the pro- fessors — a moment's reflection shows. The war has reached a vindictive stage which means, for the present, its bitter prolongation, and only one consequence can flow from even a short continua- tion, a consequence that recently has been well summarized by Prof. George Simmel in his article in the Tagehlatt; "America stands hear by as the waiting heir at the deathbed of a rich testator — Europe sends not a small part of its fortune to America, and the equivalent which it receives it blows into the air, or rather, it uses for the better execution of its suicide, to hasten the succession of America to the world-throne Is Europe insane that it commits this hara-kari?" Tribe and Class 297 What are the facts? Six nations — among them the most powerful and richest in Europe — are fighting fiercely for predominacne; it is as yet not quite clear what exactly they are fighting for. They are putting forth all the power they can exert, and they are spending all the money they can raise. The figures — even if roughly and care- lessly compiled — are stupifying. There may be 15 millions of men in arms, some two millions have been killed, and some five times that number wounded, and the money outlay so far probably exceeds $6,000,000,000! The conclusion forced upon one, viewing the contest impartially, is that exhaustion alone will terminate it, unless — as hinted in the body of this essay — the PEOPLE demand its cessation. We are told by a number of unauthorized and more or less emotional guessers, that the war will last a year more, and three years more, but the slightest glance at the expenditures of money and men would seem to make any considerable prolonga- tion of the insane struggle preposterous. It certainly will last longer, and at the terrific rate of consumption of material, even a few more months of it will disturb to their foundations the financial resources of the various countries, upset their industries, and thrust upon their populations new eventualities of effort to regain their wealth. If Germany can hold what she has gained she will be lucky, and the Germanization of that will not so frightfully disfigure the earth, or make the existence of the rest of it impossible. England will 298 Europe's Handicap — certainly remain England, and France, France, Italy, Italy, and the whole expression of the world practically subsist unchanged. If Germanization means, (besides that mechanical regulation which rules the mind and the body and society, with an inflexible predisposition to make the most of themselves) also the dread thing labelled MILI- TARISM; then indeed there is reason for alarm, for again that includes the perpetuation of TRIBE and CLASS. On this latter question hangs the welfare of the future of Europe. Democratization is its absolute remedy. Militarism in the last years has been afforded an exaggerated status in Germany but it has not been absent anywhere in Europe. In Ger- many it gains a spectacular effrontery because of its signal efficiency. Arms and armies have been always the bane of the continent, and nothing will dissipate the tribal spirit and the class pride that encourages them, but the vigorous injection into the political thought and feeling of the peoples the need of popular ascendency in government and the utter obliteration of HEREDITARY SYM- BOLS. Can that be accomplished? Will the shattering throes of this effort at mutual extinction bring about so superhuman an upheaval? Possibly. There will be change, perhaps a deep movement for reconstitution of political traditions, but in many aspects of the problem, a solution, embodying a definite assimilation of the American spirit throughout Europe, seems almost incredible. Tribe and Class 299 If Germanization means the universal exten- sion of the use of the tongue of Schiller and of Goethe, that is an absurdity, although, were it probable, the incoherent frenzy of fear in those talking about Germanization, might be fully condoned. But no such dreadful catastrophe is conceivable. Can any one imagine a frenchman, and the french nation to boot, abandoning their language for the shocking cacophony of german; To cleave the general ear with horrid speech, and be lost in its maelstrom of inverted clauses? Is it believable that the Italians, under any inflic- tion less than death, would exchange their Parnas- sian melodies for the rude grotesqueries of the Teuton? Is the language of Cervantes likely to be replaced by the multisyllabic obfuscation of Schlegel? Will the countrymen of Shakespeare learn to put genders on their articles of speech, and separate the prefixes and suffixes of their verbs? Never, on your life, or — more eloquently, That will never he: Who can impress the forest; hid the tree Unfix his earth-hound root? Does Germanization mean that we shall all worship Gambrinus and drink beer, fertilize our bowels with the messes of a delicatessen shop, and subdue our noses to the tyranny of Limburger? Impossible; all kinds of fit eating are beloved 300 Europe's Handicap — by men, tolerated, respected, even tried, but the familiar dish remains inviolate; Ye pow'rs wha mak mankind your care And dish them out their hill o' fare, Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware That jaups in luggies: But, if ye wish her gratefu' pray'r, Gie her a Haggis Perhaps this dreadful Germanization implies that we shall hear no other music than that of Wagner and Dr. Strauss. The Kaiser and all his legions will not accomplish that. Good tunes are im- perishable. No one need blanch with terror at the thought of losing either Pinafore or Rigoletto, Carmen, (indeed we have heard that the Kaiser is himself partial to Bizet), or Traviata. The german terror will not scare them off the foot-stool, whatever else it may do. Germanized in our music! Nonsense. That is madness, and the wide aspiration for music of all sorts among men and women, with the actual increasing phenome- non of cosmopolitanism in musical taste forbids this calamity. The german musical terror passed away a long time ago. Has not James Huneker — a man not forbearing to the melomaniacs — said, " 'with what infantile malignancy was regarded the lead pencil of the German music-master!' Why, even as I write, my very sentence assumes an OUendorffian cast because of the harrowing atmos- phere conjured up by that same irritable Teutonic pencil-wielder!", but now, "poets no longer make Tribe and Class 301 sonnets to our Ladies of Ivories, nor are budding girls chained to the keyboard." Abolish rag-time? Rash thought. Verbum sat sapienti. Well what other catastrophe threatens us from Germanization? Learning? We shall become en- cyclopaedic. Heaven forbid. Must we become quid-nuncs who, like the knight-errant described by the knight of La Mancha, "must be learned in the law, and understand distributive and com- munitative justice, must be conversant in divinity, must be skilled in medicine, especially in botany that he may know how to cure the disease with which he may be afflicted, must be an astronomer, must understand mathematics", with all of which the Spaniard also conjoined, (and surely the teu- tono-phobists will not object), "all the cardinal and theological virtues." Well to be a Paragon and a Dictionary is an almost inconceivable misery, for then we should become what Mr. Huneker has designated, "the new individual in literaturecreatedbyMr.Shaw"— ^5t/P£i?-C^i9. Hoc valde vitium periculosum est. Non tigris catulis citata raptis, Non dipsas medio perusta sole, Nee sic scorpios improbus timetur. Nam tantos, rogo, quis ferat labores? Or perhaps Germanization means the things Miss Meredith has so pointedly alluded to, (Letter to the N. Y. Times), when she writes; "Let us compare our own progress in these respects with that which Germany can show, 302 Europe's Handicap — for instance, for it seems to me that the duty of the State to its citizens is more keenly real- ized and more conscientiously fulfilled in Germany than in any other country". Her Bill of Particulars, as a record of Merit, is rather convincing, (See original letter). And if she is right — Mrs. Atherton's enchantment over Munich confirms her praise, — then it would almost seem that Germanization to this extent conforms rather propitiously with the admitted functions of government, as instanced by the Englishman John Stuart Mill, inasmuch as ''they embrace a much wider field than can easily be included within the ring-fence of any restrictive definition, and that it is hardly possible to find any ground of justification common to them all, except the comprehensive one of general ex- pediency; nor to limit the interference of govern- ment by any universal rule, save the single and vague one that it should never be admitted, but when the case of expediency is strong". But pleasantries and innuendoes aside, what Germanization means, to those shuddering before the awful menace, is understood. It means a dis- astrous infusion of Force and Rule in social rela- tions, the substitution of Hardness for Geniality, and of that heathenism of taste that afflicts the shrinking Chesterton, when he finds the germans putting arms on the Venus of Milo, that "would look at once like the arms of a woman at a wash- tub". It means to the same embittered aesthete, **a failure in honor, which almost amounts to a Tribe and Class 303 failure in memory; and egomania that is honestly blind to the fact that the other party is an ego, and, above all, an actual itch for tyranny and inter- ference, the devil which everywhere torments the idle and the proud", and to innumerable Ameri- cans — frightfully anglicized — it means an actual world-empire, of which however the very mention is its own utter refutation. All of this agitation before the Furor Teutonicus is hopelessly childish. At the completion of this war Germany and all of Europe will be a material and moral devastation. Flat on its back, neither Germanization nor any other nationalism, as a process of subjugation, or a" propagandum of ideas, will be thought of. The big problem of recupera- tion will occupy fully the mind of the moribund patients. They will be also given plenty of time to think, whether TRIBE and CLASS can be and ought not to be exterminated. In a different way from the mode of this essay Mr. H. G. Wells has well summarized a similar conclusion. Rewrites; "Unless this does help to bring about a lasting peace in the world it is idle to pretend that it will have been anything else but a monstrous experi- ence of evil. If, at the end, of it we cannot bring about some world-wide political synthesis, unani- mous enough and powerful enough to prohibit further wars by a stupendous array of moral and material force, then all this terrible year of stress and suffering has been no more than a waste of life, and our sons and brothers and friends and allies have died in vain. If we cannot summon enough 304 Europe's Handicap — goodwill and wisdom in the world to establish a world alliance and a world congress to control the clash of legitimate national aspirations and con- flicting interests, and to abolish all the forensic trickeries of diplomacy, then this will be neither the last war, nor will it be the worst, and men must prepare themselves to face a harsh and terri- ble future, to harden their spirits against continu- ing and increasing adversity, and to steel their children to cruelty and danger. Revenge will become the burthen of history." The progressive democratization of Europe, the total obliteration of Tribe and Class — if such an event is conceivably possible — and the assimila- tion of the American liberality of sentiment, and humanity of purpose, and ubiquity of sympathy, and permanence of ideals, and toleration of altru- istic designs, might effect the Mutation, we at least can dream of in Europe, or, by a Permutation more gradual and more stable, achieve its redemp- tion. I. SAMUEL, VIII, 9-22 9. Now therefore hearken unto their voice: ho wbeit, yet pro- test solemnly unto them, and shew them the manner of the king that shall reign over them. 10. And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked of him a king. 11. And'he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and jowe shall run before his chariots. 12. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instru- ments of his chariots. 13. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. 14. And he will take your fields^ and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. 15. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vine- yards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. 16. And he will take your men-servants, and your maid- servants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. 17. He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. 18. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you ; and the Lord will not hear you in that day. 19. Nevertheless, the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us; 20. That we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles. 21. And Samuel heard all the words of the people, and he rehearsed them in the ears of the Lord. 22. And the Lord said to Samuel, Hearken unto their voice, and make them a king. And Samuel said unto the men of Israel, Go ye every man unto his city. r 52-79 I ^4 o^ ^'-^^-;o -^^ .'^^ .V 4 O ..-^ ^^-^^ 4.0 ^. * 1 ^ * o H o Deacidified using the Bookkeeper pro( >?^ Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide ^ Af Treatment Date: j^^^v 2001 ; si PreservationTechnolog -^ ^- A WORUD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVE c » o -^ v^ , , ■« .^ .^' ^ .0^ ^o * A ° ^^'% 0^ ^n.. & >^> .V- V 0> ^oV' > 0- ,H c V ^ o > ^ ^^ <^ ^, ■^/ ,^