BOOKS.
CONGRRVEtS ROMAN EMPIRE OP THE WEST.'
THE selfish and factious spirit which distinguished representative government in France, not merely under the Republic but from the Restoration—the singular exhibitions as well of behaviour as of principle that have taken place on the other side of the At- lantic—the bigotry, dishonesty, and corruption of the Spanish Cortes—and the remarkable ineptitude which the British Parlia- ment has for some years past displayed—have not been resultless. They have in fact raised doubts in the minds of men as to the superiority of what is called constitutional government to meet the necessities of a national crisis, or even to deal with the re- quirements of an advanced civilization—when the crowded popu- lations of immense towns require a sanitary policy which formerly was not so called for—when to train and educate the masses which swarm in those towns has become a necessity—when it is per- haps desirable to exercise some economical forethought as to the subsistence, employment, or removal by emigration of the prole- tarians, who do, or may under adverse circumstances constitute the dangerous classes. Conclusions, however, often slumber in the mind till some striking events give them reality and application. The low estimate of representative bodies, which had been a floating idea since these bodies began to exhibit their want of power to rule themselves, or their indisposition to let others rule by means of them, received a living impulse by the conduct of the French Republic of 1848, the coup d'etat, and its subsequent acceptance by the French people. The fact has been brought still closer to us by our break-down in the war upon that which is the easiest func- tion of government, business administration. Men began to talk of autocracy as a thing to be at least admired ; not long since, the Times, little given to touch upon abstract theories, expressed the opinion that a country with a limited government is not adapted to wage war successfully, and that we had better give it up or introduce des- potic practice. Still it is strange to find the same idea deliberately advanced by a quondam Fellow and Tutor of Oxford, in a series of lectures on the constitution and decline of the Roman Empire of the West, delivered to the Philosophical Institution of Edin- burgh ; and moreover, advanced not as a necessity to be submitted to, but as the true principle of government upon a great scale ! The following passage is a digression, for which the lecturer apo- logizes ; but it is a digression congruous to the spirit of the whole survey of the Imperial government from Augustus to Odoacer.
" Possibly, many of my hearers familiar with the language and traditions of constitutional monarchy, and accepting on various grounds the common statements as to its superiority, may object, that what was good and neces- sary at the time of the foundation of the Empire ceased to be so at a later period. They may urge, in common with very many writers on the subject, that it was an error in policy both in the first Cwsars and their successors, that they founded no institutions by which their absolute power might gra- dually have been modified into a more constitutional one.
"I differ wholly from this opinion. I think that, under the conditions of the Roman Empire, its political organization was based on a correct view of its wants. I may go further, and I do so in the hope of drawing your attention to this problem of government : I may add, that not merely the Roman Empire, but that every large political society—every society in which we find aggregated many smaller ones, of sufficient size themselves to be in- dependent societies—to make my meaning clear, all such states as the larger kingdoms of modern Europe, with no exception as to our own country, are not fit subjects for the constitutional system. That system, with its fictions and its indirect action, may offer advantages at certain times, as, historically, it has done with us; but, on the whole, I think it alien to good government. It has ever failed ; and I appeal to the history of England in support of my assertion, and not merely to the present disgraceful state of our government, though that is so much in accordance with past history as to exonerate in a measure the men at the expense of the system : it is failing you now in the presence of real dangers and war. It is of more than doubtful advantage in peace. The people of this country must have felt of late that it is not a sys- tem of checks, with the ultimate irresponsibility that is its result, but a vi- gorous unity of administration, that is required for the right conduct of a war. The poor of this country feel the effects, though they may not be aware of the cause, of the want of a vigorous Central Executive—of a govern- ment, in short, in the place of Parliamentary no-government. It may be long before the necessity of so great a political change is acknowledged, but it is at any rate, a possibility that it should be again acknowledged as it has been , and it would be desirable that the atmosphere of political discus- sion should be free enough to admit of such questions being agitated, which, speaking generally, is hardly the case. For myself, I heartily wish that the time were come when we were clear of the government of boards, call them a cabinet or a vestry, with all their complication of personal and local inte- rests, and under the government of one—a protector or dictator, if you like to call him so—the name is unimportant: the essential is, that he should be one who would rule England as she was ruled by Cromwell. "Excuse these remarks. History and politics are really inseparable; and if lectures are to be worth anything, the lecturer must speak freely."
There is nothing absolutely new in this theory, or in its ap- plication to the Roman Emperors. Many philosophers have in theory advocated a well-administered autocracy, under various eu- phonical terms. Gibbon pronounces, that "if a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power under the , guidance of virtue and wisdom." It is probable that' if the litera- ture of Rome had possessed and preserved the reports of " our own correspondent," the historian would have had details about misery
• The Roman Empire of the West. Four Lectures delivered at the Philosophica' Institution, Edinburgh, February 1855. By Richard Congreve, M.A., late Fellow and Tutor of Wadham College, Oxford. Published by Parker and Son.
and misgovernment enough to modify his general statement. Tie best despotism, however, will of necessity act somewhat on military principles, where suffering or life are considered as nothing in com- parison with the attainment of an end, and where even those who are " happy and prosperous" are probably made so against the grain, The absolute ruler of a nation may impress his energy on his subordinates, but he could do little more; otherwise Nicholas of Russia, during the generation throughout which he reigned, would have purged his offices of corruption. In a great nation go- verned by an absolute monarch, there may be startling or melodra- matic punishments of official abuses; but there must be much licence, much tyranny, much helpless suffering, which the world will never know because it is not permitted to be told. These opinions against despotism have no more novelty than Mr. Con- greve's in its favour. In this country they are widely entertained ; and, coupled with the national conception of a "free-born Bri- ton," and similar phrases expressive of the national thought, they may seem to maintain public opinion in this country on a sound constitutional basis. Bat the instant evil has greater influ- ence over men than the abstract and ideal good : when anger is ex- cited and evil inflicted by a system, whether apathetic or effete, it is not a theory that will ward off its destruction. The intellect of France knew all about the theories in favour of freedom ; but they could not avert the coup d'etat, or prevent its acceptance by the French people. Greece and Rome were stunned respecting the be- nefits of freedom, with the advantage, which France had not, of having long-established forms of so.called free governments. Nay, at the very period that the first Cmsar and his nephew Augustus were destroying the last remains of constitutional government, the tongue, the pen, and the life of Cicero himself, were exhausted in defence of it. They were exhausted with as little avail as if im- perial power were an absolute good ; which Mr. Congreve main- tains it was under the circumstances. It cannot, however, be said that either the Patrician government of Rome or the Representa- tive Assembly of Republican France lowered the external repu- tation of their country. There was more or less of corruption, confusion, ineptitude, and terror, at home ; but abroad there was not disgrace. France was regarded with fear and anxiety : Rome during her long internal agony was victorious over external enemies. It is to be apprehended that the British Parliament, and the small men whom Parliament tolerates in evil, may not leave to English- men the sorry consolation that attended upon the citizens of Rome or the citizen subjects of the President. Incapable of rising to the height of their position—shrinking from 'responsibility, and from the labour their duty involves—apparently deluded by the theatrical and rhetorical artifices by which Russia magnifies her power, and evidently disregarding the vital drain upon her re- sources which are caused by the demands of the Baltic, Poland, and the Crimea, (even when every deduction is made for Russian exaggeration of what those forces are,) they seem willing to re- duce the country to contempt, as well as to show the impotence of constitutionalism by patching up a disgraceful in addition to a futile peace. The grounds upon which Mr. Congreve bases his conclusions in favour of autocratic government go deeper than the mere com- pleteness of an absolute ruler's plans or the simple vigour of their execution. He seems to think, that however well direct democracy may consist with a small state, constitutional government in a large state is in fact an oligarchy or an aristocracy ; that imperial government in Rome was a democracy with a dictator at its head; and that the best Emperors faithfully fulfilled their mission. This mission, the lecturer conceives, was to repel the barbarians, and to establish a unity of civilization throughout that portion of the world which was then capable of it ; to overturn the provincial tyranny and extortion of the aristocratical republic, and to protect the interests of the many against the few. Except in those pas- sages where a brief narrative of events becomes necessary to en- able the reader to follow the lecturer, this exposition, and an en- deavour to trace the reason why the Imperial government de- clined so rapidly, form the subject of the lectures. The decline Mr. Congreve ascribes to the personal vices or incapacity of many of the Emperors, to the mixture of the hereditary principle with the true constitutional theory of selection or adoption, and to the want of a middle class. The numbers and power of an urban pauper population was also an evil, as well as.the great predomi- nance of the towns over the country, which was really abandoned to slaves and their bailiffs. He considers the complete union of the secular and religious powers in the person of the Emperor as another source of evil ; for it destroyed the sense of religious duty, and removed the means of any opposition to Imperial power on the ground of obligation to a superior being. Mr. Congreve fails to remark the temporal benefits to the people where the priestly au- thority was subordinate, as. in the Roman Empire, compared with the Papal States, where it is predominant.
In the consideration of these subjects, and of incidental topics springing out of them, as well as in the more historical matter, such as the delineation of " characters," Mr. Congreve exhibits a well-meditated knowledge, and views both striking and novel, though often, in our opinion, unsound or extreme. In the treat- ment of his great subjects—the characteristics of the Roman Em- pire, the conduct and character of the prominent emperors, the means by which some of them arrested while others hastened the decline, and the causes of the final destruction—he is not merely animated as a writer, but imparts a lifelike air to his book by reference to contemporary circumstances. Such are these remarks on succession to an absolute throne.
" In a constitutional monarchy, such as our own, which is but by courtesy a monarchy, where monarchy is but one of several institutions, theoretically coordinate, but in fact with one—in our own case the aristocraey—dominant, and the others subordinate ; in such a monarchy the succession is compara- tively unimportant, and may be settled, as it is with us, on the strict here- ditary principle. And whatever the result of that principle, whoever occupies the throne, there is no real danger to the system ; for the government resides not in the monarch, but in the institutions as a whole.
"But the case is different with a monarchy proper, where the sovereign is actually the centre of government, from widen all action proceeds. There it is of supreme importance what principle you adopt in regulating the suc- cession. And it seems to me a fair conclusion from historical experience, to say that in such a monarchy, the strict observance of the hereditary principle is inapplicable—that some modification of it is necessary. It has been felt to be so in the two great states of Eastern Europe, which are really absolute monarchies. Neither the Czar of Russia nor the Emperor of Austria are the rightful tenants of their respective thrones on our principle of succession. The modification adopted in those two cases is, that the successor has been chosen within the limits of the reigning family. Now, the Roman Empire was, to the full as much as either of the two mentioned, an absolute mo- narchy, and as such required the gravest attention to the question of the succession. He who was to have resting upon his shoulders the burden of that empire, with its two great tasks of upholding civilization against bar- barism and of organizing the civilized world, should evidently unite a variety of qualities. He should be, as Tacitus says of Tiberius, tried in war, for so would he be respected by the enemies of Rome, and capable of controlling her defenders, the thirty legions that guarded her frontiers. KO should at the same time have a mind capable of embracing air the details of civil administration. I should add to this, that he should be of ripe age, in the prime and vigour of life, or if not exactly that, at any rate that the error should not be on the aide of youth. If, lastly, it had been made requisite that he should have tilled subordinate stations, on the sound principle that it is impossible for one who has not been ruled himself to rule others well, then all would have been done that could be done Co secure a succession of ade- quate governors. Neither Caligula nor Nero, Commodua, Caracalla, Elaga- balus, nor Gallienue, would have been Emperors. But, leaving out of view thesetwo rules of exclusion, and looking at the positive qualities required, still the question occurs, in whom should the selection be vested ? There might be many, and the period before us will show that on different occa- sions there were many, at one and the same time, competent to rule, whether as generals or statesmen. Amidst conflicting claims, who should decide ? I would take my answer from the traditions of the monarchy. Julius Cipaar had adopted his successor. Augustus, himself without a son, had grouped around him and adopted into the family of the Caesars his son-ia-law, his stepsons, and his grandchildren. Gotha had adopted Piso, and in the speech put into his mouth by Tacitus, he states it as the true theory of the Imperial succession, that it should proceed by adoption and not by connexion.
"It is not without interest to observe, that the present Emperor of Prance has secured this power of naming a successor should such a successor be wanted."
The Lectures on The Roman Empire of the West are a political exposition, rather than an historical account ; the principles lurk- ing in the history, rather than the events or persons of the con- tinuous action, chiefly fix the attention. The volume is worth study, as throwing a new light upon one of the most important periods in the history of the world, or more truly as carrying old opinions to such an extreme as to look like new, and imparting life to old theories by applying them to an existing condition of affairs, as well as to the illustration of a bygone period. At the same time, we think the author's particular judgments and his general conclusions are to be received with caution. His pane- gyrics upon the Emperors and the Imperial system are exagge- rated : it may be doubted whether they had or fancied that they had any such mission as Mr. Congreve supposes, except indeed to preserve the Roman territory from invasion by the barbarians. It is useless to deny the fact, that at present despotic principles are, in the language of the market, "looking up." The follies and the failures of the zealots of liberty during 1848 and the subsequent years—the greater promptitude with which the powers and the greater economy with which the resources of absolute states are applied, compared with the awful waste and obstinate blundering of a free country, have rendered men indignant at routine, and in some instances willing to get rid of it at any price. The argu- ment, nevertheless, cuts two ways. Power and promptitude may as well be engaged in evil as in good, and from a dictator there is no appeal. The time may indeed come when aristo- cratical exclusiveness and incapacity may be so onerous, even though accompanied by idle words in favour of liberty, and by good intentions—as was the case with the old Bourbon re- gime—that the apprehension of future evil is lost in the actual ignominy. The evil is nevertheless great, though it may be a necessary evil. Neither should it be forgotten that even a no- minally constitutional state never passes into despotism except through revolution and anarchy. Happy those rulers who are wise by the example of others; but all experience tells us that history to most men is an old almanack.
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