Engaged In Tracing Out An Agreed Line Of Policy On The Pacific Question, The Problems Of A Pericles, Or Even Of An Alexander, Would Seem But Child’s Play.

Let us see what results from this difference of scale. In the first place, Greek political thought although (as we shall see) it aimed at universality, at arriving at certain definite laws or conclusions about politics, never succeeded in divesting itself of a certain element of local or national individuality. When Plato and Thucydides think and write of ‘the State’ they are also thinking of the City—the same word, polis, serves indeed for the two—and not merely of the City, i. e., of any municipality, but of a particular city. There are elements in Greek political thought which, just because they owe their inspiration to Athens, can never be universalized. A treatise on education in which general psychological conclusions were intermingled with conclusions based on experience at some English school with a very unique tradition, would require to be carefully examined and applied with caution to the problems of adolescent life in Japan or Nigeria. Similarly, in so far as Greek political thought is Athenian or (to use a much disputed term in what I hold to be its proper sense) national, it is not truly political.

The distinction that I am trying to draw is a difficult one and cannot be understood without a short digression about the nature of the study of politics. Politics is the study or activity of government, of the management of the public or common affairs of men. We need ‘politicians’, men who will devote themselves to meeting the demand for the management of our common affairs—we need them not because we are Englishmen, Irishmen, or Americans, but because we are human beings living together in society, and because our co-operative relations and activities require to be guided and controlled. Whether the ‘politician’ is a tyrant or a Minister of the people is not here to the point; the point is that he is the manager of what the Romans called res publica, the Latin[324] for the good old English word ‘Commonwealth’. Politics is therefore primarily concerned with the practical problems arising out of the fact that a number of different human beings are living together, and the more different they are and the smaller their greatest common measure, the more truly political do such problems become. The first business, of the politician or governor is, as Aristotle said, to see that men shall live (the twin problems of supply and defence), his second to see that they shall live well (in the first instance the problems of health and physical development and well-being). In the last analysis pure politics, as our great grandchildren may discover if ever the World-State becomes a reality, is mainly concerned with administration, administration of the affairs common to all in the interests of all.

Now ancient Greek politics were entangled, and modern politics also are still too largely entangled, with the discussion of matters which are not common at all, and do not constitute the material of politics in the true sense of the word—with questions arising, not out of the common need for a common law, but out of the inner ultimate and ineradicable differences between the various nations and other groupings of mankind. When the League of Nations or the Dublin City Council is discussing an epidemic of small-pox or the improvement of some dock or wharf, or schools for mothers, or the problem of juvenile employment it is dealing with common interests which affect human beings as human beings: it is on the plane of politics proper. But when the Dublin City Council, following in the wake of the nineteenth century democratic movement throughout Europe, puts forward some proposal in order to give satisfaction to the sentiment that Ireland being the home of a nation ought to be a sovereign state, and when the League of Nations is asked to deal with the political situation created by the clash of contending nationalisms in the British Isles or elsewhere, both bodies, as governing bodies, are out of their depth: for they are faced with an impossible[325] task. Established to deal with politics proper, with the common affairs of men as men, they are bound to flounder helplessly when they are cajoled into the thorny intimate and (let it be added) far more fascinating region of national and individual personality—to a region where, the deeper you penetrate, the less common, uniform, standardized or standardizable are the interests involved, and the less susceptible of being ‘settled’, or even understood, by the rough and ready politician accustomed to deal with matters in the bulk and to measure up the results on a quantitative reckoning in the cold and cosmopolitan language of statistics.

In reading the Greek political writers then, we must be careful to distinguish the universal from the local and ephemeral element. The latter is indeed of great interest and value; but we shall tend to miss the really precious and permanent elements in their thought if we do not take pains to disentangle Thucydides the disillusioned Athenian patriot from Thucydides the scientific historian and psychologist, and Plato the aristocrat born out of due season from Plato the unrivalled student of human nature and of the permanent needs of human society.

The failure to recognize this distinction has led to much misunderstanding and shallow thinking in attempts to apply Greek ideas and maxims too literally to modern life. It is only too common to hear Englishmen, whose knowledge of politics and history, outside the newspapers, is confined to stray reminiscences from a not very ardent pursuit of the classics in their school and college days, basing confident predictions of the failure of modern democracy on some obiter dictum of Thucydides or Plato and assessing the fate of the British Commonwealth in terms borrowed from some judgement of Sallust or Tacitus on its wholly different Roman prototype. It is flippancy or pedantry like this which gives rise to the onslaughts of a Cobden or Herbert Spencer or an H. G. Wells and to the practical man’s suspicion of a classical education. One might as well go to last year’s market [326] reports for guidance in a business deal of to-day as have recourse to Plato, or, for that matter, to Macchiavelli, in an existing political emergency. If a classical education, designed as it is in England to promote ‘character’ rather than ‘intellect’ (a vicious distinction which leaves no room for such a quality as intellectual integrity) often leaves behind it but a meagre residuum of knowledge and ideas, it should at least cause the public school man of yesterday and the London clubman of to-day to realize the limitations of his field of study and to abstain from confident political generalization. The Labour M.P. who once remarked to the writer, à propos of an Indian debate, that he had been in the House just long enough to know that all he knew about India was that he knew nothing about it, had been brought up, if not in a better at least in a cannier school. There is no sounder training for the student of politics and history, or indeed of any serious subject, than to know everything about something, whether it be the chronological order of Plato’s dialogues or the problem of humidity in weaving-sheds, or about placing a field or keeping a wicket. That is why the Duke of Wellington who, if he lacked the intellectuality of a Foch, at least knew both his England and his own job of military science, selected the playing fields rather than the classical classrooms of Eton as the home and training-ground of that concentrated and disinterested endeavour of mind and spirit which had carried his army through patient years of effort to victory. It is all to the good that our classical devotees, faced with criticism and competition from many quarters, should be acquiring both a greater humility and a greater seriousness.

Our first caution then, is that Greek political thought is both national and universal, and that we must learn to distinguish what pertains to nationality from what pertains to government.

A second result which flows from the small-scale character of Greek politics is that we nowhere find an adequate treatment [327] of the problem of foreign relations. Foreign policy is one of the weak spots of modern democracy; it is, perhaps, the element in our political technique which is most in need of thoroughgoing revision. We have yet to induce the modern citizen to pay continuous attention to issues which, although they are seemingly remote from his purview, may at any moment shake the whole fabric of his everyday existence; and, when we have done this, we have to persuade him to approach these world-problems not in the spirit of a competitive aggrandizement but with a view to discovering what is the best line of policy in the interests of the world as a whole. So long as the peoples remain self-absorbed, the governments will continue to conduct their mutual relations on a basis of individual self-interest, and the meetings of the Assembly of the League of Nations will remain what they are at present, not gatherings of statesmen solely bent, each from his own angle and upbringing, on the welfare of humanity, but barterings of politicians who (with rare exceptions) have come to the fair to do the best business they can for their own clients. Now Thucydides and Plato give us no help for the League of Nations. Such a phrase as ‘the interests of humanity as a whole’ would have been politically meaningless to them. They did not think of humanity as a whole; they thought of it as divided sharply into two sections, Greeks and Barbarians, and of the Greek world as a small oasis of intelligence and culture ringed round by a wide and indefinite expanse of barbarism. We also, it is true, speak of ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ peoples: but the latter are not, as they were to the Greeks, a formidable mass, tribe upon tribe, of military power extending up to and beyond the known or legendary confines of the world; they are child-races under our watchful care and control. We have explored and surveyed the whole earth, and where we find weakness or inferiority, we establish a trusteeship. To the Greeks, ever on their guard against barbarian inroads from north, south, east and west, from[328] Scythians and Libyans, Persians and Carthaginians, the mandate clause of the Covenant would have seemed both theoretically undesirable and practically impossible. No Greek writer ever dreamed of a system of international co-operation between the governments of the world as men then knew it. All of them thought in terms of competition and ever-recurrent warfare or, at best, of a precarious balance of power. Even Plato’s Utopia had its soldier class; and they were real soldiers, not merely police. In this respect, at any rate, vanquished Germany, with practically the whole of her population relieved from military duty and available for productive tasks, has the advantage over the most ideal construction of ancient Greece.

There is a further point to be noted under this head. If Greek thought gives us no guidance in foreign policy, it is no more helpful, except very indirectly, in another difficult region, that of industrial policy. The problem of industrial policy, or what is sometimes roughly described as the Labour problem, may perhaps be thus stated: how to secure or maintain for civilized mankind (or for our own particular section of it) the goods and services it needs, whilst at the same time providing justice and freedom for those who produce them. To put it more shortly, how to secure that a good life for the consumer shall be compatible with a good life for the producer. It is a problem which goes to the root of democracy: for the world has never yet known a time when the increase of wealth and the consequent growth of refinement and civilization in the upper section of the community did not lead to degradation and injustice in the lower. Here too the Greeks can give us no help. They did not even face the problem but fail to solve it, like the Romans. Their material civilization was so simple that the problem hardly arose for them at all—except in certain cases, such as that of the mine-slaves. But the fact that they acquiesced, without a twinge of conscience or a trace of repining, in the[329] institution of slavery indicates how they would probably have faced it had it arisen. Confront Plato with the complexity of modern industry, prove to him, as any modern lecturer could, that, for Northern man at any rate, life can only be maintained without degradation on a basis of widespread industrialism and with our familiar equipment of railways, steamships, telephones, et hoc genus omne, and it is safe to predict that he would fail to give the reply which the modern reformer would expect from him. Instead of embracing one of the many current varieties of socialism which masquerade as his bastard progeny, he would either accept his interlocutor’s premisses and tell him to build up his precious northern civilization on a basis of slavery; or he would reject them and advise him, with Samuel Butler, to make a bonfire of the machines. The latter is, indeed, the more probable alternative; for it is that to which the more thoughtful and prophetic (perhaps one can add also, the more Hellenic) of our modern guides are turning. When men so diverse as Tagore the Indian sage and Rathenau the German Trust magnate tell us that the disease from which we are suffering is ‘mechanization’, and that our crying need is for greater simplicity, it seems safe to predict that Plato would not reject the possibility of providing a ‘good life’ for the modern man in a world divested of most of the rattling and tinkling paraphernalia of which the nineteenth century so plumed itself as the inventor.

Let us pass now to our second limitation, that arising not from the difference of scale but from the difference of outlook between Greek and modern speculation. We can best sum this up by saying that whereas modern political thought, like modern thought generally, works from the inner to the outer, from the individual to the state and society, the ancient thinkers habitually work in the opposite direction, setting the interests of the community or state above those of the individual. This is what Fustel de Coulanges intended to[330] convey when he declared that ancient man had no conception of the meaning of liberty. Liberty is no doubt a somewhat confusing and ambiguous term; it is hard to cut it loose from its political associations, from national independence and democratic self-government. We can perhaps therefore improve upon the French writer by saying that the Greek political thinkers do not recognize, or do not make proper allowance for, the rights and responsibilities of the individual soul. Just as they failed to distinguish between Nationality and Government, so they failed also to distinguish between Conscience and Public duty. Socrates, indeed, meeting his death in obedience both to Conscience and Law, had a glimpse of the higher truth; but his followers did not take up this side of his message or, in so far as they did so in their study of individual morality, they did not relate it to their theories of politics. It was a greater than Socrates who summed up and put the problem with his incomparable directness and irony: Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things which are God’s. If this had been said in the presence of Thucydides, the keenest practical brain that applied itself to Greek political thinking, he simply would not have known what it meant. To him Caesar and God, or, to translate them into his own language, Athens and Athena, were not opposing but practically identical terms. When the Athenian, as he described him, ‘spent his body, as a mere external tool, in the city’s service and counted his mind as most truly his own when employed on her behalf,’ he was, according to the universal Greek belief, serving both his God and his neighbour, both his own highest good and the noblest of the world’s causes. His life was a unity: for he had not yet learned to disentangle his soul from the soul of the City or the herd, or his God from the god of Israel or of Athens. The Greek thinkers, as we shall see, sincerely endeavoured to distinguish between the ‘good citizen’ and ‘the good man’ and to base the State on foundations of the spirit; but[331] their work was vitiated by their failure to realize the extent and urgency of the claim of the individual soul. Men must be spiritually free before they can co-operate politically on the highest terms. In the last analysis the weakness of Greek political speculation can be traced back to the weakness of Greek religion. Even Plato played with Pagan orthodoxy and gave the Delphic Apollo a titular place in his Utopia, proving himself as timid in touching Greek superstitions as English thinkers to-day are in touching the Monarchy. It is this basis of insincerity which reveals itself throughout the superstructure. Greek political thought contains already the germs of the disease which, centuries later, led men, plebeians first, later patricians also, to turn away from the outworn symbols that stood for the union of Church and State and to seek comfort in a religion which, if it undermined and eventually overturned the last and greatest of the ancient Empires, established the City of the Soul upon a firm and enduring basis. Julian’s Vicisti Galilaee marked the end of one strain or tradition in ancient political thought which, originating in the local worships of the City-State, had lasted on, with gathering momentum, until, all over the known world, men bowed the knee before the altar of Caesar, the God-Emperor. From this there was no way forward except through revolution; and mankind paid, in the night of the Dark Ages, for sins of compromise and insincerity committed during long centuries of enlightenment.

The liabilities thus frankly stated, let us turn to the assets.

The first valuable contribution the Greeks made to political study was that they invented it. It is not too much to say that, before fifth-century Greece, politics did not exist. There were powers and principalities, governments and subjects, but politics no more existed than chemistry existed in the age of alchemy. An imitation of an idea, as Plato has taught us, is not the same as an idea; nor is the imitation of a science the same as a science. Rameses and Nebuchadnezzar, Croesus [332] the Lydian and Cyrus the Persian, ruled over great empires; but within their dominions there were no politics because there were no public affairs. There were only the private affairs of the sovereign and his ruling class. Government and all that pertained to it, from military service and taxation to the supply of women for the royal harem, was simply the expression of the power and desire of the ruler. The great advance made by Greece was to have recognized that public or common interests exist and to have provided, first for their management, and secondly for their study. In other words, the Greeks were the first to rescue the body politic from charlatans and to hand it over to physicians.

How great an achievement this was we can best recognize when we consider how large a place the true study of politics, and the terms and ideas to which it has given rise, fills in the life of the modern man—especially of the modern Englishman. Justice and liberty, law and democracy, parliament and public opinion—all these and many more we owe to the peasants and craftsmen of the small Greek republics who, having felt the need for a better management of their humble concerns, set to work to provide it, with the same inventiveness, the same adaptation of means to end, which led them, in other fields, to the invention of the classic temple or of the drama. If it is going too far to say that every modern politician owes his stock-in-trade of general ideas to the Greeks, there are certainly few who do not owe them their perorations.

This is not the place to enlarge on the features of Greek political organization or to point out the various elements in Greek political theory or practice which have proved of permanent value. Only a very summary appreciation can be attempted. But certain points can be picked out as being of special interest to the citizen of to-day.

In the first place, the Greeks, having made clear to themselves that public or common affairs existed, sat down resolutely to study them. Convinced believers in reason,[333] they did not fall into the convenient English fallacy of believing that institutions are not made but ‘grow’, or that difficulties which seem too thorny for timid fingers to touch will settle themselves by being left alone. Political problems, they felt, were caused by men, by the interaction of human wills and desires, and by men, by the conscious and deliberate application of human intelligence, they could and must be solved. In spite of their belief in mysterious powers which control the destinies of men and nations, they did not think it decent to abandon public affairs to Providence; nor did they avert their gaze from them as too mundane for the squeamish intellectual to handle and turn them over to the tender mercies of the ignorant and less scrupulous demagogue or doctrinaire. Their public affairs were no more interesting than ours: they were indeed considerably less interesting—unless we are prepared to argue that the election of generals to command an army far smaller than the Swiss is a more arresting issue than the choice of a government to bear rule over 400 millions of men on five continents, or that the question of peace or war between two small neighbouring mountain territories outweighs in interest the discussion of the relations between the white and yellow races of mankind. And, if Greek politics were not interesting in themselves, they suffered still further by comparison with the other topics which lay ready to claim the Greek citizen’s attention. The modern voter who is too idle to cast his ballot, will give up to business or to pleasure, to motor-car and music-hall, the time and the trouble that he owes to humanity. When the Athenian spent a hot and exhausting day (for why should we think their nerves less susceptible to glare than ours?) listening to a parliamentary debate or to a lawsuit on a hard stone seat in the open air, he was postponing till to-morrow, or till his crops and fruit-trees permitted him the leisure, the discussion of some masterpiece of drama or some new issue of human thought which had leapt during the last few days[334] or months from the brain of a fellow citizen into immortality. If it is hard for the citizen of New York to spare the time to dethrone Tammany, or for the electors of Great Britain to uproot its more outwardly respectable analogue on this side of the Atlantic, when his life, and his newspapers, are full of vulgar and ephemeral distractions, how much harder must it have been for a Euripidean enthusiast, or a student of Socrates or Protagoras, to descend for long days to solid earth in order to strike a bargain with a Thracian chieftain or to assess some poor devil’s damages in drachmae! Let us honour, not pity or despise them, for having thought it right to do so, for having deliberately determined to infuse into public affairs, in themselves so drab and dull, so deficient in the fineness and subtlety which characterize men’s more intimate concerns, the interest derived from the very fact that honest, sincere, and able minds devoted themselves to their study. As Huxley could make the geological procession of the ages revolve round a piece of chalk, and Sir Richard Owen reconstruct primitive man from the bone of his great toe, so the citizen of Athens, as we see him depicted for us in the pages of Thucydides, could raise the great permanent issues of politics, and cause them to remain living for us two thousand years later, in debates which were ostensibly concerned with mere provincial trivialities. When such was the atmosphere created, no wonder that those who stayed away were held up to obloquy in an expression (ιδιωτης) of which our English ‘idiot’ is the exact transcription.

Let us dwell for a moment on the attitude of mind in which the Greek citizen approached political problems. He was both a Conservative and a Radical; or rather, he brought to politics the best of Conservatism together with the best of Radicalism. He was a Conservative because he reverenced tradition and recognized the power and value of custom. None of our modern Conservative writers and defenders of the existing order, not Burke himself or Bismarck or Chateaubriand,[335] had a deeper sense than the Athenian for ‘those unwritten ordinances whose transgression brings admitted shame’. Athens was a Conservative democracy. Most democracies, despite the labels of their politicians, are in reality Conservative; for the common man whose régime they represent is Conservative from the very nature of his life and occupation; it takes leisure and travel, or a wider education than any democracy has as yet bestowed on its young people, to lift the minds of the mass of men out of the rut of habit. But Athens was far more Conservative than the modern democracies with whom we are acquainted. Where the British public rebukes an awkward writer by conspiring to boycott his books, so that, unless he has private means, he is eventually silenced, where the United States, going a step farther, deny his works the privilege of the mails, Athens does not scruple to administer hemlock, and, if an élite is indignant or sorrowful, the democracy applauds. Even at the height of the recent Red Terror the United States never went so Conservative as this. This should help us to realize the rock-firm basis of tradition, of use and wont, of patriarchal sanctities, which underlay the working of fifth-century Athenian democracy as we watch its apparent vicissitudes. The citizen could use his mind as freely as he would on the material presented to him for his consideration; but there was a point at which the State, and his own instincts, cried ‘Halt’; and, except in rare cases, he obeyed. It is only fair to add that the most enlightened modern opinion would entirely support the Athenian view against the discussion of ‘unwritten laws’ in Parliament. The difference between the Conservative Athenian democrat and the modern Liberal in such matters is, not that the one refuses, while the other demands, the discussion of life’s sanctities in Parliament and law-court, but that the one appeals to custom and the other to conscience as the sanction of the unwritten law itself. Whether it be the gods or man, the law of the hearth or of the heart, that is at issue,[336] both agree that what is private and holy has no place in the forum of common debate.

But, within these well-recognized limits, the Greek citizen was a Radical; that is to say, he was ready to apply his reason to public affairs without fear or prejudice. He loved straight and sincere thinking; he tried hard to face the real situation before him and not to be clouded or led astray by side-issues or inhibitions. There is many a lesson in common honesty to be learnt by our politicians and public in the speeches of Thucydides. Shallow critics have been known to dub them cynical, an adjective which the English, adepts in self-deception, are fond of applying to nations sincerer in self-analysis than themselves. When we refuse formally to reopen an issue on which action is in fact being taken daily, because it is a party question and a Coalition government is in power, when we leave to the healing mercies of time a problem with regard to which inaction itself constitutes a policy, when we deliberately invent party labels or election cries designed to confuse the mind of the voter and to distract him from the real issue, when our politicians have become professionals in the art of what Thucydides described as ‘the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty ends’ and a British Premier, more euphemistically, as ‘political strategy’, we might do worse than sit down to read, mark, learn, digest, and apply to our modern situations, the immortal speeches or essays in which Thucydides lays bare for us the heart of the political life of his day, and to let them act as a purge of some of our own too sugary diet. The bitter-sweet of truth is not always popular on the hustings; but it is good feeding for the plain citizen, whether ancient or modern.

This leads on to a further reflection. The Greeks, in their political thinking, were essentially realists, rather than idealists. This is true of all the Greek writers, even those who, like Plato, starting from the market-place of Athens, lead us up to a Utopia in the clouds. They were realists in that they based[337] their political studies on the world as it is and human nature as it is, rather than on some personal and fanciful conception of what man and the world ought to be. To put it in other words, they are realists because they are psychologists, because they applied the psychological method to political problems. That they were the first to do so goes without saying: for no one before them had applied any method at all, except in the most rough-and-ready manner. But they did it so perfectly, with such utter and artistic simplicity, that those who followed them accepted or criticized their results without observing the basis of human study on which they were built up, and it is only in quite recent years, through the work of patient inquirers who, like Graham Wallas, have laboured systematically in both fields, that politics and psychology have once more been drawn together.

It may perhaps seem strange to a modern reader to be told that, in this very important respect, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle are sounder in their method than the whole long line of political thinkers and statesmen up to our own day. Let the reader who doubts it turn to the texts. He will find that all the three writers whom I have named toiled at the study of human nature before they set pen to paper. The Republic opens with several books of psychological analysis, no doubt at times a little fantastic in its attempts at premature classification, but full of life and reality, and not only Greek reality but human reality. Aristotle precedes his work on Politics, in which he embodied the results of a study of all the available political and constitutional material of his day—for a Greek could work like a modern German or American thesis-grubber when he tried—with a book on Ethics which is still regarded, quite rightly, as a standard work for the modern student. As for Thucydides, his knowledge of men, the fruit of patient experience deepened by disappointment, is felt behind every line of his book, as one descries it in the features of his undegenerate descendant Venizelos. Turn now to the moderns. Where[338] in Hobbes or in Bentham, in Locke or Burke or Rousseau, in the individualists or the Socialists, the Hegelians or the anarchists, do we find, until quite recently, a really wide and open-minded attempt to see man as he is? Our ears are assailed by a chorus of catchwords, based on some arbitrary and ephemeral estimate of men’s reactions to outward events and institutions. Men argue backwards and forwards as to whether ‘human nature can be changed’, whether man is guided solely by self-interest, or is only waiting to be set free from sordid cares to be guided solely by his love for his fellows, whether fear or hope, custom or the sense of adventure, form his natural and most compelling spur to action. Meanwhile in the great debate, in Burke’s Reflections as in Marx’s Capital, in Maine and Mill and Mazzini, as among the hacks who vulgarize their results in text-books and election literature, man as he is has vanished behind a cloud of doctrine or verbiage. We need the simplicity, or cynicism, of the Greeks to recall us to realities.

Let us for a moment imagine Thucydides face to face with the problems of our post-war world of to-day. We have only to read his immortal analysis of the war-mood of Greece, and of the nervous and emotional phenomena which accompanied it, to realize that his first effort would have been to explain us to ourselves. He would not allow us to acquiesce idly in our vague disillusionment, our impatience of foreigners, our suspicion of the idealisms of the Wilson brand. He would trace our discontent ruthlessly to its sources and hold up to our eyes the strange compound of sorrow and fatigue, impatience and disappointment, aspiration and helplessness which makes us what we are. ‘The war-mood brought with it many and terrible symptoms such as have occurred and will always continue to occur, so long as human nature remains what it is; though in a severer or milder form, according to the variety of the particular cases.’ Thucydides would have had eyes for it in all its forms, mild or severe, simple or complex,[339] pitiful or repulsive. He would show us the English upper and middle class, shaken out of its comfort and complacency, its easy and patronizing security, by the shock of war and bereavement, facing a future of unknown and terrifying ideas and forces, with the brutal tax-gatherer administering the coup de grâce to its equanimity: the working class, called to fight for a cause which it but dimly understood, in the hope of a new world which victory was to call into being, exhorted by the nation’s leaders to be as daring in its home policies as in the trenches, and then confronted with a world of failing markets and impoverished customers and with the full rigour of the merciless laws of supply and demand which, just because it had wished them out of existence, it had grown accustomed to believe could be ignored, oscillating, according to age, temperament or experience, between resignation and impotent fury, between old-fashioned trade-unionism and the latest fashion in extremism: France, emerging nerve-racked from a fifty years’ obsession and a five years’ nightmare, half-dead with sorrow and suspense, yet too proud in victory to own her weakness, looking round, half-defiant, half-wistful, among her allies for one who can understand her unspoken need, and longing, with all the intensity of her sensitive nature, to be able to resume, in security and quietness of mind, the arts and activities of normal life in which she has been, and will be again, the Athens of the modern world: Germany, tougher in fibre than her western neighbour yet equally shaken and exhausted: a land of sheep without a shepherd, rushing hither and thither seeking for a direction and a Weltanschauung, her amazing powers of industry and concentration and her rich and turbid life of feeling running to waste for lack of channelled guidance: Belgium, self-confident, industrious and rejuvenated: Italy, made one at last and measuring her strength to face the tasks of a new epoch in her history: and, behind, the great new surging world of the Slav, from the disciplined enthusiasm of Prague, under her philosopher-president, [340] to the birth-agonies of a new Russia in the grip of the rough tyrant-physicians of the Kremlin. All this a modern Thucydides would attempt to set before us, not forgetting the conservative forces and the gods of the older generation, the great Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Socialist traditions, the power of the bankers and the merchants, the universities and the press, and all the various types of humanity produced and hall-marked by their activity. And then, and not till then, having shown us what we are, each of us in his niche and all of us together in our little corner in the vast Temple of mankind, having made us see our pettyisms and orthodoxies against a universal background of time and space, he would have broken silence and allowed himself to speak to us of remedies. Know yourself is the first, perhaps the only, message of the scientific historian to our bewildered age.

But by what right, it will be asked, in this age of Wissenschaft and Fachmenschen, of specialism and research-institutes and organized intellectual production, do you speak of Thucydides as a scientific historian? Here is a man who, without a university degree or any university training at all, after a brief military career for which he took no staff college course (as witness his generalship), sits down to write a chronicle of the war in which he played a part, basing his account simply on his own experience and on the testimony of such eye-witnesses as he was able to meet. Any tiro on the history staff at a modern college or university could predict the result—one of those bulky volumes, full of detail and post-prandial reminiscence, in which splenetic elderly gentlemen have so often sought to justify their own existence, and to call down damnation on the War Office, before an indifferent public. How can anything better be expected from a mere soldier, a rough practical man, untrained in the arts of research, in collecting facts on slips of paper and arranging and re-arranging them till an induction emerges, in looking up reference books in [341] libraries and ‘listing’ them in a neat alphabetical bibliography, totally ignorant of the Hilfswissenschaften, the laborious subsidiary studies on the basis of which scientific history is built up, ignorant even of foreign languages, who has read no sociology, and is not even aware of its existence, whose geographical studies are limited to his own journeys and the tales of his friends, who, finally, has the impertinence to intersperse his narrative with fictitious speeches, thus destroying any pretence at a scientific character for his treatise, and revealing it in its true nature as a mere work of art or imagination? It may indeed be doubted whether a modern trained librarian, working according to the classification laid down by the standard Congress library at Washington, would, when his attention was drawn to it, admit so offending a writer on to his history shelves at all. His place, he would probably say, is with the prose-poets, or with the writers of historical fiction next door to them.

Yet turn to the opening chapters of Thucydides’ book. You will find most of the sciences on which long modern treatises are written: but you will find something more: you will find them blended into a unity. Let those who deny that Thucydides was a sociologist, who continue to claim that Herbert Spencer, inventor of the horrid word, invented also the science, re-read Thucydides’ account of the evolution (for it was as an evolution that he saw and depicted it) of Greek society from the earliest times to his own day. Let those who cry up anthropology examine into his treatment of legend and custom and his power, untrained in Seminar or institute, to use it as sociological evidence. Let the geographers, too forgetful sometimes that man is not the creature of environment alone, refresh their minds by recalling those brilliant sallies in geographical thinking in which he explains some of the features of early Greek settlement and city-building. It is not only orthodox history, of the school of Ranke, of which Thucydides is the father and inspirer: there[342] is not one of the many movements which have sought to broaden out historical study in recent years, from Buckle and Leplay and Vidal de la Blache down to the psycho-analysts of our own day and of to-morrow who will not find in Thucydides some gleaming anticipation along the path of their own thought.

Here we touch upon what is perhaps the cardinal merit of the Greek political thinkers, as it is of the Greek contribution as a whole. They saw all the problems: but saw each in its place within the larger whole. They ‘saw life steadily and saw it whole’. Matthew Arnold’s line is hackneyed enough; but it cannot be bettered. To put the same thought in another way, the Greeks were natural Catholics, while we of to-day, especially on the political field, are constantly relapsing into an unhelpful Protestantism. By Catholicism I mean nothing doctrinal, or indeed religious at all, but simply the habit of mind which insists on looking at the whole before the parts, at setting the common before the sectional interest, and in sweetening and harmonizing the inevitable contrarieties and antagonisms of life by remaining steadily conscious of its major and reconciling interests. A Catholic is one whose intellect, to use the words of Newman, himself, despite his religious label, one of the greatest of the tribe, ‘cannot be partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot be impetuous, cannot be at a loss, cannot but be patient, collected and majestically calm, because it discerns the end in every beginning, the origin in each end, the law in every interruption, the limit in each delay, because it ever knows where it stands and how its path lies from one point to another’. Protestantism, on the other hand, is the attitude of protest, of revolt, of indignation: the spirit which is conscious only of what it is against, and is too ignorant, or too angry, to survey the whole field of problems involved in its protest or to think out an alternative scheme. If the Greeks can render us no other service in our discontents they can at least lift us, by the example of their wide and fearless vision, out of our petty Protestant rebelliousness [343] and recrimination and plant our feet solidly on the rock of steady Catholic thinking.

Take a few instances, drawn from Plato, of what I call the Catholic spirit. Perhaps the most difficult and unsettling of all our modern problems is that of the relations between men and women in a society which has granted or is about to grant to women complete equality of rights and opportunities without having effected the corresponding inner revolution of thought and sentiment. Masculine society, in other words, despite a multitude of professions, has not yet admitted, still less assimilated, the educated woman into its ranks. Here is a problem with far reaching and most difficult implications which Plato discussed more than two thousand years ago, but in how different a spirit from so many of the ‘feminists’ of to-day. Not that he was less ‘advanced’ in his speculations: he was ready to face all that there was to face and to go a good deal farther in his suggestions of policy than would be regarded as printable in a modern English or American review. But his spirit is throughout perfectly serene and, in the best sense of the word, scientific, so that he can work out his argument to the end without a trace of squeamishness or false modesty. Where shall we find in our modern discussions of women’s employment, equal work for equal pay, and the like, the central point so simply and clearly stated as in the following sentence: ‘Then, if we find either the male or the female sex excelling the other in any art or other pursuit, we shall say that this particular pursuit must be assigned to one and not to the other; but if we find that the difference simply consists in this, that the female conceives and the male begets, we shall not allow that that goes any way to prove that a woman differs from a man with reference to the subject of which we are speaking, and we shall still consider that our guardians and their wives should follow the same pursuits.’ If all our modern discussion were as clean and direct as this, we should have made greater progress in this subject by now. Greek[344] intellectual integrity, and clarity of thought and expression, were not hampered by a festering and obstructive legacy of what it is a libel on a great movement to describe as Puritanism.

Take a second example—the influence of occupation on character. This is a subject which goes to the root of many of our social problems for, till we have studied the reactions of different classes of employment, not only on the body but on the mind, and perfected our methods of vocational guidance, we shall still have left open one of the greatest avenues to unhappiness. The modern inquirer will find a very interesting adumbration of this line of thought in the Republic; and if here, as in the problem of the relations between men and women, he finds Plato’s remedies somewhat drastic, and is inclined to dissent from his veto on actors and acrobats, let him consider the appalling extent to which, during recent generations, the consumer has been pampered at the expense of the producer, and ask himself how often, when he attends a music-hall as a narcotic after a distracting day, or when he rings up on the telephone or books a ticket at a railway office, he considers the kind of life to which he is an accomplice in condemning those who minister to his needs and desires. Plato believed in the value of beauty and, being more than a mere modern aesthete, held no skindeep creed. He knew and understood the vital significance of rhythm and harmony, of grace and freedom, in the outward order of life as in the soul; and if he found himself plunged down in the centre of one of our modern hives of progress he would have some searching questions to ask. For ‘absence of grace’ he tells us ‘and bad rhythm and bad harmony are sisters to bad words and bad nature’ and ‘we would not have our guardians reared among images of evil as in a foul pasture and there day by day, and little by little, gather impressions from all that surrounds them, until at last a great mass of evil gathers in their inmost souls and they know it not’. Has the most widespread malady of our time ever been better diagnosed; and do not our capitalist and socialist physicians,[345] with their merely material remedies, look very small by the side of this commanding and convincing simplicity of statement?

We have dwelt upon some of the special directions in which Thucydides and Plato can be of help to us. Let us now turn briefly to the third of the great triad. Aristotle is, of course, the most systematic thinker of the three: and it is just for that very reason that the two elements already noted in Greek political thought, the local and ephemeral and the universal, are most closely interwoven and most baffling to disentangle. Tutor of Alexander though he was, his mind is incapable of stepping outside the city-state framework. His Ethics is half a treatise on human nature, half a book, akin to the Characters of Theophrastus, on deportment for a Greek citizen. No wonder that successive generations of English undergraduates have failed to respond to the human excellence or social charm, of his hero or paragon, described as ‘the big-souled’ or ‘magnificent man’. Similarly the Politics is a book in which it needs a trained reader, already familiar with Greek life, to pick out the universal from the particular and draw his own modern conclusions. But when you have read, say, the first book of the Politics in this spirit, when you have ruled out from what is said of the State all that pertains solely to the City, when you have made allowance for the hazardous biological, psychological, and sociological generalizations (‘man is more of a political animal than bees or other gregarious animals’, ‘he who is by nature not his own but another’s and not a man is by nature a slave’, ‘the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part’), based, as the examples show, on the embryonic condition of those sciences at the time, you have a large residuum of practical wisdom that is and will remain of value to the modern world.

Let us look for a moment at one element in this legacy, for it has recently become a subject of much controversy—Aristotle’s conception of the State, and of its relation to other social and political groupings. As has already been said, Greek [346] political thought is open to criticism for unduly neglecting the claim of the individual. Aristotle is less open to this indictment than either of his great compeers: he does indeed allow, for certain favoured individuals, an inner or ‘theoretical’ life, as he calls it, remote from the concerns of the City-State and almost, except for its excessive intellectuality, recalling the monastic ideal of the Middle Age. But this is only for the fewest. Nevertheless it involved the admission that behind the citizen remained the man, who might conceivably on occasion have his rights, that ‘political science’, as he says, ‘does not make men’, as Thucydides regarded Athens as making Athenians, ‘but receives them from nature and uses them’. And the justification for this taking over of human nature by the state, this subjection of man over the whole or part of his nature, is clearly set forth. It is that ‘man when perfected [i. e. taken over and educated by the State] is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all’, or, as he puts it in another place, the man who does not participate in State or city life is ‘either a beast or a god’—more likely (as the order of the words indicates) the former. In other words, it is law and justice, not, as Thucydides would have it, an exaltation of the spirit to its highest power, nor, as Plato preaches, some organic identification between the inner life of the soul and the outward order of society, which is the basis and justification of politics. ‘It is justice’, he says, using the word in a strict, not a platonic or metaphysical sense, ‘which is the bond of men in states, and the administration of justice, i. e. the determination of what is just, which is the principle of order in political society.’

Now, with this principle clearly laid down, and with the claim of the individual thus partially or at least implicitly recognized, it is easier to understand Aristotle’s intransigeant attitude towards the claims of associations other than the state, a point on which much recent controversy has turned. ‘Every state’, so his Politics open, ‘is an association of some kind, and every association is established with a view to some[347] good.... But if all associations aim at some good, the state, or political association, which is the highest of all and which embraces all the rest, aims, and in a greater degree than any other, at the highest good.’ In other words, in cases of conflict of allegiance between the state or political association and some other form of grouping, whether Church or Trade Union or professional or humanitarian organization, the claim of the state must take precedence.

This doctrine has been much attacked as involving an indefensible ‘State absolutism’, a denial of ‘personality’ to lesser groups, even as a negation of the right to lesser loyalties. Mr. Figgis, in a number of suggestive, if unconvincing, writings, has recalled the theories of the Jesuits and other anti-state minorities and protestants on this subject, reinforcing them from the Nonconformist and Trade Union theories or inclinations of our own day: and a whole school of younger ‘progressive’ intellectuals made bold to follow him. The assault on state-sovereignty has, however, already been brought to a standstill by the impact of fact. Strange as it may appear in an age of sectarianism and rebel theorizing, the war revealed the truth that the mass of mankind, now as in ancient Greece, respond at need to the call of citizenship: that when the cry goes up summoning each and all to the tents, it is not this or that little tabernacle but the protecting shelter of the larger and more truly representative state organizations to which men flock; that the sects and conventicles which have fed the enthusiasm and provided the activity of leisure hours cannot maintain their appeal when the whole fabric of our society is in danger. Exclusive of those who refused allegiance on true grounds of conscience, and the despicable remnant who shammed a similar conviction, the number of Englishmen who definitely set allegiance to some other political or social grouping before allegiance to the state was surprisingly small. So little are fundamental loyalties, or the dictates of an unanalysed common sense, affected, in this country, by fine-spun theories and arguments.

[348] But what we called commonsense views, after all, can be analysed and ought to be analysed. And there is a very sound and practical reason, as Aristotle knew, why men prefer the state to lesser associations. It is because the state leaves them more free. Those who talk of state-absolutism are ignoring the simple truth that there is no tyranny like the tyranny of near neighbours. The smaller the group the tighter its stranglehold over your life and activities. Groups and lesser loyalties are highly necessary, and indeed desirable, in our modern large-scale society; but they involve men, and especially weak-willed and thoughtless men, in far greater dangers than their larger citizenship. What the confessional at its worst may be to a woman, professional or business or other loyalty may be to a man. The modern world is full of men who have bartered away their integrity of soul to preserve the unity of the party or the unbroken tradition of the organization or the interests of the trade or even the existence of the business. If the secrets of all hearts could be revealed, how many high officials and dignitaries in Church and Party, in Trade Union and employers’ federation, would be discovered to be thinking and even saying in private what their lesser loyalties forbid them to proclaim in public to their fellow-guildsmen. The state, in its larger field, may sometimes commit terrible blunders and even crimes; but at least, in these days of large-scale government, it does not expose its citizens to the daily falsehoods and hypocrisies, to the insidious clogging of the wheels of progress with the grit of petty personal considerations, which seem inevitable in the life of the smaller groupings of men and women. Seen in this light, the state stands out as the guardian not only of justice but of freedom, of an inner freedom of soul and spirit with which the professional and syndicalist attitude of mind is so often in flagrant, if unavowed, contradiction. If all this was not visible to Aristotle when he penned his immortal opening paragraph of the Politics, he is at least entitled to the credit of having laid his doctrine of state-sovereignty on a foundation[349] so sure that over twenty centuries of discussion from the Stoics and Cynics, through Augustine and Dante, down to Rousseau and Lenin, have not been able to shake it. Against Church and Soviet, as against sage and hermit and anarchist, the territorial state still holds its own over the whole civilized world; and the latest construction of idealism at Geneva, misnamed though it is, is but an association of such states, far larger indeed in average size, but of the same kind and composition as those upon which the Greek philosopher fixed as the true object of political study and the most effective and enduring agency for securing a good life for civilized mankind.

What are the chief and most enduring thoughts which contact with the Greek political thinkers leaves with us? They are surely twofold, the first concerning the material of politics, the second concerning the men and women of to-day who are called to be citizens. Public affairs, we feel, so far from being a tiresome preoccupation or ‘a dirty business’ are one of the great permanent interests of the race: if they were not too trivial or too debasing for great artists like Thucydides and Plato, we need not fear lest they be too trivial or debasing for ourselves. And if they are not beneath our study, neither should they elude it by being enwrapped in clouds of rhetoric or in the cotton-wool of sentimentality. The Greeks should teach us, once and for all, that the common affairs of mankind are matter to think about as well as to feel about. What distinguishes what we call a ‘good’ statesman and a ‘public-spirited’ citizen from their less truly political colleagues is not that they have warmer feelings—there are as many affectionate sons and loving husbands among the tools of politics as among the elect—but the fact that by a resolute use of the related powers of intellect and imagination they have been able to raise their feelings on to a higher plane and to face great issues with a mind attuned, not to the familiar appeal of hearth and home, but to the grander and more difficult music of humanity. The psychologists are teaching us, in the individual life, how we can ‘sublimate’ our emotions,[350] when life denies them an outlet on the level of our desire, by raising them to a higher and more rarified range of feeling and action. As we can sublimate our love of individuals, so we can sublimate our love of country, not quenching or denying our patriotism, but consciously dividing and apportioning it. We must learn to preserve for our blood and nation that precious part of our gift of service which, just because it is intimate and of the family, cannot be offered directly to humanity; but we must learn also the more difficult lesson of transferring to the international stage, the arena where men, because they are men, labour at common tasks and seek a greatest common measure of co-operation, all these interests and loyalties which safely and rightly belong there. This is the claim and call of the modern Caesar, whether his separate capitals remain, as they are to-day, in London, Paris, Washington, and the other centres of state-sovereignty, or whether mankind can rise, if not in our own day, to the level of a single allegiance. We shall neglect that call at our peril. For, unless we render unto Caesar that which is properly his, unless we discard our unthinking and divisive nationalisms, our noble sentiments will avail us nothing and, in the civil war of the angels, patriotism against patriotism, Mammon and Beelzebub will come into their own. In these days of large-scale organization and mammoth syndicates, it takes a Caesar, a multi-national government, to keep a giant trust at bay. Had the land of Washington and Lincoln been broken up into separate governments instead of drawn together into a single territory of United States, private interests would have taken and defeated each government in detail, and freedom would have vanished from the land—unless indeed, in some conflict of devil with devil, of bank and railroad against oil and lumber, the angels crept once more into their own. The same reasoning applies to the smaller governments in other continents to-day. Local patriotism is but a stripling David in face of the Goliaths of modern commercialism. More and more men will be driven, if not by reason, then by exploitation and[351] suffering, to learn the lesson of what is still mistakenly thought of as imperialism until they find themselves crying out, with the apostle of the Gentiles, who fought his own battle against nationalism, ‘I appeal unto Caesar.’

But the Greeks have a message for us not only as regards the material of our politics but as regards ourselves. What can we do to help humanity forward in these problems of its common affairs? The age of Utopia-dreams is over. We know now that modern science has made the world one place and that social salvation is not to be found, as the early socialists imagined, by fleeing from the haunts of men and founding some model city in a wilderness. We must make our contribution here and now, in the drab world in which fate has set us. If we cannot hope to turn it into Utopia, let us at least make it as much like Utopia as we can. This, after all, is Plato’s message, even in the most idealistic and visionary of his books. The famous passage is worth quoting in detail:

‘Then do you think any less of our argument because we cannot prove that it is possible to found a state of the kind we have described?’

‘Surely not,’ he said....

‘Then do not compel me to show that what we have decided in our argument could in all respects be reproduced in experience. If we manage to discover how a state could be organized in any close correspondence to our description, then you must allow that we have discovered that your commands could be realized. Will you not be content with that? I certainly should be.’

‘Yes, I will,’ he said.

’Then next apparently we must try to discover ... what is the smallest change by which a state might arrive at this manner of constitution....’

‘Most certainly,’ he said.

‘Well, there is one change,’ I said, ‘which I think we could certainly prove would bring about the revolution. It is certainly neither a small nor an easy change, but it is possible.’

‘What is it?’ he said.

‘Now,’ I said, ‘I am at the very topic which we likened to the greatest wave. Spoken, however, it shall be, even though[352] it is likely to deluge me with laughter and ridicule.... Consider then what I am about to say.’

‘Say on,’ he said.

‘Unless,’ I said, ‘lovers of wisdom bear sovereign rule in states, or those who are now called sovereigns and governors become sincere and capable lovers of wisdom, and government and love of wisdom be brought together, and unless the numerous natures who at present pursue either government or wisdom, the one to the exclusion of the other, be forcibly debarred from this behaviour, there will be no respite from evil, my dear Glaucon, for states, nor, I fancy, for humanity; nor will this constitution, which we have just described in our argument, come to that realization which is possible for it and see the light of day. It is this which has for so long made me hesitate to speak. I saw how paradoxical it would sound. For it is given to few to perceive that no other constitution could ever bring happiness either to states or individuals.’

Thus far the philosopher of antiquity. His words are sometimes interpreted as a cry for some philosopher-genius to take the task of government out of our too feeble grasp. But that is not his message for us. The age in which philosopher-emperors were possible has passed beyond recall. To us Plato’s words are an appeal to become, each and all of us, in our own sphere, lovers of wisdom according to the measure of our ability. If we would amend the world around us—and it is in sore need of amendment—our first duty is to eschew falsehood and to follow truth in our own lives, in our thoughts and actions. Revolutions spring not from without inwards but from within outwards; and it is often when the external world seems most sick and sorrowful, when selfishness and irresponsibility sit enthroned in the world’s seats of government, that the power of truth is most active in the silent region of the soul, strengthening it in order that it may issue forth once again to impress man’s unconquerable purpose of order, justice and freedom upon the recalcitrant material which forms the stuff of men’s common problems on this small globe of ours.

A. E. Zimmern.

---

---

FOOTNOTES: