At this point, when the Culture is beginning to turn itself into the Civilization, the non-Estate intervenes in affairs decisively--and for the first time--as an independent force. Under the Tyrannis and the Fronde, the State has invoked its aid against the Estates proper, and it has for the first time learned to feel itself a power. Now it employs its strength _for itself_, and does so as a class standing for its freedom against the rest. It sees in the absolute State, in the Crown, in rooted institutions, the natural allies of the old Estates and the true and last representatives of symbolic tradition. This is the difference between the First and the Second Tyrannis, between Fronde and Bourgeois Revolution, between Cromwell and Robespierre.

The State, with its heavy demands on each individual in it, is felt by urban reason as a burden. So, in the same phase, the great forms of the Baroque arts begin to be felt as restrictive and become Classicist or Romanticist--that is, sickly or unformed; German literature from 1770 is one long revolt of strong individual personalities against strict poetry. The idea of the whole nation being “in training” or “in form” for anything becomes intolerable, for the individual himself inwardly is no longer in condition. This holds good in morals, in arts, and in modes of thought, but most of all in politics. Every bourgeois revolution has as its scene the great city, and as its hall-mark the incomprehension of old symbols, which it replaces by tangible interests and the craving (or even the mere wish) of enthusiastic thinkers and world-improvers to see their conceptions actualized. Nothing now has value but that which can be justified by reason. But, deprived thus of the exaltation of a form that is essentially symbolical and works metaphysically, the national life loses the power of keeping its head up in the being-streams of history. Follow the desperate attempts of the French Government--the handful of capable and farsighted men under the mediocre Louis XVI--to keep their country in “condition” when, after the death of Vergennes in 1787, the whole gravity of the external situation had become manifest. With the death of this diplomatist France disappeared for years from the political combinations of Europe; at the same time the great reform that the Crown had carried through against all resistances--above all, the general administrative reform of that year, based on the freest self-management--remained completely ineffective, because in view of the pliancy of the State, the question of the moment for the Estates became, suddenly, the question of power.[706] As a century before and a century afterwards, European war was drawing visibly nearer with an inexorable necessity, but no one now took any notice of the external situation. The nobility as an Estate had rarely, but the bourgeoisie as an Estate had never, thought in terms of foreign policy and world-history. Whether the State in its new form would be able to hold its own at all amongst the other States, no one asked. All that mattered was whether it secured men’s “rights.”

But the bourgeoisie, the class of urban “freedom,” strong as its class-feeling remained for generations (in West Europe even beyond 1848), was at no time wholly master of its actions. For, first of all, it became manifest in every critical situation that its unity was a _negative_ unity, only really existent in moments of opposition to something, anything, else--“Tiers État” and “Opposition” are almost synonymous--and that when something constructive of its own had to be done, the interests of the various groups pulled all ways. To be free from something--that, all wanted. But the intellectual desired the State as an actualization of “justice” against the force of historical facts; or the “rights of man”; or freedom of criticism as against the dominant religion. And Money wanted a free path to business success. There were a good many who desired rest and renunciation of historical greatness, or wished this and that tradition and its embodiments, on which physically or spiritually they lived, to be spared. But there was another element, now and henceforth, that had not existed in the conflicts of the Fronde (the English Civil War included) or the first Tyrannis, but this time stood for a power--namely, that which is found in all Civilizations under different contemptuous labels--dregs, _canaille_, mob, _Pöbel_--but with the same tremendous connotation. In the great cities, which alone now spoke the decisive words--the open land can at most accept or reject _faits accomplis_, as our eighteenth century proves[707]--a mass of rootless fragments of population stands outside all social linkages. These do not feel themselves as attached either to an Estate or to a vocational class, nor even to the real working-class, although they are obliged to work. Elements drawn from all classes and conditions belong to it instinctively--uprooted peasantry, literates, ruined business men, and above all (as the age of Catiline shows with terrifying clarity) derailed nobles. Their power is far in excess of their numbers, for they are always on the spot, always on hand at the big decisions, ready for anything, devoid of all respect for orderliness, even the orderliness of a revolutionary party. It is from them that events acquire the destructive force which distinguishes the French Revolution from the English, and the Second Tyrannis from the First. The bourgeoisie looks at these masses with real uneasiness, defensively, and seeks to separate itself from them--it was to a defensive act of this category, the 13th Vendémiaire, that Napoleon owed his rise.[708] But in the pressure of facts the separating frontier cannot be drawn; wherever the bourgeoisie throws into the scale against the older orders its feeble weight of aggressiveness--feeble in relative numbers and feeble because its inner cohesion is risked at every moment--this mass has forced itself into their ranks, pushed to the front, imparted most of the drive that wins the victory, and very often managed to secure the conquered position for itself--not seldom with the continued idealistic support of the educated who are intellectually captivated, or the material backing of the money powers, which seek to divert the danger from themselves on to the nobility and the clergy.

There is another aspect, too, under which this epoch has its importance--in it for the first time abstract truths seek to intervene in the world of facts. The capital cities have become so great, and urban man so superior and influential over the waking-consciousness of the whole Culture (_this influence is what we call Public Opinion_) that the powers of the blood and the tradition inherent in the blood are shaken in their hitherto unassailable position. For it must be remembered that the Baroque State and the absolute Polis in their final development of form are thoroughly living expressions of a _breed_, and that history, so far as it accomplishes itself in these forms, possesses the full pulse of that breed. Any theory of the State that may be fashioned here is one that is deduced from the facts, that bows to the greatness of the facts. The idea of the State had finally mastered the blood of the first Estate, and put it wholly and without reserve at the State’s service. “Absolute” means that the great being-stream is _as a unit_ in form, possesses _one_ kind of pulse and instinct, whether the manifestations of that pulse be diplomatic or strategic flair, dignity of moral and manners, or fastidious taste in arts and thoughts.

As the contradictory to this grand fact, now, Rationalism appears and spreads, that which has been described above[709] as the _community of waking-consciousness in the educated_, whose religion is criticism and whose numina are not deities but concepts. Now begins the influence of books and general theories upon politics--in the China of Lao-tse as in the Athens of the Sophists and the Europe of Montesquieu--and the public opinion formed by them plants itself in the path of diplomacy as a political magnitude of quite a new sort. It would be absurd to suppose that Pisistratus or Richelieu or even Cromwell determined their actions under the influence of abstract systems, but after the victory of “Enlightenment” that is what actually happens.

Nevertheless the historical rôle of the great concepts of the Civilization is very different from the complexion that they presented in the minds of the ideologues who conceived them. The effect of a truth is always quite different from its tendency. In the world of facts, truths are simply _means_, effective in so far as they dominate spirits and therefore determine actions. Their historical position is determined not by whether they are deep, correct, or even merely logical, but by whether they _tell_. We see this in the phrase “catchword,” “_Schlagwort_.” What certain symbols, livingly experienced, are for the Springtime religions--the Holy Sepulchre for the Crusader, the Substance of Christ for the times of the Council of Nicæa--that two or three inspiriting word-sounds are for every Civilized revolution. It is only the catchwords that are facts--the residue of the philosophical or sociological system whence they come does not matter to history. But, _as_ catchwords, they are for about two centuries powers of the first rank, stronger even than the pulse of the blood, which in the petrifying world of the outspread cities is beginning to be dulled.

But--the critical spirit is only one of the two tendencies which emerge out of the chaotic mass of the Non-Estate. Along with abstract concepts abstract Money,--money divorced from the prime values of the land--along with the study the counting-house, appear as political forces. The two are inwardly cognate and inseparable--the old opposition between priest and noble continued, acute as ever, in the bourgeois atmosphere and the city framework.[710] Of the two, moreover, it is the Money that, as pure fact, shows itself unconditionally superior to the ideal truths, which so far as the fact-world is concerned exist (as I have just said) only as catchwords, as means. If by “democracy” we mean the form which the Third Estate as such wishes to impart to public life as a whole, it must be concluded that democracy and plutocracy are the same thing under the two aspects of wish and actuality, theory and practice, knowing and doing. It is the tragic comedy of the world-improvers’ and freedom-teachers’ desperate fight against money that they are _ipso facto_ assisting money to be effective. Respect for the big number--expressed in the principles of equality for all, natural rights, and universal suffrage--is just as much a class-ideal of the unclassed as freedom of public opinion (and more particularly freedom of the press) is so. These are ideals, but in actuality the freedom of public opinion involves the preparation of public opinion, which costs money; and the freedom of the press brings with it the question of possession of the press, which again is a matter of money; and with the franchise comes electioneering, in which he who pays the piper calls the tune. The representatives of the ideas look at one side only, while the representatives of money operate with the other. The concepts of Liberalism and Socialism are set in effective motion only by money. It was the Equites, the big-money party, which made Tiberius Gracchus’s popular movement possible at all; and as soon as that part of the reforms that was advantageous to themselves had been successfully legalized, they withdrew and the movement collapsed. Cæsar and Crassus financed the Catilinarian movement, and so directed it against the Senatorial party instead of against property. In England politicians of eminence laid it down as early as 1700 that “on ’Change one deals in votes as well as in stocks, and the price of a vote is as well known as the price of an acre of land.”[711] When the news of Waterloo reached Paris, the price of French government stock rose[712]--the Jacobins had destroyed the old obligations of the blood and so had emancipated money; now it stepped forward as lord of the land.[713] There is no proletarian, not even a Communist, movement that has not operated in the interest of money, in the directions indicated by money, and for the time permitted by money--and that, without the idealist amongst its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.[714] Intellect rejects, money directs--so it runs in every last act of a Culture-drama, when the megalopolis has become master over the rest. And, in the limit, intellect has no cause of complaint. For, after all, it _has_ won its victory--namely, in its own realm of truths, the realm of books and ideals that is not of this world. Its conceptions have become venerabilia of the beginning Civilization. But Money wins, through these very concepts, in _its_ realm, which is _only_ of this world.

In the Western world of States, it was in England that both sides of Third-Estate politics, the ideal and the real, graduated. Here alone it was possible for the Third Estate to avoid the necessity of marching against an absolute State in order to destroy it and set up its own dominion on the ruins. For here it could grow up into the strong form of the First Estate, where it found a fully developed form of interest-politics, and from whose methods it could borrow for its own purposes a traditional tactic such as it could hardly wish to improve upon. Here was the home of Parliamentarism, genuine and quite inimitable, which had insular position instead of the state as its starting-point, and the habits of the First and not the Third Estate as its background. Further, there was the circumstance that this form had grown up in the full bloom of Baroque and, therefore, had Music in it. The Parliamentary style was completely identical with that of cabinet-diplomacy;[715] and in this _anti-democratic_ origin lay the secret of its successes.

But it was on British soil, too, that the rationalistic catchwords had, one and all, sprung up, and their relation to the principles of the Manchester School was intimate--Hume was the teacher of Adam Smith. “Liberty” self-evidently meant intellectual _and_ trade freedom. An opposition between fact-politics and enthusiasm for abstract truths was as impossible in the England of George III as it was inevitable in the France of Louis XVI. Later, Edmund Burke could retort upon Mirabeau that “we demand our liberties, not as rights of man, but as rights of Englishmen.” France received her revolutionary ideas without exception from England, as she had received the style of her absolute monarchy from Spain. To both she imparted a brilliant and irresistible shape that was taken as a model far and wide over the Continent, but of the practical employment of either she had no idea. The successful utilization of the bourgeois catchwords[716] in politics presupposes the shrewd eye of a ruling class for the intellectual constitution of the stratum which intends to attain power, but will not be capable of wielding it when attained. Hence in England it was successful. But it was in England too that money was most unhesitatingly used in politics--not the bribery of individual high personages which had been customary in the Spanish or Venetian style, but the “nursing” of the democratic forces themselves. In eighteenth-century England, first the Parliamentary elections and then the decisions of the elected Commons were systematically managed by money;[717] England, too, discovered the ideal of a Free Press, and discovered along with it that the press serves him who owns it. It does not spread “free” opinion--it generates it.

Both _together_ constitute liberalism (in the broad sense); that is, freedom from the restrictions of the soil-bound life, be these privileges, forms, or feelings--freedom of the intellect for every kind of criticism, freedom of money for every kind of business. But both, too, unhesitatingly aim at the domination of a _class_, a domination which recognizes no overriding supremacy of the State. Mind and money, being both inorganic, want the State, not as a matured form of high symbolism to be venerated, but as an engine to serve a purpose. Thus the difference between these forces and those of Frondism is fundamental, for the latter’s reaction had been a defence of the old Gothic against the intrusive Baroque way of living and being “in form,”--and now both these are on the defensive together and almost indistinguishable. Only in England (it must be emphasized again and again) the Fronde had disarmed, not only the State in open battle, but also the Third Estate by its inward superiority, and so attained to the one kind of first-class form that democracy is capable of working up to, a form neither planned nor aped, but naturally matured, the expression of an old breed and an unbroken sure tact that can adapt itself to the use of every new means that the changes of Time put into its hands. Thus it came about that the English Parliament, while taking part in the Succession-Wars of the Absolute States, handled them as economic wars with business aims. The mistrust felt for high form by the inwardly formless Non-Estate is so deep that everywhere and always it is ready to rescue its freedom--_from_ all form--by means of a dictatorship, which acknowledges no rules and is, therefore, hostile to all that has grown up, which, moreover, in virtue of its mechanizing tendency, is acceptable to the taste both of intellect and of money--consider, for example, the structure of the state-machine of France which Robespierre began and Napoleon completed. Dictatorship in the interests of a class-ideal appealed to Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Rodbertus, and Lassalle as it had to the Classical ideologues of the fourth century--Xenophon in the Cyropædia and Isocrates in the Nicocles.[718]

But the well-known saying of Robespierre that “the Government of the Revolution is the despotism of freedom against tyranny” expresses more than this. It lets out the deep fear that shakes every multitude which, in the presence of grave conjunctures, feels itself “not up to form.” A regiment that is shaken in its discipline will readily concede to accidental leaders of the moment powers of an extent and a kind which the legitimate command could never acquire, and which _if_ legitimate would be utterly intolerable. But this, on a larger scale, is the position of every commencing Civilization. Nothing reveals more tellingly the decline of political form than that upspringing of formless powers which we may conveniently designate, from its most conspicuous example, _Napoleonism_. How completely the being of Richelieu or of Wallenstein was involved in the unshakable antecedents of their period! And how instinct with form, under all its outer unform, was the English Revolution! Here, just the reverse; the Fronde fights _about_ the form, the absolute State _in_ the form, but the bourgeoisie _against_ the form. The mere abolition of an order that had become obsolete was no novelty--Cromwell and the heads of the First Tyrannis had done that. But, that behind the ruins of the visible there is no longer the substance of an invisible form; that Robespierre and Napoleon find nothing either around or in them to provide the _self-evident_ basis essential to any new creation; that for a government of high tradition and experience they have no choice but to substitute an accidental régime, whose future no longer rests secure on the qualities of a slowly and thoroughly trained minority, but depends entirely on the chance of the adequate successor turning up--such are the distinguishing marks of this turning of the times, and hence comes the immense superiority that is enjoyed for generations still by those states which manage to retain a tradition longer than others.

The First Tyrannis had completed the Polis with the aid of the non-noble; the latter now destroyed it with the aid of the Second Tyrannis. As an idea, it perishes in the bourgeois revolutions of the fourth century, for all that it may persist as an arrangement or a habit or an instrument of the momentary powers that be. Classical man never ceased, in fact, to think and live politically in its form. But never more was it for the multitude a symbol to be respected and venerated, any more than the Divine Right of Kings was venerated in the West after Napoleon had almost succeeded in making his own dynasty “the oldest in Europe.”

Further, in these revolutions too, as ever in Classical history, there were only local and temporary solutions--nothing resembling the splendid sweep of the French Revolution from the Bastille to Waterloo--and the scenes in them were more atrocious still, for the reason that in this Culture, with its basically Euclidean feeling, the only possible way seemed to be that of physical collision of party against party, and the only possible end for the loser, not functional incorporation in the victor’s system as in the West, but destruction root and branch. At Corcyra (427) and Argos (370) the possessing classes were slaughtered _en masse_; in Leontini (422) they were expelled from the city by the lower classes, which carried on affairs for a while with slaves until, in fear of an avenging return, they evacuated altogether and migrated to Syracuse. The refugees from hundreds of these revolutions inundated the cities, recruited the mercenary armies of the Second Tyrannis, and infested the routes by land and sea. The readmission of such exiled fractions is a standing feature in the peace-terms offered by the Diadochi and later by the Romans. But the Second Tyrannis itself secured its positions by acts of this kind. Dionysius I (407-367) secured his hegemony over Syracuse--the city in whose higher society, along with that of Athens, centred the ripest culture of Hellas, the city where Æschylus had produced his Persian trilogy in 470--by wholesale executions of educated people and confiscations of their property; this he followed up by entirely rebuilding the population, in the upper levels by granting large properties to his adherents, and in the lower by raising masses of slaves to the citizenship and distributing amongst them (as was not uncommon) the wives and daughters of the victims.[719]

After the characteristically Classical fashion, the type of these revolutions was such as to produce always an increase of number, never of extent. Multitudes of them happened, but each proceeded purely for itself and at one point of its own, and it is only the fact that they were contemporary with one another that gives them the character of a collective phenomenon, which marks an epoch. Similarly with Napoleonism; here again, a formless regimen for the first time raised itself above the framework of the State, yet without being able to attain to complete inward detachment therefrom. It supported itself on the Army, which, _vis-à-vis_ the nation that had lost its “form,” began to feel itself as an independent power. That is the brief road from Robespierre to Bonaparte--with the fall of the Jacobins the centre of gravity passed from the administration to the ambitious generals. How deeply this new tendency implanted itself in the West may be seen from the example of Bernadotte and Wellington, and even more from the story of Frederick William III’s “call to my People” in 1813--in this case the continuance of the dynasty would have been challenged by the military had not the King stiffened himself to break with Napoleon.[720]

This anti-constitutionality of the Second Tyrannis declared itself also in the position taken by Alcibiades and Lysander in the armed forces of their respective cities during the latter stages of the Peloponnesian War, a position incompatible with the basic form of the Polis. The first-named, destitute as an exile of official position, and against the will of the home authorities, exercised from 411 the _de facto_ command of the Athenian Navy; the second, though not even a Spartiate, felt himself entirely independent at the head of an army devoted to his person. In the year 408 the contest of the two powers for the supremacy over the Ægean world took the form of a contest between these two individuals.[721] Shortly after this, Dionysius of Syracuse built up the first large-scale professional army and introduced engines of war (artillery)[722]--a new form which served as a model for the Diadochi and Rome also. Thereafter the spirit of the army was a political power on its own account, and it became a serious question how far the State was master, and how far tool, of its army. The fact that the government of Rome was exclusively in the hands of a military committee[723] from 390 to 367[724] reveals pretty clearly that the army had a policy of its own. It is well known that Alexander, the Romanticist of the Second Tyrannis, fell more and more under the influence of his generals, who not only compelled the retreat from India but also disposed of his inheritance amongst themselves as a matter of course.

This is essentially Napoleonism, and so is the extension of _personal_ rule over regions united by ties neither national nor jural, but merely military and administrative. But extension was just what was essentially incompatible with the Polis. The Classical State is the one State that was incapable of any organic widening, and the conquests of the Second Tyrannis therefore resolved themselves into a _juxtaposition of two political units_, the Polis and the subjugated territory, the cohesion of which was initially accidental and perpetually in danger. Thus arose that strange picture of the Hellenistic-Roman world, the true significance of which is not even yet recognized--_a circle of border-regions_, and within them a congeries of Poleis to which, small as they were, the conception of the State proper, the _res publica_, continued to be bound as exclusively as ever. In this middle (indeed, so far as concerned each individual, hegemony was in one point) was the theatre of all real politics. The “_orbis terrarum_”--a significant expression--was merely a means or object to it. The Roman notions of “_imperium_”--dictatorial powers of administration outside the city moat (which were automatically extinguished when its holder entered the Pomœrium)--and of “_provincia_” as the opposite of “_res publica_,” express the common Classical instinct, which knew only the city’s body as the State and political subject, and the “outside” only in relation to it, as object to it. Dionysius made his city of Syracuse into a fortress surrounded by a “scrap-heap of states,” and extended his field of power thence, over Upper Italy and the Dalmatian coast, into the northern Adriatic, where he possessed Ancona and Hatria at the mouth of the Po. Philip of Macedon, following the example of his teacher Jason of Pheræ (murdered in 370), adopted the reverse plan, placing his centre of gravity in the periphery (that is, practically in the army) and thence exercising a hegemony over the Hellenic world of States. Thus Macedonia came to extend to the Danube, and after Alexander’s death there were added to this outer circle the empires of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies--each governed from a Polis (Antioch, Alexandria), but through the intermediary of existing native machinery, which, be it said, was at its lowest better than any Classical administration of it could have been. Rome herself in the same period (_c._ 326-265) built up her Middle-Italian territory as a _border state_, secured in all directions by a system of colonies, allies, and settlements with Latin right. Then, from 237, we find Hamilcar Barca winning for Carthage, a city old established in the Classical way of life, an empire in Spain; C. Flaminius (225) conquering the Po Valley for Rome; and finally Cæsar making his Gallic empire. These were the foundations upon which rested, first, the Napoleonic struggles of the Diadochi in the East, then those of Scipio and Hannibal in the West--the limits of the Polis outgrown in both cases--and lastly the Cæsarian struggles of the Triumvirs, who supported themselves on the total of _all_ the border states and used their means, in order to be--“the first in Rome.”