CHAPTER V: DE MAISTRE AND BISMARCK653

I

The Catholic Revival and the growth of nationalism are perhaps the two most fundamental facts in the history of the nineteenth century. Round them may very largely be grouped the ideals from which its ultimate canon may be evolved.

II

There is no problem as to the origin of De Maistre's fundamental ideas. He was born to hate the Revolution and in his examination of its charac­ter he found no signs of good. Every institution he cherished it had overthrown. Every dogma he accepted it had cast away. It had tyrannised over the Church, it had mocked religion, it had executed the king. ‘France was dishonoured by more than a hundred thousand murders and the soil of that noble kingdom was strewn with scaffolds.'⁶⁵⁴ The foundations of political authority were overthrown and with them the structure of eccle- siasticism seemed to perish. It was De Maistre's task to suggest the basis of their reconstruction.

The character of his response was in a large degree determined by his early life. The member of a distinguished family, he was, as M. Faguet has well pointed out,⁶⁵⁵ essentially a patrician by nature. His early career had fastened on him the disposition of the bureaucrat who loves order and to whom chaos is the first of sins. He had, even from childhood, a high regard for authority; and even when at the University, he read no book without the permission of his father. Nor can the fact that the Jesuits of Chambery played their part in the determination of his career have been without its influence; and we know that to his mother the suppression of that order in France was a serious blow to religion.⁶⁵⁶ To an intelligence so trained a shock more deep than that which the ideas ofthe Revolution must have suggested it is impossible to imagine. The blow came, moreover, when he was nearly forty years of age,⁶⁵⁷ at a time when the main lines of intellectual development have been finally determined.

He desired a reconstruction of society and it was such a method as his education had familiarised him with that he applied to his work. In no sense of the word a psychologist, it was a logical analysis of the problem that he made. He found a new dogma—the sovereignty of the people— popularised by the Revolution. No item in the term was de­fined, no implications had been studied. The magic of a phrase had enthralled the intelligence of men. There was easy talk of the rights of men, and, once more, no shadow of precision in the talk.⁶⁵⁸ Society, he pointed out, was not born, as Rousseau devoutly urged, from delibera­tion; for that term itself implies the organisation which is society. Nor can we predicate a society before we have a sovereign, in order that we may refer authority to a popular origin. The very idea of human inter­course implies, to his mind, the idea of sovereignty; ‘for the term “people” suggests an organisation built round a common centre, and without sov­ereignty there can be neither union nor political unity.'⁶⁵⁹ He is equally opposed to the suggestion that man is in any sense an independent be­ing. He admits that the thought is an easy one, but it is founded upon a mistaken interpretation of freedom.⁶⁶⁰ We have to accustom ourselves to grasp firmly the idea of a divine will as the foundation of human society, and only in so far as man acts in harmony with that will is he capable of constructive achievement.⁶⁶¹

It is easy to see the direction in which his thought is moving. To conceive of man as an isolation is to build a State upon the basis of his separatism.⁶⁶² But that is to neglect the fact that the State is essentially an unity, over and above its constituent parts. The attempt to base it upon separatism results in an undue stress of the individual on the one hand, and of reason on the other. Reason is useless in the preservation of a political society,⁶⁶³ and the essence of patriotism is that abnegation of the individual which a separatist theory denies.⁶⁶⁴ That corporate soul which is the centre of national power can never be constructed from thought.

We have abandoned reason and the individual and their main weapon must follow. If it is necessary to introduce a certain mysticism into the texture of the State, it must be preserved in all its dignity. So he urges that a written constitution is an error. The danger of its accessibility apart, it contains the stupid error of supposing that the makers of laws are men, that laws are documents, that a nation can be constituted with a pen and paper. History gives evidence to the contrary. The more feeble the institution the more does it tend to take a written form.⁶⁶⁹ Men do not respect that which they see created. A real constitution man can not create; for his function in nature is only to transform. ‘Man,’ he urges,⁶⁷⁰ ‘can not give laws to himself. He can do no more than defend what is dispensed to him by a higher power. These rights are beneficent cus­toms which are beneficent because they are unwritten and because we know neither their beginning nor their author.’ And the declaration of custom should be avoided since not only is it either the effect or the cause of great evil, but it also is invariably more costly than it is worth.⁶⁷¹

So that it is to authority we are driven back and of its worth he has no doubt.

No one can doubt the reasons for his attitude. ‘Ainsi done, Ma­dame,’ he wrote to a Russian lady,⁶⁷⁹ ‘plus de pape, plus de souverainete; plus de souverainete, plus de unite; plus d ‘unite, plus d’authorite; plus d’authorite, plus de foi.’ It is the bitter protest of the medievalist against the Revolution. Doubt is sin, and to prevent its birth we must form a political system in which it shall have no place.

We need, then, a formula against revolution and it is in the sover­eignty of authority that we find it. One tremendous consequence must result immediately from such a conclusion: our theologico-political sys­tem can not be Protestant in character. De Maistre was too bold a thinker not to admit the logical deduction from his premises and he was unspar­ing in his criticisms of Protestantism. It is a word that must be effaced from the language of Europe if religion is to be re-established and the foundations of political authority strengthened.⁶⁸³ In its various forms, as Calvinism, more insidiously as Jansenism,⁶⁸⁴ it has declared war on every sort of authority. It is protestant against sovereignty for its only dogma is to have no dogmas.⁶⁸⁵ The French Revolution is the inevitable and disastrous consequence of its principles; it has almost annihilated Christianity in Europe.⁶⁸⁶ For it is a philosophy of scepticism. ‘C‘est l'insurrection de la raison individuelle,' he wrote,⁶⁸⁷ ‘contre la raison generale, et par consequent c'est tout ce qu'on peut imaginer de plus mauvais. C'est l'ennemi essentiel de tout croyance commune plusieurs hommes: ce que constitue ennemi dii genre humain.' By nature it is rebellious, for doubt is its foundation and doubt is the mother of rebel­lion. History gives proof of this statement. With the Reformation came the religious division of Christianity and the political division of Eu­rope.⁶⁸⁸ Its force even then was not expended. To test the doctrines of Luther it cast Germany into the horrors of the Thirty Years' War. The execution of Charles I is traceable directly to its influence. If it urges the inhumanity of Saint Bartholomew the necessity of that massacre is the proof of its inherent danger.⁶⁸⁹ It is in fact anti-sovereign, and therefore anti-authoritarian by nature. It is the very mainspring of inquietude. For sovereignty in its essence is indivisible, and Protestantism makes of each man his own sovereign.⁶⁹⁰ It places faith in the category of sin, and examines dogma only to reject it. For in that desire for investigation lies the yearning for novelty, and the distrust of existing things, as is in­stanced in the manner in which one whom De Maistre signalises as perhaps the most odious of the Revolutionists, Condorcet, was the ea­ger friend of reform.⁶⁹¹ It is the sans-culottisme of religion. It is inferior as a political system even to paganism or to the theories of Mahomet which realised the necessity of dogma and faith.⁶⁹² It has taken the secu­rity of the State to cast it heedlessly among the multitude.

The criticism has at any rate the merit of certitude and it is also the logical result of his beliefs. For when he had based his monarchy on miracle, De Maistre had in fact placed it beyond the reach of argument, and his salvation must find itself in a political theory in which reason was but a secondary consideration. The necessities of his outlook are clear. He has his organic state, of which the nature and origins are alike enwrapped in mystery. He has asserted the need of corporate govern­ment which can not, in its turn, exist without sovereignty. For there is no adequate rule that is not absolute. If it is said that absolutism is bound to issue in injustice, he will retort that injustice is at the basis of life. It is upon sacrifice that existence is founded, and if the innocent die they will at any rate have the satisfaction of remembering that the executioner is the cornerstone of society. If it be retorted that this is irrational, he will then answer that he is thereby the more certain of its truth. So to him even Christ can be no more than ‘une victime sanglante,' and M. Faguet has acutely suggested that his Christianity was basically pagan; for it lacks the very idea of love of which the Gospel is the written expres­sion.⁶⁹³ This, clearly, is the cause of his profound hatred of the Greek spirit. For he found there the same lack of vigour, of hardness of certi­tude, the same anxiety to examine and to doubt, which is the root of the egoism ofthe Protestant.⁶⁹⁴ Nothing is more characteristic of his temper than the singular but striking judgment of Plato that as a Greek he is wearying to a degree; ‘Il n' est grand, sublime, penetrant que lorsqu'il est theologien; c'est dire lorsqu' il enonce des dogmes positifs et eternels separes de toute chicane.'⁶⁹⁵ The Greek mind was for him too pliable, too yielding, too curious to command either his affection or his admira­tion. What he sought for were the premises of life, and, once given, as he could not doubt they were given to the world in the Christian philoso­phy, the sole problem was to give them an unchangeable political ex­pression. The discussion of Christianity itself became thus unimpor­tant. For, once given, it was outside the realm of argument. It was in this way that De Maistre became above all a political theorist. He could subordinate philosophy and theology to his theory of the State simply because they required no more than the statement to merit acceptance. That is why, as M. Faguet has pointed out, his earliest work is a politi­cal treatise; for at the very outset of his career his other views were indelibly fixed, were, indeed, the foundation of his political thought.⁶⁹⁶

III

With the rejection of Protestantism he is thrown back on the Catholic theory, and to this he gave an uncompromising and unquestioning ac­ceptance. The book was in the nature of a personal apologia; for in the stress of the Napoleonic conflict he had spoken disrespectfully of the Holy Father, and Du Pape was written as a method of reparation.⁶⁹⁷ Certainly the Papacy has good reason to give thanks to the ability of its enthusiastic champion; for with the possible exception of Augustinus Triumphus no one has given such entire allegiance to the gravest ex­tremism of Hildebrand and of Innocent III, and De Maistre is superior to his predecessor in that he has the important merit of being readable.

It is not difficult to understand the cause of De Maistre's papalism. Semper eadem might have been the motto of his thought, as it was the Catholic challenge to a revolutionary age. The Papacy had endured un­changed for eighteen hundred years. It was almost the parent of dogma. Its very life depended on the imposition of its authority. It was the guardian of a mystery into which faith alone could penetrate. Its sanction was divine; it spurned the power of human thought; it was the proud claim­ant of infallibility. What institution could be more fitted to rule the world? It claimed infallibility. That was to mark it as a sovereign power, since infallibility is only the spiritual synonym of sovereignty.⁶⁹⁸ That it should claim infallibility did not mean that it asked the possession of any special privilege, but only that the Church was a monarchy and demanded the natural attributes of its character.⁶⁹⁹ It meant that error could not be charged against it, that its decisions must be accepted with­out question. If it be suggested that its infallibility is impossible, since Popes have erred, the reply is simply that infallible it must be since without it unity becomes impossible.⁷⁰⁰ Nor is it worth while to raise the objection, since the Catholic Church does not enter into argument. ‘Elle croit,' he says almost with affection,⁷⁰¹ ‘elle croit sans disputer; car la foi est une croyance par amour, et l'amour n'argumente point.' It has the even greater merit of finding at once its visible unity in the Pope. De Maistre makes short work of conciliar claims. Their infrequency, the manner in which they have themselves acclaimed the papal supremacy, the analogy with the relation of States-General to King, the witness of Gallican Church and Jansenist schismatics, of Protestant theologians like Calvin and heretic jurists like Pufendorf, are all dragged, some little matters of history notwithstanding, into the service ofthis supremacy.⁷⁰² Rome, he says with Calvin, is the centre of the world, umbilicus ter­rae ⁷⁰³

He is not afraid of despotism; for the Pope will be governed by the laws of his being, which are divine in character. And in any case he alone is the judge of those laws and must be obeyed without conditions unless anarchy is to result. The descent from absolute sovereignty to utter confusion is single and precipitous. Infallibility has been estab­lished in order that it may be avoided.⁷⁰⁴ If it be said that Popes have meddled too intimately with the lives of men, he will reply that it has never been without justification, and to Catholics who cherish such a thought he gives the warning that it implies a human judgment upon a divine institution.⁷⁰⁵ Everything, in short, that can be known of the pa­pal structure justifies the conclusion that it fulfils all the necessary condi­tions of social permanence. ‘Il ne peut avoir de societe humaine sans gouvernement,' he said in tremendous words,⁷⁰⁶ ‘ni de gouvernement sans souverainete, ni de souverainete sans infaillibilite, et ce dernier privilege est si absolument necessaire, qu'on est force de supposer l'infaillibilite, memes dans les souverainetes temporelles (ou elle n'est pas) sans peine de voir l'association se dissoudre.' Law, then, is simple enough. It is what the sovereign commands, and that sovereign must be unique that he may escape destruction.

There is a tinge of fatalism in so terrible a logic, but De Maistre is ready with explanations of its necessity. Man, he holds, is a curious mingling of good and evil, and has need of government that he may be social. The law courts—we must remember that De Maistre was for long a judge-make us understand why that government must be abso­lute. Where there is no sentence given dispute immediately arises; and sovereignty arising to prevent the disaster which would result there­from. Man desires to be just, and sovereignty provides the means for the attainment of that end.⁷⁰⁷ It is true, of course, that dangers can result from its exercise; but they are less than the dangers which would result from its absence. And those who urge that the difficulty may be avoided by the erection of constitutions and of fundamental laws forget that the individual or the institution which carries them into effect will be in fact sovereign; so that in our effort to avoid it we attain it.⁷⁰⁸ It is useless to object, for instance, that the difficulty has been evaded in the limited monarchy of England; for, as he urges, what has been limited in En­gland is royalty while the king in Parliament still remains supreme.⁷⁰⁹ It can do all it desires, and there is no legal limitation upon its will. He does not deny that kings may act wrongly; but in that event they will be subject to the indirect power of the Pope, who, as the direct representa­tive of God, can release their subjects from their oath of fidelity. It is in this case only that there exists a right of resistance in the subject. Or, rather, it is not a right of resistance so much as a duty, since it is a command laid upon them by the most supreme of powers.⁷¹⁰ Nor have the Popes ever misused their power. If they have fought with sovereigns, with abstract sovereignty itself they have never contended. They have enforced the divine law of which they are the chosen delegates, and its very exercise has exalted the peoples of the earth.⁷¹¹ They have defended the sanctity of marriage;⁷¹² they have maintained the laws of the Church and the customs of the priestly caste;⁷¹³ they have upheld—De Maistre speaks in all seriousness—the liberty of Italy;⁷¹⁴ it is an enviable record.

The power thus theoretically conceived is justified in its practical results. It is untrue to urge, as is customary with the opponents of the Papacy, that it has plunged Europe into strife and fanaticism. The Popes are charged with the execution of a supreme power—that of excommu­nication— and they have used that power for public welfare. Where its use has resulted in tumult, it is due to the resistance they have encoun­tered.⁷¹⁵ The medieval exercise of their right saved Europe from the catastrophes of barbarism. They can do so again, after the latest of barbarian irruptions, if men would but realise their power instead of remaining blinded by appearances. The good the Popes have conferred upon men is manifest in work such as missionary enterprise which is the harbinger of civilisation.⁷¹⁶ It is seen in their struggle for civil liberty,⁷¹⁷ in the admirable results that have followed on the institution of clerical celibacy⁷¹⁸—a good which Protestantism has sought to destroy—in their almost miraculous preservation of monarchy at a time when the decay of the Roman empire, and the barbarian invasions from the North seemed destined to achieve its destruction.⁷¹⁹ In its new infancy it was cherished and strengthened by the papal arm.⁷²⁰ Where kings have been obedient to the Pope their reigns have been long and prosperous—clearly a sign of virtue.⁷²¹ Without the Pope, in short, a true Christianity would have been impossible. ‘Des Papes,' he writes⁷²² ‘furent les instituteurs, les sauveteurs, et les veritables genies constituantes de l'Europe.' It thus becomes impossible to judge of kings save in their papal context, and its achievements are the solid demonstration that the papal monarchy is the best because the most permanent and the most natural.

To such a view his theory of schism is the logical conclusion. A schismatic church is a Protestant Church, for it is destroying the essen­tial unity of civilisation.⁷²³ The heretic churches are so many evidences of division and thus so many proofs of danger. They have no common name, their character is mutually alien, they attack each others' dogma, they have no means of final decision between their errors.⁷²⁴ To sympathise with their variety is to invite the onset of a cataclysm.

What, then, is the conclusion to which his speculations lead? The faulty systems of the eighteenth century must be cast aside; they have deprived the half of Europe of its Christianity.⁷²⁵ The institution which alone has lasted for eighteen centuries can serve as the natural centre of a new political system which will be the old. It is necessary for the preservation of Christianity that Rome should undertake that leader­ship. She only has the power and the majesty. She only emerges un­harmed from the ruthless attacks to which she is subjected. She only can guarantee unity and faith. Divine in her origin, she has been splendid in her past and is destined to a more glorious future. God has watched over her with a special love, and thus fitted her to be the protector of nations. She holds in her hands the future happiness of men. If she has to face doubt and vice and rebellion, yet is she destined to triumph. ‘Hydra­headed error will be vanquished before indivisible Truth: God will reign in the Temple as He reigns in heaven, in the blessed communion of his Saints.'⁷²⁶

IV

Lamartine has somewhere remarked that De Maistre's political thought is at the service of his religious instincts and this must be the main and abiding impression of any one who analyses his work. His was that fanatic devotion to a cause which examines all dogmas save his own. His own faith he did not examine, for he had placed it outside the realm of discussion; and to have admitted that it was capable of analysis would have been for him the admission that it might be annihilated. It is an admirable position; and it would demand the highest reverence did it possess the single merit of truth. For it was here that the immense fal­lacy lay in De Maistre's argument. He had already determined his con­clusions before he began his enquiry. In the result, he became not the judge but the advocate who uses history as the great storehouse of po­litical examples from which instances such as he desired might be culled. Nor was he in the least careful as to the accuracy of his interpreta- tions.⁷²⁷ He had that peculiar faculty of the eighteenth-century mind for seeing only what he believed on a priori grounds.⁷²⁸ He would not admit that he might be wrong, for that would be to give tolerance the name of virtue. So it is that to the modern sense there is something of almost unrelieved ugliness in the brutality with which he discusses his oppo­nents. What is above all lacking in his temper is the capacity to under­stand humanity and, understanding, to forgive. The first necessity, after all, in a statesman, even in a theological statesman, is the readiness to admit error. History, in fact, is strewn with the wrecks of infallible sys­tems and, in the end, De Maistre added but one more to that hapless company.

He mistook the grounds of the Revolution. He misread the charac­ter of his age. He seems, indeed, to have hated it too greatly to have made possible that understanding which, politically at least, can be born of sympathy alone. He did not remember, or else he chose to forget, the very obvious fact that no great historic event can come to pass without some justification of equal greatness as its parent. Since the Revolution did not accord with his desires, he chose deliberately to misrepresent its ideals. He would not understand that it had come as a protest against exactly that system of which he urged the reconstruction. He made the capital error of taking no account of the category of time. After all, the events he had regretted were on the book of record, and to ignore them was in nowise to ensure their oblivion. The world that had seen the fall of the Bastile was bound to be a different world. To tilt against its fun­damental principles may have been courage; but it was the courage which has been immortalised by the dangerous pen of Cervantes. His plan would perhaps have been admirable in the fifth century after Christ. One recognises then the need of that powerful, even absolute, centralisation for which he contended. But to apply the solution of the problems of the fifth century to the difficulties of the nineteenth was to make too bold a denial of the march of mind. Men had thought too infinitely for his conclusions to be possible. They had known the Pa­pacy too long. They would judge it not by the programme it announced but by the character its actions suggested it to possess. If the Reforma­tion, and its political offspring the Revolution, have any definite begin­ning, they can be traced back to the era when what most oppressed men was the crimes of Rome. Luther may have been ignorant, fleshly, brutal, but he said boldly what men wanted to hear. It is not enough to proclaim loudly that Rome has never erred when men of genius have occupied themselves with the pregnant examination of her error. It is an inad­equate outlook to defame curiosity as sin without attempting to enquire whether it is not in fact as natural as faith itself. Easy it may be to proclaim sovereignty divine, but the real problem comes when its de­fender is asked to justify the results of its exercise. The brilliance of De Maistre's apologetic does not conceal the viciousness of its determined obscurantism.

But it is of his main tenets that there must be most serious question. He takes his stand upon the splendour of national and religious unity, and his books are in effect a ceaseless hymn to its praise. It is for its preservation that his dogmas are so pitilessly erected. Sovereignty is politically one that thought may cease to be manifold. The Church is a monarchy that the single judge of the content of faith may pronounce his judgment without the fatal dissolvent of argument. To the need for unity are alike sacrificed reason and liberty. We know, of course, the explana­tion of his attitude, nor can we lack compassion for the suffering he so courageously endured. But a theory which finds no justification in ex­perience is not a theory but a dream. To construct a satisfactory theory of the State we must be equipped with a psychology that is realistic. We must deal with men as they are, and desist from the seductive temptation to deal with men as they would be could they but be induced to appreci­ate the force of our ideas. For we are given variety and difference as the basis of our political system, and it is a world that takes account of them that we must plan. Race, language, nationality, history, all these are barriers that make us understand how fundamental are the natural limits to unity. And within the State itself it is only upon minute issues that agreement or compromise is possible; upon the basis of conviction, where conscience pricks to the utterance, we are, often despite ourselves, com­pelled to retain our souls. A system that makes entire abstraction of such facts as these is grounded in falsehood and doomed to dissolution.

Its sovereignty can not remain entire so long as there is disagree­ment, and the means to unity De Maistre barely sought to discuss. He argued that his papalism would prevent disunion and change but he did not see that this was true only to the point where the system carried conviction. That was the meaning of Hume‘s caustic saying that even despotisms are built upon consent, and it is only in a world of De Maistres that consent to such a despotism could be possible. The freedom of thought from which the Revolution was born may have been anarchy; we can then but note that its necessity makes it sacred. We can not make a fetich of obedience. To every one there comes a point where to bow the knee is worse than death. It was a realisation which Luther had at the Diet of Worms, which came to Ridley and Latimer in the open square of Oxford, to Dollinger, when, in 1871, he parted with a Church that was dearer to him than life. We who care for truth can not promote unity if its cost be the suppression of such spirits. It may be that such an attitude involves the dangerous exaltation of individuality. Yet this is an intersti­tial world to be absorbed into which is to lose oneself. A State that is so fundamentally one as never to need the wholesome spur of discontent will doubtless avoid a revolution; but that will only be because its cor­porate life is dead. The one thing that seems to be historically sure m an uncertain world is the fact that progress is born from disagreement and discussion. We have, then, to organise our State in such fashion as best permits its emergence.

We may, of course, urge as De Maistre would doubtless have ar­gued, that the best of worlds is a static world and that the love of progress is an illusion. That may be true, but the world, after all, is not static, and it is with the given conditions that we must cope. And even De Maistre may be said to have admitted progress when he remarked that every attack on Catholicism has only strengthened it. Development is so cer­tainly the fundamental law of our being that it is therein we must, how­ever difficult be the conception, find our truest identity. And that is to say that we must lay down no immutability of political form. Since each of us lives differently our hopes and thoughts must be different. That, logically, is the negation of the extreme claims of Catholicism. It means that the Pope will not possess the sovereignty of the world, since there are people who do not agree with him. It means that he will be com­pelled to continuous readjustment not less from within than from with­out. It was not without reason that Sextus IV and Alexander VI were followed by men like Caraffa and Gregory XIII; that to Pius IX the liberalism of his successor would have been anathema it is difficult in­deed to deny. But facts such as these prove the futility of a sovereignty that alone would have satisfied De Maistre.

It is not as a political theorist that he will live but as the trumpeter of a remarkable reaction. He is the real author of that Ultramontanism by which the nineteenth century Papacy sought the restoration of its pres­tige. It was upon his argument that it was founded and his book was in reality its watchword. For he gave it cause to hope at a time when the humiliation of the Revolution seemed to have stricken it beyond recov­ery. He provided logical cause for a hatred that before had been but sullenly instinctive. He created the materials for a new and more terrible Canossa. It was the spirit of De Maistre which barred the way to a united Italy. It was the new hope that he inspired which caused the con­demnation of Lamennais. He was the real author of the definition of papal infallibility in 1870. And yet in every victory he suffered a defeat. Cavour built a new Italy upon the ruins ofthe temporal power. Lamennais is the author of a French reformation that is yet to come. The seed sown at the Vatican Council has yet to produce its harvest. For men have grown in the course of time to love freedom and slavery has become a losing cause. Yet it is impossible to withhold our admiration from a man who battled so earnestly for what he deemed right. Even if he loved a cause we deem mistaken, it is to his honour that he loved it greatly. And it may well prove in the end that he served liberty the more truly because he did not shrink from proclaiming his hate.

V

If in the perspective of history it seems a little grimly ironical to connect the name of Bismarck with the spirit of religion, yet is it none the less certain that his attachment to Christianity was deep and sincere.⁷²⁹ Though as a young man he had been a sceptic,⁷³⁰ his friendship with the Blankenberg circle seems to have convinced him of the truth of Chris­tian principles, and he experienced all the typical phenomena of reli­gious conversion.⁷³¹ Henceforth he did not doubt the power of God in the direction of the world, and he felt to the full the significance of the need for human redemption from sin.⁷³² And this new realisation of a vivid faith gave him strength in his political life. It was therein that he found all the sources of his activity. ‘If I was not a Christian,' he told Ferrieres in the stress of the Franco-Prussian War,⁷³³ ‘I could not hold my position for an hour. If I could not count on God's help, I could sacrifice nothing for the sake of earthly masters. If I lost my faith, of what avail would be my fatherland ?' Whatever happened in his career he attributed to a divine intervention. If he escaped an accident, it was God who warded off the danger;⁷³⁴ were the French defeated, God had chosen thus to reward the piety of the German nation.⁷³⁵ He was, in short, essentially an Evangelical whose religion partook of that curious inwardness which, in Geneva, made of Calvin a tyrant that he might become the parent of resistance to tyranny.

And the political consequences of his attitude were no less apparent than they were logical. Because he came increasingly to emphasise the significance of this inward vision he came also certainly to suspect, perhaps even to deprecate, its expression in religious societies and insti­tutions. Man had only to do his duty and for Bismarck, so the indefati­gable Busch informs us,⁷³⁶ the manner in which his belief found expres­sion was unimportant. It was this religious-spirit that he termed ‘one of the foundations and bulwarks of justice and the State.'⁷³⁷ For him the State was essentially based upon the principles of Christianity, and to rob it of that character was to destroy that which gave it its crowning distinction. For it was from this intimate infusion of the Christian spirit that it derived the eternal renewal of its underlying truth.⁷³⁸

What it is here important to realise is that, like most Evangelical Christians, Bismarck lacked any deep sense of an institutional and organised Church. Indeed, he would probably have denied that religion, as internally grounded, has any need of external form, since, so he would have argued, it finds its most adequate expression in political action. He took no interest in dogmatic problems⁷³⁹—even the internal dissensions of the German Evangelical Churches aroused in him no echo of inter­ested response;⁷⁴⁰ he had but little confidence in the fortification sup­plied by religious observances.⁷⁴¹ For him there was but one institu­tion—the State—and it was to that he devoted his energies and, on oc­casion, sacrificed his convictions.⁷⁴² Like the great Stahl, he saw in the State a Church, and his theory of its structure was at bottom theocratic.⁷⁴³ It was for this reason that he had, in 1847, opposed the emancipation of the Jews; for since the State was Christian in character, its identity would be destroyed by the admission of non-Christian elements into its compo­sition.⁷⁴⁴ But the Christian State meant to Bismarck neither the vague socialism of F. D. Maurice and of Kingsley, nor the control of that State by a Church. It meant simply the governance of its political conduct by the rules of life which Bismarck, in all sincerity, believed that he re­ceived from God. He was thus logically bound to hate all organisations which might embarrass the State, for such embarrassment was the clear proof of an anti-religious spirit. His State was simply the Hegelian con­ception taken to the plane of action, and raison d’etat justified every­thing.⁷⁴⁵ What he did for the welfare of the State he could not doubt was for the welfare of his Church since it came directly from his intimate union with God. ‘I believe,’ he said in 1873,⁷⁴⁶ ‘that I am serving my God by serving my King,’ and it was this which explains his love of unity in political activity. He simply could not understand antagonism to his policy where raison d’etat was its justification; for it seemed to him not dissimilar to direct antagonism against the divine will.⁷⁴⁷ He was thus, perhaps, the most completely Erastian statesman who has ever lived, since his identification of politics with religion is final and absolute. In such a view he would be compelled to regard with vehement hostility the exclusion of any sphere of life from the control of the State; and this surely explains why he seems to have regarded with suspicious dislike the Prussian measure of 1850 which had guaranteed autonomy to the Church.⁷⁴⁸ He, in fact, deified the State, and in the light of such an identification, the toleration of variety became completely impossible.

It was obvious that in such a mind the Roman Catholic Church would awaken no sympathy. It ran directly counter to all for which he stood; and that the more so in an age when, in its warfare against the Revolution, the Papacy had refurbished the weapons of Ultramontanism. For Rome claimed a sovereignty superior to that of kings. She regarded the Church as a complete and perfect society, determined to brook no interference with her internal affairs. That Church, further, like Bismarck’s own State, demanded the undeviating allegiance from its subjects. It was, moreover, an infallible Church, nor did it permit ques­tion of its judgments. No organisation was so centralised or so patiently efficient. No organisation was less ready to admit the virtue of change. The Church laid down its fundamental laws and, at the risk of forfeiting their salvation, men were compelled to obey. Clearly in such a view a conflict of sovereignty might arise. The attainment of unity was impos­sible. If Bismarck could issue commands which the Roman Catholic members of the German empire might refuse, at the papal behest, to obey, the dream of twenty years was a vain and empty thing. A struggle between empire and papacy became again essential since the absolutism of Bismarck’s sovereignty would not admit the existence of spheres of separate influence. If the Roman Catholic Church differentiated between things which were of Caesar, and those which were of God, Bismarck denied the distinction. Since to him the world meant Germany, within its confines he would permit no division of power. That, to his mind, was the fundamental error of granting ecclesiastical independence. He saw no meaning in that term or, if he did, it was a meaning fraught with danger. If the emperor could not be master in his own house, Bismarck would drive out those who doubted his domination. ‘If such a sect as the Ultramontanes,’ he declared proudly,⁷⁴⁹ ‘can not be at one with the am­bitions of the State, and even endangers those ambitions, clearly the State can not tolerate their existence.’ For it would be the blasphemy of politics to destroy the identity of the ethics of the State. It was the nega­tion of that Hegelian sovereignty the empire was proudly to personify.

VI

Such was the psychological basis of the Kulturkampf. That is not to say that it was for the enforcement of these political views that Bismarck embarked upon his most disastrous enterprise. Certainly it was not the definition of papal infallibility which moved him to action; for not only did he very decisively refuse Hohenlohe’s suggestion of concerted ac­tion against the Vatican Council, but Hohenlohe at one time even sus­pected that he was the secret ally of the Jesuits.⁷⁵⁰ The great canonist Schulte found him unwilling to take action against the infallibilist Ger­man bishops.⁷⁵¹ It seems, on the contrary, that with him the Roman policy was the natural result of the method he employed in founding the empire. ‘My one ideal,’ he said in 1879,⁷⁵² ‘was the unification of Ger­many under Prussian leadership. To that everything is accessory.’ It was when he discovered that, as he conceived the Catholics of Germany stood in the path of his ambition that he set out to ensure their destruc­tion. That he did not desire war with them is surely evident enough from August Reichensperger’s express exoneration of him from hostility in motive to the Church.⁷⁵³ It was but one of the institutions he felt it in­cumbent upon him to sacrifice in his pursuit of the Austinian chimera.

It was the unity of the German empire he had set himself to achieve. He had fought Austria as a step towards its achievement, because he believed that the new Germany must have a Hohenzollern and not a Hapsburg as its leader. When Sedan gave him victory over France it was possible to state the terms of the new problem, but not, as yet, to solve it. The permanence of the new empire he did not feel wholly as­sured. Poland was an old danger, and it had by no means proved ca­pable of adequate Germanisation; Poland was notoriously Catholic, and Jesuit influence there was known to be strong. The Roman question puzzled him greatly. He dreamed always of a revanche; and it seemed to him that a Franco-Italian alliance might well serve as its basis;⁷⁵⁴ and if he forestalled France, as a Latin and Catholic power she might easily turn to the aid of the stricken Papacy. If the Roman Catholic sympathy for Pius IX was so deep as Bismarck believed, could he feel certain of their loyalty?⁷⁵⁵ Bavaria was preponderantly Catholic and Bavaria showed no eagerness to affirm its adherence to the new empire; and when Bismarck had asked for Antonelli’s assistance in securing the Catholic vote in the Bavarian Parliament, his request had been politely ref used.⁷⁵⁶ Alsace-Lorraine, again, was predominantly Catholic in char­acter; and its discontent with its new masters the Papacy was unwilling to alleviate.⁷⁵⁷ When he remembered that as a Protestant power, as the victor, moreover, in a conflict with the two greatest Catholic nations, Prussia could hardly inspire affection at Rome, it was not difficult for his mind to consider very seriously if the allegiance German Catholics owed to the Roman see, which he considered essentially a political power,⁷⁵⁸ was not at the root of his difficulties. If he could destroy that bond, the obstacle to unity might be removed.

Internal political causes seemed to point in the same direction. The National liberals had been enthusiastic for unification; and they were the theoretical antagonists of clericalism. It was their intellectual leader, Bluntschli, who at Worms in 1869 declared that the success of German liberty depended upon the destruction of Roman influence.⁷⁵⁹ They had already urged upon Bismarck the dangers of monasticism⁷⁶⁰ and the religious control of schools.⁷⁶¹ Journalists were writing of the French defeat as the prelude to a campaign against Ultramontanism in the party papers.⁷⁶² Men of their school were speaking of the great victory as a step forward for Luther's cause.⁷⁶³ If Germanism was synonymous with Protestantism, as they did not cease to proclaim, Bismarck would have no doubts as to the requisite policy. ‘Not France alone,' wrote the Alsa­tian Schneegans,⁷⁶⁴ ‘declared war on Germany; it was Rome which de­sired a deadly combat with Protestantism. And Treitschke was proclaim­ing loudly the import of that religion to Prussia.⁷⁶⁵

If Protestantism thus showed signs of militancy, the Catholics were no less watchful. In the Prussian elections of 1870, some sixty of them were returned to the Chamber, and in men like Windthorst, Savigny, Reichensperger, they had politicians of unusual ability. Their very organisation roused serious anger among the National Liberals, and they were soon charged with having as their object a conspiracy against the State.⁷⁶⁶ Bismarck must have noted its formation with some disquiet; for the Ultramontane Bishop Ketteler, urging to him that the German victory over France was too largely interpreted as a Protestant victory with unfortunate results in the pacification of Alsace-Lorraine, had suggested that peace might the sooner come if the Catholics outside Prussia were given the same liberty as within it.⁷⁶⁷ Did that mean, as it seemed to imply, that the Catholics were German in a different sense from the Protestants At any rate he allowed his journalist Blum to an­nounce that the Centre was hostile to the German State-a sign of grow­ing suspicion.⁷⁶⁸ In the imperial elections of 1871 Ketteler's letter be­came the basis of a definite programme and forty-three Catholics of the centre were elected.⁷⁶⁹ To the press the Centre was simply an instrument in the hands of Rome, the tool of Ultramontanism, and thus in its con­ception anti-national.⁷⁷⁰ Its members seemed no less suspicious since Windthorst was an enthusiastic papalist, and Ketteler, as a bishop, might be considered as an official representative of Rome; and Bis­marck, at the outset of his career as a deputy, made him understand that between Catholic and layman there was already a grave distinction.⁷⁷¹ It seemed not a little suggestive that the first speeches of these two sus­pects should be in response to an attempt on the part of the National Liberals to make the ground of conflict one between Rome and Ger- many.⁷⁷² It was, to say the least, menacing that Bismarck, on the eve of the debate, should have given Italy the assurance that he was disposed to be friendly towards it.⁷⁷³ For friendship with Italy could mean only hostility to the Papacy, and, from such an attitude, it was but a logical road to the Falk Laws. The meaning of his attitude was clear. The old principle of a territorial religion of which the empire should be the di­vinity had come to be for him the solution of these ecclesiastical compli­cations.

On the first of April, 1871, he made quite apparent the drift of his thought. A Polish member of the Reichstag had denied the voluntary affiliation of Poland with the Empire in the name of his country. It was a direct challenge to Bismarck’s conception ofthe.State, and he did not fail to take it up. ‘Behind you,’ he retorted angrily,⁷⁷⁴ ‘you have naught save errors and illusions. You think that the Polish nation has elected you to represent it, but, in truth, you have been elected to represent the interests of the Catholic Church, and if you defend them when they are under discussion, you will have fulfilled your electoral function.’ It was a notable identification. It could mean only that he had declared war on the Roman Church and the Grand Duke of Weimar regarded it as his first overt attack on Ultramontanism.⁷⁷⁵ Windthorst saw clearly the drift of his mind when he declared that it was an attempt to enslave the Church. And it is of interest to note that Treitschke denounced the Roman claim of a free Church within the State as equivalent to a demand for the right to rebellion.⁷⁷⁶ It is often difficult to distinguish between the thought of Treitschke and the practice of his master.

The issue was defined; it was not yet joined. If the Centre was anti­imperial diplomatic negotiations with Rome might bring its members to their senses; and journalistic pressure might make plain to the Pope the danger of embroiling himself with the public opinion of Germany. Tauffkirchen was accordingly despatched to Rome to explain to the Papacy the help given to its enemies by the lamentable aggressions of the Centre;⁷⁷⁷ while Busch was commissioned to write articles to the same effect.⁷⁷⁸ Antonelli disavowed any attempt at criticism of the Cen­tre,⁷⁷⁹ and thus increased the anger of Bismarck who had already found new causes of suspicion in its support of the democrats⁷⁸⁰—for him outside the State—and their opposition to the grant to the successful generals of the recent war.⁷⁸¹ Bismarck appealed in vain to the papal approval of the Versailles ceremony.⁷⁸² He began to accuse the Centre of Jesuitism, and to remind the Church that for three hundred years it had failed to conquer the Teutonic genius.⁷⁸³ But he could obtain nothing satisfactory. Rome pursued its ancient policy of patience; for Ketteler had put it on its guard against his accusations.⁷⁸⁴ He sent the Prussian minister to dine at the Quirinal.⁷⁸⁵ Antonelli’s reply was to inform him that ‘Rome could not break with the party’ he so bitterly hated.⁷⁸⁶

‘The members of the Centre,’ he said a little later,⁷⁸⁷ ‘are trying to make us Italians,' and it was of this he had become convinced by his negotiations with Rome. The papal refusal seemed to him evidence that he was dealing with a State within a State, and that reprisals were es­sential ifthe sovereignty ofthe empire was to be maintained. If he sought for means, they were near at hand in an affiance with the National Lib­erals who as the bitter antagonists of the Papacy were prepared with a policy that might accomplish its destruction. It was the old antagonism of priestcraft and kingcraft.⁷⁸⁸ If the Centre treated his government as an enemy it was clearly necessary to treat its master as he had treated Austria and beat him into submission. Rome, as he now saw, was asso­ciated everywhere with his enemies. She endeavoured to rule in France, in Bavaria, in Poland; at the Vatican Council, as Doflinger's excommu­nication seemed to show, she had laid claim once more to the lordship of the world. He would make plain the sovereignty of the State.

VII

It was the ancient contest of Guelf and Ghibelline prolonged into a mod­ern time. What was changed was not so much the manner of the struggle as the roots from which it sprung. As in the medieval time it had been the function of the State to be the police department of the Church, so to Bismarck the Church in the modern age seemed to have a similar part to play.⁷⁸⁹ But there was the same attitude of suspicion between the two powers. ‘This is a question of Church and State,' said Bismarck at Gastein to Monsignor Vallet,⁷⁹⁰ ‘as a statesman I hate the Church.' He hated it because it threatened the unity of his State. He conceived of allegiance as one, and it was part of the danger inherent in any ecclesi­astical organisation that it undermined that oneness. While, verbally, he admitted the Church's right to absolute freedom in her own domain, he still held that her sphere must be defined by the State and, as the Falk Laws bear witness, controlled by it.⁷⁹¹ The Kulturkampf seemed to him ‘the primeval fight for supremacy between royalty and priesthood.... What we aim at is the protection of the State, the establishment of a distinct boundary-line between priestly dominion and Royal rule, de­fined in such sort that the State may be enabled to abide by it. For, in the kingdom of this world, the State is entitled to power and precedence.'⁷⁹² But that was virtually to deny the doctrine of a separate sphere for Church and State and to assert the superiority ofthe latter. He can hardly have hoped for peace when he promulgated such a doctrine against Rome. A remark of Busch's on this attitude perhaps throws light on the Chancellor’s mind. ‘For Protestant States to achieve peaceful relations with the Church of Rome,’ writes that dutiful commentator,⁷⁹³ ‘is— under the most favourable circumstances—a problem like that of squaring the circle, the solution of which one may go very near, but never quite attain.’ Such an attitude, added to his fear that the Vatican contemplated a ‘gesta Dei per Francos’⁷⁹⁴ was sufficient in itself to give him a theory of political action against a foreign and interfering prelate. Regarding the Pope as he did, simply as the head of the Centre party,⁷⁹⁵ it is little wonder that difficulties should have arisen. It was not, of course, from theory that he fought. ‘It is unworthy of a great State,’ he had said in 1850,⁷⁹⁶ ‘to fight for any question that does not concern its own inter­ests;’ and he fought Rome as holding in its hand the key to his French and Polish difficulties. He believed, as the National Liberal Bennigsen put it,⁷⁹⁷ that the Ultramontanes desired ‘not conciliation but domina­tion’ and he would strive against that to the end. If the Papacy chose to ally itself with a party which, in attacking him, threatened the unity of the empire, he must vindicate the sovereignty so challenged.⁷⁹⁸ It might be, as Krementz stingingly told him, that he was trying to make Prussia play the part of Julian the Apostate;⁷⁹⁹ but at any rate Julian had not hesitated to assert the authority of the empire. That was why, as he laboriously explained,⁸⁰⁰ he had suppressed the Catholic division in the Ministry of Public Worship, ‘for it represented not the rights of the State but rather the rights of the Catholic Church.’ They were rather papalists than Germans; and they must go if the integrity of the empire was to be maintained.⁸⁰¹ They destroyed the peculiarly Germanic char­acter he had endeavoured to develop. They were Poles, and they repudi­ated the German nationality.⁸⁰² The Catholic division facilitated the teach­ing of Polish in Polish schools-a thoroughly anti-German work. And when he remembered that the Poles were born rebels, it was not difficult to see a widespread conspiracy.⁸⁰³ His press continually compared the Ultramontanes to the Poles and the French—the enemies of German nationality.⁸⁰⁴ ‘Your bishops,’ he told Auguste Reichensperger,⁸⁰⁵ ‘are not safe; Ketteler corresponds with that Pole Kosmian. They only care about ecclesiastical interests. I respect every manner of faith but I can not allow a powerful enemy threatening to Germany to organise itself.’ He believed he had proofs of the Polish taint in the Jesuits;⁸⁰⁶ later he urged that they were guilty of the almost equal sin of plotting to lead the Social democrats.⁸⁰⁷ Hohenlohe explained the true character ofthe con­flict. ‘We begin the old medieval conflict again,’ he said,⁸⁰⁸ ‘I am a Ghibelline and I shall always be of that party.' And to consolidate the empire Bismarck, too, would take up the ancient text.

It is thus that we have to interpret the nature of the anti-clerical legislation.⁸⁰⁹ The Falk Laws are an attempt to insist on the universal paramountcy of German influences. The expulsion of the Jesuits re­moved an order which he believed to be concerned with the promotion of Polish interests.⁸¹⁰ The refusal of bishoprics to any save a German who has followed a course of study approved by the government⁸¹¹ has a clear purport not merely of purging the Catholic episcopate of men not likely to be in sympathy with German ideals, but also of placing their education under a strict governmental supervision. The third clause in the sixteenth article of this law is particularly noteworthy. ‘When there exists,' it states,⁸¹² against a candidate facts which give grounds for the opinion either that he will not observe the laws of the State and the arrangements made by the authorities within the legal limits of their powers, or that he will disturb the public peace,' his confirmation may be refused. ‘Raison d'etat,' in fact, will serve as a sufficient excuse for denying an otherwise fit appointment; in this way Germany could rid itself bit by bit of the Ultramontanes. It is important, moreover, to bear in mind both the civil penalties attached to the laws and the establish­ment of a State Court of Appeal. This was, in implication, the assertion of the superiority of State to Church. The twenty-fourth article⁸¹³ went even further and gave the State the right of interference with ecclesias­tical functions where it deemed them improperly performed. Against the law of thirteenth of May, 1873, which limited ecclesiastical punish­ments to those of a purely spiritual kind,⁸¹⁴ it is difficult to take serious objection; though it is worth remarking that the Church is forbidden to inflict or to threaten pecuniary penalties. The law of the twentieth of May, 1874,⁸¹⁵ virtually handed over the control of vacant bishoprics to the State, thus rendering it difficult to enforce an objectionable appoint­ment. All religious orders, save those of a semi-medical character, were forbidden on Prussian soil.⁸¹⁶ Catholic Churches on Prussian soil were handed over to the old Catholics in such parishes as those in which the majority consisted of their sympathisers, for certain hours of the day;⁸¹⁷ though Bismarck must have known that to the Catholics this was simply the desecration of a sacred edifice. The State charged itself with the surveillance of the fiscal administration of the Church, forbidding it to build or collect funds without permission; a law which of course placed in lay hands half the possibility of church extension.⁸¹⁸ To the lay con-

trol of schools, established with a similar object, it is difficult to find grounds of exception. But it is clear that no more thorough-going Erastianism than this has ever been attempted. Every corner of Church policy was swept by the grim hand of the State. While it is possible to admire the relentless thoroughness with which the legislation is con­ceived, it is also difficult to deny that such legislation would have anni­hilated any conception of a Church worthy of the name. It would have turned it into no more than an organ for the propagation of the opinions of an imperious chancellor upon German unity. It would have prevented the Roman Catholic Church from remaining true no less to the letter than to the spirit of its endeavour. It would have made it admit to virtual membership excommunicated members of its own communion. Clearly to antagonism such as this only an unfaltering hostility was possible.

The history of the Kulturkampf showed how greatly Bismarck had mistaken the strength of his opponents. He fined, he imprisoned, he inflicted a virtual exile; but the Church replied only with contempt. In the Reichstag itself he found in men like Windthorst and Reichensperger foemen in every way worthy of his own powers. Despite his utmost efforts and unconcealed chagrin the numbers of the Centre grew, and those of the National Liberals diminished until the Catholics were in virtual control of the House. The banished prelates continued, in despite of his laws, to exercise their functions from Rome and Holland, and they found a willing obedience. All his efforts to obtain some compro­mise with the Centre or with the Vatican met with the utmost diplomatic politeness but also with the completest refusal. Little by little he was compelled to turn from affiance with the National Liberals to his old friendship with the Conservatives—a change which involved also his humiliation. ‘If,’ he had said in 1874,⁸¹⁹ ‘I was stranded on an island where there were only two men, a Catholic and a Scandinavian, I be­lieve I should make friends with the latter.’ But in 1879 the same Bis­marck was nominating a member of the ‘anti-German’ Centre, Fran­kenstein, to the vice-presidency of the Reichstag;⁸²⁰ on the twenty-ninth of June, 1879, he was dismissing Falk;⁸²¹ in 1883 he sent the Crown Prince Frederic to the Vatican;⁸²² in 1884 he asked for papal mediation in his difficulties with Spain;⁸²³ finally, in 1886 and 1887, came the abrogation of the Falk Laws. It was the ‘little Canossa’ he had tried vainly to conceal amid his smiles.⁸²⁴

VIII

So he learned the meaning of a sovereignty within Germany which yet did not belong to the German State. ‘You will never be German citi­zens,' said the historian Baumgarten to the Catholics in words which might have been Bismarck's;⁸²⁵ and if that meant that they were to be faithless to their religion its truth was undeniable. But it was a different Bismarck who, in 1881, acclaimed the German Catholics as his compa­triots, and the institutions of their Church, the Papacy included, as part of the great confederation it had been his task to create.⁸²⁶ It was a different Bismarck from him who, in 1875, had urged that if France submitted to the new Ultramontanism the peace of Europe must be broken;⁸²⁷ and in the same year had urged the vital necessity of defend­ing the State against an aggressive Catholic Church.⁸²⁸ In the interval he had learned a mighty lesson.

He had learned that the world, even the Germanic world, is not one and indivisible. He had defined the State to himself as a power which, to maintain itself, must prove its sovereignty over every department of human life. He would have agreed with Calhoun that the division of sovereignty was its destruction. So, in one aspect, he would contend that the Kulturkampf was no more than the vindication for the State of rights that were in reality its own. ‘We can not,' he said,⁸²⁹ ‘concede to the Church the permanent right of exercising part of the powers of the State; and while the Church is in possession of such a prerogative we must, for the sake of peace, restrain its activities.' But the Falk Laws show clearly that his notion of restraint involved the extension of the powers of the State into a field where no Catholic could admit its exer­cise and where conflict was bound to result. Doubtless so to derogate from the unity he envisaged as desirable was to lessen the completeness of the sovereignty he pursued; but it was to limit it in the direction of its natural boundaries. It was useless for him to contend that no difficulties would ever have arisen if the Centre had only helped him to complete the unity of the empire.⁸³⁰ He defined unity in such a manner as to make possible only their opposition. He did not see, as Treitschke so clearly understood, that the sovereignty of a State is simply the power that State has at its disposal;⁸³¹ though where the Prussian historian would have found that power in the army, we tend, in the modern State, to find it in the degree of consent a measure can command. Bismarck learned that sovereignty must thus be essentially an illusory concept since its exercise at any moment belongs to the realm not of the certain but of the probable. But his defeat would have taught him also the error in Treitschke's teaching that the State is ‘born and dies with the exercise of its sovereignty,'⁸³² for assuredly the German State did not disappear because it was worsted in the Kulturkampf. It was simply demonstrated that men belong not to one all-inclusive group, the State, but to a variety of groups, and that, in the last resort, they will follow the demands of their conscience. It was useless for Bismarck to demand its subjugation to the needs of the State, to urge that in making war on the State the Church was usurping one of the. State's prerogatives. Such argument was born from the failure to understand that the State is an institution like any other and that rights must find their justification in the support they can command. There may be a divorce between politics and mor­als, but, in all final questions, we begin to perceive the clear sign of their essential identity. It was Bismarck's difficulty that he failed to under­stand their union, and was thus unable to resolve his problem into its constituent parts.

IX

Where De Maistre speaks of the Church, Bismarck speaks of the State; where De Maistre discusses the Papacy, Bismarck is discussing the German empire. Otherwise, at bottom, the thought is essentially the same. Nor was their problem different. De Maistre had to confront a world which the Revolution had smashed into an atomic chaos and it was in the world-sovereignty of Rome that he found its new centre of unity. Bismarck found a bewildering congeries of unimportant and frag­mentary communities from which a great empire had to be builded and it was in the single hegemony of Prussia that he found his instrument. What De Maistre feared was intellectual opposition; the chief bane of Bismarck was political antagonism. The fundamental faith of each was beyond the sphere of reason—with De Maistre it was the dogmas of Catholicism, with Bismarck the revelations of an evangelical Christian­ity. Each saw in a world of individualisation the guarantee of disruption and evolved a theory to secure its suppression. Each loved passionately the ideal of unity since that seemed to them both the surest guarantee of survival. Each saw truth as one and therefore doubted the rightness of a sovereignty that was either fallible or divisible; and each in the end came to the realisation that his theories were inconsistent with the facts of life. Each failed to understand that tremendous truth inculcated by Lamennais when he urged that the real unity of doctrine-whether politi­cal or religious—can come only from possession of freedom. It is use­less to paint truth as one unless preparation is made to carry on the perpetual warfare that will result from disagreement with its nature. That was the fundamental defect in the minds of both. They did not see that however organic be the community in which we live, man is a soli­tary no less than a social being, and his ideal world is at bottom intersti­tial. However much he acts in common, he wishes also to act alone; however much he thinks as a member of the herd, he will wish also to think as a lonely wanderer. It is, perhaps, an antinomy; but it is one which no theory of the State dare afford to neglect. For an attitude which makes the boundaries of authority commensurate with the bounds of mind is at war with the instincts most pregnant with human good.

APPENDIX A: A NOTE ON SOVEREIGNTY AND FEDERALISM

Had he commented with any fullness upon it, the Constitution of the United States would doubtless have provoked the vehement derision of John Austin, for nowhere, either in theory or in practice, has it chosen to erect an instrument of sovereign power. In England, as De Lolme told us a century ago, nature alone has set limits to the omnicompetence of the king in Parliament, and what he so forcibly taught Professor Dicey has reiterated in the most famous of all his books. So that, in some sort, there would seem a theoretical deficiency in American government. We do not know who rules. Certainly the president is not absolute. Neither to Congress nor to the Supreme Court is unlimited power decreed. And, as if to make confusion worse confounded, there cut athwart this dubi­ousness certain sovereign rights possessed by the States alone.

Professor Dicey would shrug his shoulders and tell us that it is the natural consequence of federalism. It is, he writes, ‘the method by which federalism attempts to reconcile the apparently inconsistent claims of national sovereignty and State sovereignty.' The sarcasm is but thinly veiled. The fathers reconciled these opposites by abolishing altogether any notion of Austinian sovereignty. Federal government, we are there­fore told, is notoriously weak government, since in it there is no final arbiter. The legislature of the United States, or of Canada, for the mat­ter of that, is degraded to the level of an English railway company. It is a non-sovereign law- making body. It derives its powers, like the Great Eastern Railway Company, from a written document, which simulta­neously limits them. Federalism, Professor Dicey notes further, tends to produce Conservatism. For the Constitution is written and rigid. It ac­quires a kind of sacrosanct character in the eyes of the people. Change of any kind becomes difficult because it almost seems irreligious. It is condemned before it is attempted. The unitary method of government impresses Professor Dicey as being as far more admirable in conception as it is more efficacious in results.

Any criticism ofthis well-established doctrine has at least two obvi­ous lines of attack. We might, in the first place, urge that to talk of parliamentary omnicompetence in such downright fashion is to beg the whole question. Theoretically existent, practically Parliamentary sover­eignty is, in the technical sense, an absurdity. The British Parliament may be the legal superior of the colonial legislatures; but everyone is well aware that it dare not in fact override them on any fundamental question. When the South African Parliament forbade the admission of Indians to the Transvaal, Great Britain felt that a grave injustice had been inflicted on a meritorious section of its subjects; but Great Britain did not dare, despite the theoretical sovereignty of its legislature, to repair the injustice so inflicted. When Lord Grey tried, in 1849-1850, to turn the Cape of Good Hope into a penal colony, he was compelled, despite the delegation to him of sovereign power, to desist. Lord Brougham caused the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council to be created the supreme tribunal in ecclesiastical cases; but it is notorious that churchmen have refused to accept its decisions as binding in spiri­tual matters. Sir James Graham, in 1843, took the legally admirable ground that if the courts upheld the right of lay entry into patronage in the Scottish Church he must uphold their decision in Parliament; but that legal rectitude did not prevent Dr. Chalmers and his colleagues disrupting the Church to emphasise their dissent. In a more recent time, when the Welsh miners struck in complete defiance of the provisions of the Munitions Act, it was found simply impossible to enforce its penal­ties. The American Revolution was, on the English side, an experiment in applied Austinianism. It is surely obvious that a sovereignty so ab­stract is practically without utility.

The second method of approach is more constructive. It is the result of the view that sovereignty, rightly regarded, ought not to be defined as onmicompetence at all. Sovereignty is, in its exercise, an act of will, whether to do or to refrain from doing. It is an exercise of will behind which there is such power as to make the expectation of obedience rea­sonable. Now it does not seem valuable to urge that a certain group, the State,' can theoretically secure obedience to all its acts, because we know that practically to be absurd. This granted, it is clear that the sovereignty of the State does not in reality differ from the power exer­cised by a Church or a trade' union. The obedience the Church or trade union will secure depends simply on what measure of resistance the command inspires. So that, on this view, when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, when a Church issues a new doctrinal order, when a trade union proclaims a strike, all are exercising a power that differs only in degree, not in kind, from that of the State. Analysed into its elements sovereignty is, after all, not such a very formidable thing. It is the obvious accompaniment of personality, and the main characteristic of personality is the power to will. Sometimes wills, whether individual or corporate, conflict, and, only submission or trial of strength can de­cide which is superior. The force of a command from the State is not, therefore, bound to triumph, and no theory is of value which would make it so. When Germany orders its subjects to refrain from the dis­cussion of peace terms it may enforce its rule when only Rosa Luxem­burg or Liebknecht is concerned; it could not do so were the Socialists as a whole to rebel.

Aside from the historical accident which has given the constituent States of the American federation a certain sovereignty, at any rate in well-defined spheres, it may well be argued that Hamilton and his coad­jutors would have had theoretical justification even if they had not had history to guide them in their determination of the division of constitu­tional powers. That division is more consonant with political facts than the unitary theory so favoured by the majority of European observers. Certain local groups have a life of their own that is ‘not merely del­egated to them by the State. They are capable of directing their own concerns. Their interest in themselves is revivified and inspired by the responsibility for such direction. When New York wants a new Consti­tution it can apply itself to that manufacture. When Australia needs one, or Canada, they must be made—the phrase is sinister—in Whitehall. The history of Lord Grey's experiments in the direction of colonial self­government makes clear the utter inadequacy of the latter method. If Wisconsin wants an income tax it can obtain one by winning the assent of its citizens. If Manchester wants a ship canal it must persuade Parlia­ment that its needs are more important than the jealousies of Liverpool. There is no more tragic history than that which comes under the rubric ‘the decline and fall of the parish.'

Lawyers, for the most part, have tended to believe that the status of a person is something it is in the power of the State alone to confer, and in this view Austin, doubtless, would have most fully concurred. But surely it is abundantly clear that the personality of associations is pri­mary, that it springs from the fact of their existence, and is not conceded to them by the State. This concession theory has, it is true, the authority of great men like Savigny behind it. It was urged, in effect by that subtle lawyer Pope Innocent IV when he argued that the corporate person is sheer fiction. That claim, however, is becoming increasingly impossible of acceptance. Things, for example, like the Disruption in the Church of Scotland, or the failure of the Privy Council as the supreme ecclesiasti­cal tribunal, show that in truth the churches live lives of their own, independent and self-contained, and that they will not tolerate external interference. The State, for good and special reasons, withheld corporateness from trade unions; but the Taff Vale decision showed how real was its existence in despite of statute. The failure of the Sherman Act may be traced to a similar cause. You can not make men compete by Act of Congress. They have wills of their own that the statute does not form. Everywhere we ‘have diversity, plurality. It seems indeed time to admit its existence.

It is really difficult to understand what special merit attaches to unity. Germany points proudly to the complete absence of differences among her citizens. Contempt is openly expressed for a country like the United States where diversity of opinion is most clearly apparent. In Germany, it is moral error to doubt the rightness of her cause. It is certainly dangerous to resist the sovereign mandate to sacrifice all to her need. Yet there is clearly grave danger in her attitude. ‘The man,' Lord Acton wrote, ‘who prefers his country before every other shows the same spirit as the man who surrenders every right to the State. They both deny that right is superior to authority.'

In fact, there is real moral insufficiency in any theory of the State which impresses upon its members the need for any consistent unifor­mity of outlook. The fact that no one in Germany doubts her rightness in sinking, for example, the Lusitania, does not morally, or even politi­cally, justify her position in that regard. It is simply evidence that in Germany to-day necessity has exacted the sacrifice of right to authority. Faith there is more urgent than thought. We prefer a country where the sovereignty is distributed, where the richness of the corporate lives is insurance against such sterility of outlook. The Austinian theory of sov­ereignty, ungenial enough even in its abstract presentation, would as a fact breed simple servility were it capable of practical application. There can be no servility in a State that divides its effective governance. The necessity of balancing interests, the need for combining opinions, re­sults in a wealth of political thought such as no State where the real authority is single can attain. The price of liberty is exactly divergence of opinion on fundamental questions. The well-ordered and neatly ar­ranged products of recent German thought on politics testify to the ex­istence of its opposite. No man, and even more, no State, can ever be so right as not to need doubts of his rightness.

It is probable that even the most extreme supporters of parliamen­tary authority would sympathise with this view. Certainly Professor Dicey adopted it when he gave, his adhesion to the Ulster cause. For he thereby announced his willingness to resist the authority he had declared om­nipotent, and he would surely not resist unless he had some hope of success. If the truth of this attitude be admitted, if the State be viewed, in brief, as something more than a delegator of powers, we begin to approach an organisation that in essence is not distinct from a federa­tion even if in name it be different. We begin to see the State as akin to that medieval empire which was above all a community of communi­ties. The sovereign appears as a thing consistently to revere rather than as a thing undeviatingly to obey. It expresses a unity of feeling, not a unity of opinion—the feeling that, as Aristotle pointed out long ago, the object ofthe State is the good life; while it implies a diversity of opinion as to the means by which that good life may be attained. Federal govern­ment may be weak government, but it is weak only as other govern­ments are weak—that is, in the degree to which it commits acts of tres­pass. Parliamentary government has only remained strong, has only re­tained the appearance of omnicompetence, by reason of the delicate skill with which its footsteps have been directed.

A last word may be hazarded. One who comes to America from Europe may well crave leave to doubt whether, fundamentally, there is truth in the judgment that federalism is conservative. The forms, it is true, may be preserved, may even seem to be revered as sacred things, but the spirit glows with a life that is ever new and abundant. The one thing that must strike the modern observer of any federal Constitution is the growing impatience with its rigid encasement, the ever insistent de­mand that the form shall be made equally elastic with the spirit. And in the variety of its group life, the wide distribution of its sovereign pow­ers, he may not unjustly see the surest guarantee of its perennial youth.

APPENDIX B: SOVEREIGNTY AND CENTRALISATION

It can never be too thoroughly emphasised that the founders of the Ameri­can Constitution did not intend to create a complete system of govern­ment. They took the States for granted, and it was upon their complex foundation that they attempted to build. What they attempted was es­sentially its supplement, the binding together of certain strands which the withdrawal of British sovereignty had grievously untied. Yet, as the event was to show, it was no easy matter to achieve a working efficiency for the new instrument of sovereign power. If we can say to-day that the interests of the American nation are supreme, and that the old States' rights theory of sovereignty is largely obsolete, we have to remember that a Civil War was needed to give it its death-blow. For the Constitu­tion was doubtfully imposed and regretfully accepted. Men found it difficult to understand that two jurisdictions largely co-ordinate can work towards a similar end. They imagined that co-ordination meant antith­esis, and drew a distinction between State and nation. Antagonism not unnaturally resulted; for where men believe there is enmity, its appear­ance may with certainty be predicted. In the result we may utter our requiescat over the grave of localism.

Nationalism, then, is triumphant. The natural question any statute must now raise is not whether Missouri or Alabama will benefit from its enactment, but whether the United States will so benefit. But there is another aspect of this unified sovereignty about which certain doubts may be expressed. It stands for centralisation; that is to say, it changes the whole character of the federal idea. It may be, indeed, that this centralisation is essential to the future of the United States. It may be that until the power of the latter undergoes a further concentration, it can never adequately be exercised. The interests of the whole may so uniquely transcend the interests of the parts as to give their separate claims little or no validity. Yet even an observer handicapped, as I am, by an alien tradition, can not help but realise that there is in America a certain fundamental disunity of circumstance. When I am in Kansas, I know that I am not in New York. The problems, even the thoughts and the desires, are different and affect people differently. Is it wise to make Washington a kind of Hegelian harmonisation of these differences and say that Congress can transcend them in a federal statute? In the result, as every statesman must know, what are called the ‘interests of the Re­public' in New York will probably be called ‘discrimination against the Middle West' in Kansas. And that is intelligible, even if it is rarely praiseworthy. For while action in Kansas would have attempted to cope with the difficulties of the Middle West, action at Washington aims— since a balance of interests must be struck—at their genial evasion. Surely this suggests the existence of a problem which has aroused less attention than it deserves.

The growth of national government, with the consequent strength­ening of its sovereign character, leads, as I have urged, to its increasing centralisation. This is true not of America alone. The whole history of England, Maitland once remarked, could be brought under the rubric of the decline and fall of the sheriff. One of the resultant and fundamental problems Great Britain will have to face when its reconstruction comes is precisely this. Its local life will have to be made real. It will undergo revivification. Its units of local government will have to be made real. They will have to receive a sovereignty that is something more than an anaemic reflex of the central power. An interest in local problems will have to be aroused not less keen and vivid than the interest in national problems. Nor is this less true of France. Her local group-life has been sacrificed to the absorptiveness of Paris; with the result that since the fall of Napoleon, France has been striving to regain the local creative­ness now stricken with impotence. The vigorous self-government ofthe modern German city derives from the at any rate partial admission by higher authority that its powers, to be responsible, must be complete. It was there remembered, as in England and France it has been forgotten, that the tissue of the civic parts changes more frequently than the tissue of the national whole. Since in the latter countries an adequate nutrition of final responsibility was not provided, the result has been in a real sense death from starvation.

I know well enough that nothing like this stage has been reached in the United States. Yet the difficulty is ominously near. No kind of work­ing compromise has been reached between the States on the one hand, and the federal government on the other. Each has gone its own way, often almost wilfully duplicating the work of the other. The State, it is assumed, must do what the federal government has not done; the federal government merely acts as the bracket to a series of algebraic symbols. The possibility of a co-operation is not considered. The lines of demar­cation are never made plain. It is never adequately realised that both are overcrowded with business, that they can not, with all the good will in the world, waste an ounce of energy in this complex age. Congress, of a certainty, can not give proper attention to local problems. It is, more­over, all the more difficult to obtain a rapprochement with a Constitu­tion uniquely inaccessible to amendment. It may be admitted frankly that the centralisation of the modern federal government has won some tremendous victories. An Englishman needs no convincing that the vic­tory won in 1865 for union, and, implicitly, for centralisation, was a victory for the beneficent forces of the civilised world. He may well stand amazed at the quality no less than the volume of work performed by such centralising agencies as the Interstate Commerce Commission. He has no doubts as to the past. It is about the future that he must feel uncertain.

For there are many able thinkers in the United States who are con­vinced that where national thought is, generally speaking, superior in quality to State thought, where it is temporally in advance, national, that is to say centralised action should follow. The sovereign, in fact, should show his powers of self-assertion. Where he is in possession of a progressive idea which fails to obtain sanction in a backward state, then he should use his reserve power in compensation for its reactionary character. It is, of course, easy to sneer at people who cling to the ideas of the midVictorian age. It is easier still to remember that there is out­side the State government a federal power which pays no heed to re­gional opinion. State government and State opinion must, so the re­former urges, be overridden if progress is to be made.

A typical instance is that of prohibition. Reformers in Maine do not see why they should suffer for the stupid inability of New York to con­trol its liquor traffic. Congress, they say, should legislate for the nation, and prevent either the enactment of anomalies, or the retention of so pathetic an ancestralism as a taste for beer. Now I waive the whole question of whether Maine does in fact benefit from its more acute per­ception; reputable authority assures me that the contrary is the case. But the real question to which I want an adequate reply—more convinc­ing than rhetorical statements of the case for prohibition—is whether America will not gain more from the slow self-struggle of New York to intelligence, than from the irritating imposition from without of a belief to which it has not been converted. I can not avoid the emphatic opinion that in this, as in other matters, nature is not saltatory. Politically we probably gain more from the slow, and often painfUl erosion of preju­dice by education, than when we attempt its elimination by more drastic methods. It is, of course, annoying for those of us who consider we have found the truth; but if we are to have democratic government we must bear with the inconveniences of democracy.

The traditional separation of powers in American government has been assailed as often as it has been explained. Yet I believe it is in fact a natural division. Of course to lawyers like Professor Dicey, federalism of any kind appears but a step on the road to centralised government; it is, in his own phrase, the union which precedes unification. I am a frank medievalist in this regard. It seems to me admirable that a country which, in certain aspects, is one, should yet adapt its governance to suit the severalty which is no less characteristic of other aspects. In a democ­racy, the surest guaranty of civic responsibility seems to lie in the gift of genuine functions of government no less to the parts than to the whole. No doubt, on occasion, the dissipation of sovereignty will result in con­flict. But even without it there is conflict of a kind far more wasteful, since it in nowise depends upon principle. And anyone who reads the reports ofthe United States Supreme Court for the last twenty-five years will realise that the national powers have not been extended without opposition and that Washington has not always been victorious. What seems to me dangerous is that the expansion no less than the contraction of the central power should always have been planless and unthinking. It has depended always—witness the recent embarkation upon the gov­ernmental regulation of railway wages—upon the haphazard accidents of momentary events, instead of upon a scheme of considered and inher­ent policy. It has grown without thought of local needs or of local per­sonality. Had the sovereign federation given respectful recognition to those other sovereigns, no less real, which we call the States, there would have resulted no less an impulse to creation than an economy of effort.

It is the fashion to regard federalism as the merest pis aller and to hope piously for the time when a more adequate centralisation will ren­der it unnecessary. This seems to me to neglect certain obvious lessons to be drawn from other experience. In education, for example, we have learned that the more pupils per teacher, the less efficient, on the whole, is the instruction. Commercially, Mr. Brandeis has shown that certain business units may become so large as to be physically incapable of successful administration. I would urge that a similar law of diminish­ing returns applies also to the sphere of government. It becomes more and more obvious that we must recognise certain natural units of politi­cal administration, but also see to it that we do not duplicate that power. It is admitted freely that the result will probably derogate from the unique sovereignty of the whole. Yet that is surely but a theoretical derogation from which no practical consequences ensue; and I am pragmatist enough to contend that it is therefore no derogation at all.

I can imagine no more fruitful political thinking than that which should attempt to read for our own day the due lesson of the failure of certain emperors who, because they took the whole world for their field of vision, gave Voltaire the material for the most admirable of his gibes. We seem in genuine danger of going back to an ancient and false wor­ship of unity, to a trust in an undivided sovereignty as the panacea for our ills. Surely the vitality of political life depends rather on the confer­ence of final responsibility where there is the willingness to assume it and the capacity to assume it wisely. Only thus can we prevent Wash­ington from degenerating into Dublin Castle. In the end, maybe, the ways of attainment will be as difficult as the objects at which they aim; but the good of the universe is manifold and not single. We are as trav­ellers breasting a hill, and we reach its summit by a thousand devious paths.⁸³³