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CHAPTER I. FREEDOM OF THOUGHT AND THE FORCES AGAINST IT. (INTRODUCTORY). IT is a common saying that thought is free. A man can never be.
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To bring order out of chaotic ruin, to rear a new civilization and blend hostile and unequal races into a nation, the thing wanted was not liberty but force. And for centuries all progress is attached to the action of men like Clovis, Charlemagne, and William the Norman, who were resolute and peremptory, and prompt to be obeyed. The spirit of immemorial paganism which had saturated ancient society could not be exorcised except by the combined influence of Church and State; and the universal sense that their union was necessary created the Byzantine despotism.
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The divines of the empire who could not fancy Christianity flourishing beyond its borders, insisted that the State is not in the Church, but the Church in the State. This doctrine had scarcely been uttered when the rapid collapse of the Western empire opened a wider horizon; and Salvianus, a priest at Marseilles, proclaimed that the social virtues, which were decaying amid the civilized Romans, existed in greater purity and promise among the pagan invaders.
They were converted with ease and rapidity; and their conversion was generally brought about by their kings. Christianity, which in earlier times had addressed itself to the masses, and relied on the principle of liberty, now made its appeal to the rulers, and threw its mighty influence into the scale of authority.
The barbarians, who possessed no books, no secular knowledge, no education, except in the schools of the clergy, and who had scarcely acquired the rudiments of religious instruction, turned with childlike attachment to men whose minds were stored with the knowledge of Scripture, of Cicero, of St. Augustine; and in the scanty world of their ideas, the Church was felt to be something infinitely vaster, stronger, holier, than their newly founded states.
The clergy supplied the means of conducting the new governments, and were made exempt from taxation, from the jurisdiction of the civil magistrate, and of the political administrator. They taught that power ought to be conferred by election; and the Councils of Toledo furnished the framework of the parliamentary system of Spain, which is, by a long interval, the oldest in the world. But the monarchy of the Goths in Spain, as well as that of the Saxons in England, in both of which the nobles and the prelates surrounded the throne with the semblance of free institutions, passed away; and the people that prospered and overshadowed the rest were the Franks, who had no native nobility, whose law of succession to the Crown became for 1, years the fixed object of an unchanging superstition, and under whom the feudal system was developed to excess.
Feudalism made land the measure and the master of all things. Having no other source of wealth than the produce of the soil, men depended on the landlord for the means of escaping starvation; and thus his power became paramount over the liberty of the subject and the authority of the state. Every baron, said the French maxim, is sovereign in his own domain.
The nations of the West lay between the competing tyrannies of local magnates and of absolute monarchs, when a force was brought upon the scene which proved for a time superior alike to the vassal and his lord. In the days of the Conquest, when the Normans destroyed the liberties of England, the rude institutions which had come with the Saxons, the Goths, and the Franks from the forests of Germany were suffering decay, and the new element of popular government afterwards supplied by the rise of towns and the formation of a middle class, was not yet active.
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The only influence capable of resisting the feudal hierarchy was the ecclesiastical hierarchy; and they came into collision when the progress of feudalism threatened the independence of the Church, by subjecting the prelates severally to that form of personal dependence on the Kings which was peculiar to the Teutonic state. To that conflict of four hundred years we owe the rise of civil liberty.
If the Church had continued to buttress the thrones of the Kings whom it anointed, or if the struggle had terminated speedily in an undivided victory, all Europe would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite despotism. For the aim of both contending parties was absolute authority. But although liberty was not the end for which they strove, it was the means by which the temporal and the spiritual power called the nations to their aid. The towns of Italy and Germany won their franchises, France got her states general and England her parliament out of the alternate phases of the contest; and as long as it lasted it prevented the rise of Divine Right.
A disposition existed to regard the crown as an estate descending under the law of real property in the family that possessed it.
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But the authority of religion, and especially of the papacy, was thrown to the side that denied the indefeasible title of kings. In France what was afterwards called the Gallican theory maintained that the reigning house was above the law, and that the sceptre was not to pass away from it as long as there should be princes of the royal blood of St. But in other countries the oath of fidelity itself attested that it was conditional, and should be kept only during good behaviour; and it was in conformity with the public law to which all monarchs were held subject, that King John was declared a rebel against the barons; and that the men who raised Edward III to the throne from which they had deposed his father, invoked the maxim Vox populi Vox Dei.
And this doctrine of the Divine Right of the people to raise up and pull down princes, after obtaining the sanctions of religion, was made to stand on broader grounds, and was strong enough to resist both Church and King. In the struggle between the house of Bruce and the house of Plantagenet for the possession of Scotland and Ireland, the English claim was backed by the censures of Rome.
But the Irish and the Scots refused it; and the address in which the Scottish parliament informed the Pope of their resolution shows how firmly the popular doctrine had taken root. If he should ever betray his principles, and consent that we should be subjects of the English king, then we shall treat him as an enemy, as the subverter of our rights and his own, and shall elect another in his place. We care not for glory or for wealth, but for that liberty which no true man will give up but with his life.
Gregory VII had begun the disparagement of civil authorities, by saying that they are the work of the devil; and already in his time both parties were driven to acknowledge the sovereignty of the people, and appealed to it as the immediate source of power. Two centuries later this political theory had gained both in definiteness and force among the Guelphs, who were the Church party, and among the Ghibellines, or Imperialists.
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It is not rebellion to depose him, for he is himself a rebel whom the nation has a right to put down. But it is better to abridge his power, that he may be unable to abuse it. For this purpose, the whole nation ought to have a share in governing itself; the constitution ought to combine a limited and elective monarchy, with an aristocracy of merit, and such an admixture of democracy as shall admit all classes to office, by popular election.
No government has a right to levy taxes beyond the limit determined by the people. All political authority is derived from popular suffrage, and all laws must be made by the people or their representatives. There is no security for us as long as we depend on the will of another man. Thomas Aquinas, of whom Lord Bacon says that he had the largest heart of the school divines. The ablest writer of the Ghibelline party was Marsilius of Padua.
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As the whole is greater than any part, it is wrong that any part should legislate for the whole; and as men are equal, it is wrong that one should be bound by laws made by another. But in obeying laws to which all men have agreed, all men, in reality, govern themselves. The Monarch, who is instituted by the legislature, to execute its will, ought to be armed with a force sufficient to coerce individuals, but not sufficient to control the majority of the people.
He is responsible to the nation, and subject to the law; and the nation that appoints him, and assigns him his duties, has to see that he obeys the constitution, and has to dismiss him if he breaks it. The rights of citizens are independent of the faith they profess; and no man may be punished for his religion. It is significant that these two writers should agree on so many of the fundamental points which have been, ever since, the topic of controversy; for they belonged to hostile schools, and one of them would have thought the other worthy of death.
Thomas would have made the papacy control all Christian governments. Marsilius would have had the clergy submit to the law of the land; and would have put them under restrictions both as to property and numbers. As the great debate went on, many things gradually made themselves clear, and grew into settled convictions.
For these were not only the thoughts of prophetic minds that surpassed the level of contemporaries: there was some prospect that they would master the practical world. The ancient reign of the barons was seriously threatened. The opening of the East by the Crusades had imparted a great stimulus to industry.
A stream set in from the country to the towns; and there was no room for the government of towns in the feudal machinery. When men found a way of earning a livelihood without depending for it on the good will of the class that owned the land, the landowner lost much of his importance, and it began to pass to the possessors of moveable wealth. The townspeople not only made themselves free from the control of prelates and barons, but endeavoured to obtain for their own class and interest the command of the state.
The fourteenth century was filled with the tumult of this struggle between democracy and chivalry. The Italian towns, foremost in intelligence and civilization, led the way with democratic constitutions of an ideal and generally impracticable type. The Swiss cast off the yoke of Austria. Two long chains of free cities arose, along the valley of the Rhine, and across the heart of Germany.
The citizens of Paris got possession of the King, reformed the state, and began their tremendous career of experiments to govern France. But the most healthy and vigorous growth of municipal liberties was in Belgium, of all countries on the continent, that which has been, from immemorial ages the most stubborn in its fidelity to the principle of self government. So vast were the resources concentrated in the Flemish towns, so wide spread was the movement of democracy, that it was long doubtful whether the new interest would not prevail, and whether the ascendency of the military aristocracy would not pass over to the wealth and intelligence of the men that lived by trade.
But Rienzi, Marcel, Artevelde, and the other champions of the unripe democracy of those days, lived and died in vain.
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The upheaval of the middle class had disclosed the need, the passions, the aspirations of the suffering poor below; ferocious insurrections in France and England caused a reaction that retarded for centuries the readjustment of power, and the red spectre of social revolution arose in the track of democracy. The armed citizens of Ghent were crushed by the French chivalry; and monarchy alone reaped the fruit of the change that was going on in the position of classes, and stirred the minds of men.
Looking back over the space of 1, years, which we call the Middle Ages to get an estimate of the work they had done, if not towards perfection in their institutions, at least towards attaining the knowledge of political truth, this is what we find:—Representative government, which was unknown to the ancients, was almost universal.
The methods of election were crude; but the principle that no tax was lawful that was not granted by the class that paid it; that is, that taxation was inseparable from representation, was recognized, not as the privilege of certain countries, but as the right of all.
Not a prince in the world, said Philip de Commines, can levy a penny without the consent of the people. Slavery was almost everywhere extinct; and absolute power was deemed more intolerable and more criminal than slavery. The right of insurrection was not only admitted but defined, as a duty sanctified by religion.
The issue of ancient politics was an absolute state planted on slavery. The political produce of the middle ages was a system of states in which authority was restricted by the representation of powerful classes, by privileged associations, and by the acknowledgment of duties superior to those which are imposed by man. As regards the realization in practice of what was seen to be good, there was almost everything to do.
But the great problems of principle had been solved; and we come to the question: How did the sixteenth century husband the treasure which the Middle Ages had stored up? The most visible sign of the times was the decline of the religious influence that had reigned so long.