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advanced democracies men make a boast of despising the boundaries drawn by diplomatists, geographers, and linguists.

In the early ages, when nations are being founded, and before local affections and ties have arisen, the tribes wander from pasture to pasture with no other bond of union but that of common kindred. When they have settled, the idea of a nation is gradually formed, and the common defence of the neighbourhood adds an additional tie to that of kindred. At the period of the national acme, to these motives for union are added a feeling of pride in the greatness of one's country, an idea of common duty, and a patriotism which errs perhaps on the side of narrowness. But during the acme, two influences are at work, which eventually, if carried to their extreme, undermine patriotism; the one is the spirit of equality, the other the spirit of commerce.

Cosmopolitanism is in fact a logical deduction from the proposition of human equality. The theorists who abound in an age of active democracy found their speculations on the equality, not of their own citizens, but of mankind in general, and their ideal structures are supposed to be adapted to any number of men wherever they may dwell, and whatever may be their traditions. Nowhere has this grand but delusive thought been carried to such an excess as in the Constituent Assembly of the French Revolution. The men of that revolution, says the most eloquent of modern historians*, were not Frenchmen, but universal men. They were, and they felt themselves to be, better than priests, or aristocrats, or plebeians, or demagogues; they were "workers of God, called by Him to restore the social reason of humanity, and to lay down right and justice for all the universe. This declaration of the rights of men was the decalogue of the human race in all languages." Another great Frenchman has remarked

* Lamartine, Hist. des Girondins, liv. vii. § 1.

of the French writers of the present age, that these are never content with discovering truths or establishing propositions adapted merely to France, but must embrace the whole of mankind in their precepts and conclusions.*

Democratic theorists are therefore by force of nature cosmopolites, but in the same way as the principle of national equality admits qualification, it being for example held in some countries that all men with one modification of the pigment of the skin are equal freemen, and all men with another are equal slaves; so cosmopolitanism sometimes reconciles itself to national vanity (which is very different from patriotism), by the consideration that though all men are by nature equal, yet that superior energy and restlessness make the inhabitants of some states, united or otherwise, far ahead of the rest of the world. Were, however, the demolition of national distinction merely to rest upon theoretical argument, it would have little chance of disturbing the settled order of things in the national acme: a consideration more practical has more weight in such an age.

Few things impede commerce so much as frontiers, tariffs, and distinctions of national customs and laws. These in a non-commercial society are little regarded, for few people then cross the frontier of a foreign state except in arms, during an eclipse of all law; but the merchant is perpetually put to inconvenience and loss by arrangements which a believer in the equality of mankind cannot but regard as highly foolish and unreasonable. The intercourse between the inhabitants of different countries for the purposes of trade is seriously incommoded with the maintenance of local and peculiar customs, and expediency, if not reason, demands on every such occasion a similarity of usage.

Again, in societies where the acquisition of wealth has become the main object, and where it is not pursued as a

* De Tocqueville, Dém. en Amérique, iii. 24.

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means to rise into an aristocracy or plutocracy, it is felt to be a matter of little moment in what territory or district it is acquired; and this feeling, joined with the restlessness of democracies, leads men to migrate from country to country, ever carrying with them a desire for universality of custom, nay even of weights, measures, languages, till at last they forget that there is any difference between the particular district in which they were raised," as they term it, and any other where they may happen to settle. It is a feeling which, carried to excess, would lead to the easy enslavement of the territory whose natives have so little regard for it. It is, on the other hand, often a consequence of a restless discontent with the tyranny established in one's native country. The Greeks, so long as their national rivalries remained, were a free people; each state having its little centre of patriotism, and yet all of them ready to combine against a common foe: their loss of this feeling of common union and common duties synchronised with their fall before the Roman conquest, and their dispersion over Europe, when they became par excellence the cosmopolites of the ancient world.

The fall of Italy in the eighteenth century was likewise due, in part, to the previous eradication of patriotism. They had soldiers, they had riches, they had agriculture and manufactures, but they had no centre of patriotism.* Florence, Venice, Milan, and Padua, when they had fallen from their greatest eminence, felt for the first time some disposition to unite; but the same feeling which led them to overlook the claims of their civic patriotism, which merged the Florentine, the Venetian, and the Milanese into an Italian, soon merged the Italian into a cosmopolite, and put an end to the hope, once fondly entertained, that Italy might, by its own exertions, maintain its independence. It needed centuries of foreign oppression to arouse the torpid spirit of the Italians.

* "Patrie," Sismondi, Rep. Ital. xvi. 126.

Cosmopolitanism is, then, a growth of excessive equality and decaying local attachments. In the stage when plutocracy and democracy co-exist in equal proportions, it is checked by the solidity and settled feelings of a plutocracy which has made its wealth; but when the latter has become corrupt, or sunk before its more restless opponent, cosmopolitanism becomes a marked feature of the transition from the social stage which we have sketched in the last two chapters, to that which opens upon us in the next.

Half of a page of Tocqueville is worth all this

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CHAP. XXI.

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"Le malheur d'une république, c'est lorsqu'on a corrumpu le peuple à prix d'argent; il devient de sang-froid, il s'affectionne à l'argent, mais il ne s'affectionne plus aux affaires; sans souci du gouvernement, et de ce qu'on y propose, il attend tranquillement son salaire."-MONTESQUIEU.

Point de noblesse, point de monarque mais une despote.

IF there is any truth in the leading position of this study, we ought to be able to discover in each phase of national progress the consequences of the past and the causes of the future. Abstract speculations upon monarchy, democracy, and aristocracy as independent ideas of the mind, each capable of separate treatment, have been censured, because too little regarding their relations of sequence; for in this the view of a statesman differs from that of a recluse theorist: the latter takes each separate form of government and condition of society as an independent whole, analyses it, and distinguishes its characteristics; the former is not content with this, but must know likewise when and how it arises.

Each of the leading characteristics which we portrayed in the description of the stage of co-existent democracy and plutocracy, is, in fact, a link between the stage there described and this which opens upon us now. Centralisation, functionarism, an exclusive attention to material

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