THE RISE OF DESPOTISM.

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of that country had become effete and weary of contention, and when despots were everywhere rising.

Machiavel's ruleschiefly regard the personal conduct of the prince; for instance, he is enjoined to devote himself, both intellectually and bodily to military affairs, to exercise all necessary cruelty at his first elevation, but afterwards to be as mild and beneficent as circumstances will allow; to be liberal and profuse, according to certain rules; to avoid contempt and hatred, to eschew flatterers, and to know upon necessity how to be perfidious. Our task is to take the process a step earlier, and to show how, by centralisation, equality, corruption of character, and other causes herein described, an apt field is prepared for a pupil of Machiavel. Without a favourable combination. of social relations it would be vain to attempt the establishment of a principate; when that combination is once formed, no one aspiring to a principate can act more wisely for himself, or perhaps, upon the whole, more for the interests of the state, than by acting upon the precepts of Machiavel. For I wish to put this distinction very clearly before the reader: An attempt to establish a principate without foreign interference, unless the conditions of society are suitable to that form of government, can only end in a signal failure, which all Machiavel's precepts are powerless to avert; but when society is ripe for a principate, and a prince becomes a political necessity, he cannot act upon the whole better for the safety of his own power, or the general good of the state, than by listening to the advice to exercise all necessary cruelty at first for the establishment of his power, but afterwards to be beneficent and just. Whatever may have been Machiavel's personal admiration of Cæsar Borgia, the prince who acts upon his precepts will not be a Cæsar Borgia, nor a Nero, nor a Caracalla, nor a Genghis Khan, but a Julius Cæsar, or a Napoleon III. There are few things in the history of our own times more striking than the remarkable manner in which the latter monarch,

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whether accidentally or not, has acted up to the very letter as well as the spirit of "The Prince;" and by so doing he has provided for the French a government more suitable and beneficial to them than any they could have received from republican ideologists, or citizen kings.

It is the misfortune of his reputation, that the mention of Machiavel not unnaturally leads to some considerations on the depravity of the national character. Every one in reading his "Prince" perceives at once that he deals with nations from which the higher feelings of honour, liberty, respect for law, restraint of self-indulgences have been eradicated, and that his rules are framed not for the establishment of a principate in any country at random, but principally in one where a certain degree of public immorality has spread through the whole national character.

The progress of morality and the progress of what is called civilisation, are not the same. The former declines after the constitutional stage is passed, the latter often advances. So that in the progress of nations this stage of incipient despotism is not reached without a decadence of character; while it is sometimes more refined, educated, ingenious, and polite than any that has preceded it. The Rome of Tiberius and of Hadrian was a far more civilised, refined, and graceful capital than the Rome of Cicero and Cæsar. The Athens with which Philip was at war, resounding with the refined discussions of the Academy, resplendent with the works of Phidias and Apelles, was more cultivated and refined than the Athens which sent forth the victors of Marathon and those of Salamis. Italy in the days of Machiavel knew many more of the useful and elegant arts, and better loved the refined, the tasteful, and the beautiful than when Dante began to sing, or Raphael to paint; and the savoir vivre of the Frenchman has increased while his liberty has decayed, and the principate of the Napoleons been consolidated over the ruins of public virtue. Ame

rica, which advances with rapid strides in the application of science to practice, and the successful opening of new sources of wealth, is said by its own citizens to deteriorate, not merely from the stern morality of the pilgrim fathers, but even from that less degree of probity and virtue which prevails in the countries whence new emigrants continue to arrive. When once every point of honour is laid aside, and nothing deemed disgraceful but what the laws punish, then civilisation may continue an uninterrupted advance, but it will advance only to materialise mankind, and elevate the useful and agreeable by banishing every troublesome virtue and every restraint on personal indulgence.

I believe the converse of the proposition to be equally true. No native despotism can hold its ground except either from the total ignorance of the greater part of the population that any other government is possible or proper, or from their firm conviction that there is not virtue enough in the public men to conduct republican or constitutional forms of government, and that they cannot furnish a new and better crop of statesmen. America will never subside before a despot while her public men maintain the honour and integrity of those who founded her constitution, and while the people have virtue enough themselves to exact it from their elected governors. If we trace the causes of the Roman decadence, do we not first single out the corruption of the Roman character? Do we not find the same cause in action in every Italian state of the middle ages before the despot, whether native or foreign, subdued it? Need we multiply instances by recalling the sad memoirs of Athens, of Spain, of Portugal ?

That revolutions are the fault of the governors more than of the governed, is a proposition which has received the sanction of great authorities †, and whose truth in the

See the speech of the Florentine citizen to the Signiory, in the beginning of the 3rd book of Machiavel's History.

† Mém. de Sully, tom. i. p. 133. Burke's Works, ii. 224.

majority of instances it would be impossible to deny. It is a condition of society sufficiently bad when the fault of the governors leads to a revolution; but it is a still worse condition when the fault of the governors and the governed combine in making that revolution lead only to despotism. The revolution which dethroned Charles I. was a revolution in main the fault of the governors, but it was the merit or the good fortune of the governed that they could eventually establish in the place of the overthrown monarch a better government. The French revolution of 1784 was the fault of the governors—if the feudal noblesse could still be said to govern; but it was the fault or the misfortune of the governed, that after half a century of experiments they have succeeded in establishing no firm or suitable government except a centralised absolutism.

When the material of moral renovation exists in the nation, the corruption of the governors may be remedied either by revolution or by constitutional means. If the second decemvirate of Rome was corrupt, it does not follow that the order of patricians from whom they were appointed was equally corrupt *; and accordingly from that order rose in later times more honourable rulers. The statesmen of our country have at certain periods been guilty of the grossest corruption, and yet constitutional monarchy has not been thereby seriously endangered, because the gentry and commons of the country were always capable of furnishing a more honest relay to supply the places of those whose corruption necessitated their removal. Our constitution will never be endangered by the corruption of our public men, so long as there is this reserve force of morality in the nation; but if the whole House of Commons were to become as corrupt as in former times some of its members were; if the electors were as corrupt as upon occasion the elected have been, then there could be left no hope of alleviation for the intolerable imposture of jobbing ministers but the iron rule of a despot. Our

* Niebuhr, Hist. Rom. ii. 341.

constitution will perish, not merely when the legislature shall be more corrupt than the executive, but when the character of the nation at large shall be more corrupt than that of the legislature and the executive.

The materialism and self-indulgence of a democracy, when the democratic is the sole and unchecked principle in a state, not merely spreads a wide demoralisation, but also affords to the aspiring prince a ready means of quieting his subjects. Machiavel* teaches him to entertain the people with feasts, public spectacles, and amusements of every description, to divert them and keep them in good humour; a line of policy practised by the Roman emperors towards the nobles of the capital, and by the Roman generals towards those nations whom they wished to subdue. They taught their rude enemies the want of civilised luxuries, and then supplied them with those luxuries at the price of liberty.†

Thus the characteristics of the more advanced stage of plutocracy and democracy lead to an absolute government. One of those characteristics, restlessness, is a means of introducing the peculiar form of absolute government which succeeds. Restlessness, on its first introduction into the national character, is very generally connected with commercial energy; but when commerce declines, the eagerness for novelty and action raises a furor for arms, and revives that popularity of war, which is generally detested where commerce is the chief national employment, unless it is war undertaken for commercial purposes. But when love of war does revive, its character is very different from the same passion in young nations. The one is the spirit of a warrior nation, inured to toil, patient of labour, ambitious of none but strenuous glory; the other, the passionate fury of a fighting democracy in the one, war is the business of a

*The Prince, ch. xxi.

"Ut homines dispersi ac rudes, eoque bello feroces, quiete et otio per voluptates assuescerent. . . idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars Servitutis esset."-Tacitus in Vit. Agric.