Society And its Purpose
Book 3 - Determining the End of Civil Societies
CHAPTER 12
Continuation — Conquerors
423. First, conquest itself is not dependent upon the whim of any human individual; it, too, requires a disposition on the part of the masses who are conquered. No flourishing nation has ever been conquered because every conquest presupposes some decline on the part of the people conquered. It is consistently true that
`sovereignty passes from nation to nation
on account of injustice and insolence and wealth.’(171)
Once the conquest has taken place, however, can the conqueror reanimate the decrepit nation he has conquered? Can human beings achieve such a feat? — Certainly the question is not applicable to conquerors who flood over nations like a raging torrent, destroying all that lies in their path without establishing any stable domination in the midst of the nations. At most, such victors are like strong winds that purify pestilential air without curing the plague.
424. Conquerors who preserve their dominion over the vanquished are of two kinds. Some tend to better the countries they have conquered by mixing and harmonising their own people with the vanquished; their aim is to produce a single people. Others want to dominate forcefully with all possible pressure. In the first case, conquerors and conquered rebind the societal ties; in the second, only a bond of dominion exists.
425. Here again it would be a great error to believe that either of these two things depended solely on the decision of the individual conqueror. This is certainly not true. The outcome depends principally, if not wholly, on the degree and nature of the corruption reached by the conquered nations.
If the degree and nature of corruption is remediable, the conquering people will easily establish brotherhood with the vanquished, and maintain in their midst only the superiority proper to the rulers in their own nation. Careful thought shows that it is only widespread vice in conquered peoples which excites anger, contempt and diffidence about them, as well as desperation about obtaining any good from them. Outside these circumstances, it is never in the interest of conquerors to destroy the vanquished, but to unite and incorporate them into their own society, using them to strengthen the conquering nation. In this case, corruption is almost always remediable when peoples who have not passed through all the social stages are only initially corrupt. In fact, the Egyptian, Phoenician, Greek and Roman colonies were able to civilise, not destroy, the peoples amongst whom they had established themselves.(172)
426. When, however, the conquered people is debased, the natural consequence of conquest is servitude, harsh or mild according to the level of corruption in the vanquished. If the servitude is mild, the conquered people live united in the midst of the conquerors, have the benefit of judgment according to their own legislation and under their own native judges, and are able to maintain their own religion and observances. Servitude in this case is proper to the nation rather than individuals who do not, however, own the land. This was the servitude of the Hebrews conquered by the Babylonians.
If corruption is extreme, servitude is also necessarily extreme. The conquerors’ anger is raised to such a pitch that slavery is a kind of favour reserved for the dross who have escaped slaughter. This deep, moral anger is easily seen in the northern nations when they overthrew the Roman empire. The overbearing pride of Attila and other barbarians can only be explained by the contempt with which they regarded Roman corruption.(173) A modern author speaks very aptly of Rome’s downfall at the hand of the barbarians:
| The Empire’s critical moment was that in which the barbarians, comparing themselves with the Romans,(174) judged themselves superior in virtues, which alone justified in their eyes the right to own and command. This judgment was first expressed by the Gauls. They saw from close quarters the increase of vice amid Roman greatness whose total weight they felt, but which they also sustained with their wealth and courage. When Florus and Sacrovir attempted to make the Gauls rise under Tiberius, they made clear to their compatriots that Italy was denuded, the population of Rome fearful and the armies without any power except that provided by foreigners.(175) |
427. Abhorrence of Roman vices alienated the barbarians from Roman civilisation which they saw clearly but were unable to separate from the vice they beheld. They were also aware they could not oppose civilisation with civilisation, government with government. Consequently, they felt they could only confront civilisation with ferocity, and stable government with military alliances. When the Germans under Civilis took Cologne, they required as a condition for an alliance with the inhabitants of the city, that the walls, which they called `outposts of servitude’, should be dismantled. `The most ferocious animal loses its natural courage if it is caged for a long time. — Let both us and you be free to live along both banks of the river as our ancestors did. As nature gave the light of day to all mankind, so it opened the whole earth to the courageous. Return to the customs and usages of your fathers; abandon these pleasures which are more helpful in prolonging Rome’s domination than any armies. Then, purified and regenerated, your days of slavery will be over; you will be surrounded only by equals, and perhaps by subjects.’
428. Peoples at the stage of power are therefore stimulated to conquest by a secret, moral feeling which constantly urges them to fall upon and even to savage weak peoples whose vices they despise. `I will send for all the tribes of the north, says the Lord, and I will bring them against this land and its inhabitants, and against all these nations round about; I will utterly destroy them, and make them a horror, a hissing, and an everlasting reproach.’(176)
429. The conqueror of nations which have reached the voluptuousness of final social corruption(177) has no power to regenerate the vanquished. All that he can do is decimate them and reduce them to slavery. In this way the plague of slavery entered mankind.(178) It is not the effect of overbearing power on the part of certain human beings, as commonly believed, but the result of the corruption of the social masses. We are dealing here not with the oppression of individuals, but with the establishment of slaves as a formed class of people recognised by laws.
430. Here we must consider carefully that, if slavery were a passing condition in the ancient world (a period of expiation and purification for the corrupt masses), some power could be attributed to the individuals responsible for the amendment of subject peoples. This, however, is not the case. Slavery in the ancient world never came to an end. It was an irremediable wound. When the masses reached the bottom of this abyss, there was no possibility of their rising again. A clear proof of this is the fact that the slave population continually increased in antiquity along with the march of human affairs; it never decreased. The times of greatest civilisation were precisely those in which the number of slaves grew. Ancient civilisation could do nothing for them.(179) The contrary cannot be proved from the fact that each master had the faculty of freeing his slaves. This itself was an effect of seigniory. Moreover, freedom depended on the spirit of the owners; public liberation en masse, or ordered by law, was unheard of. Nor is there any example in antiquity of slaves, considered as a body, rising intellectually and morally to a point where they acquired the capacity for using their freedom and thus being worthy of regaining their liberty. Indeed, neither masters nor laws ever freed masses once enslaved; nor were the masses ever able to regain sufficient force, will-power, intellect or virtue to escape from their penal condition. In thousands of years of ancient history, we see only rare attempts, such as that of Sertorius, on the part of slaves to gain freedom. No attempt was ever successful.(180)
431. The civil redemption of peoples was not within human power as the redemption of individuals was. Only the supernatural principle, the new element placed in humanity by Christianity, could redeem and reunite decadent peoples dispersed in slavery.(181)
Notes
(171) Sirach 10: 8.
(172) The Roman colonies brought the idea of government, as well as crafts and branches of knowledge, to the peoples amongst whom they dwelt. This idea, as we said, is a great source of civilisation. The policy came about as a result of the commanding nature and fine capacity for government possessed by the Romans amongst whom the social stage of power developed and endured longer than amongst any other people. `Rome was not a Greek colony, but owed its civilisation, laws, language and religion to Italian peoples educated by the Greeks. Rome was not content, as the Greeks were, with taking its crafts, language and philosophy from place to place. It wanted to dominate wherever its armies penetrated. The Greeks sowed new, independent peoples on the shores of the seas; the Romans tended to unity. Although they spread their colonies wherever they bore arms, these colonies, images of the great city, were only garrisons of a great people, not germs of new peoples. Nevertheless, they were destined to mix with the indigenous peoples, to communicate to them all the progress Rome had made in crafts and social sciences, and to set them on the road to civilisation. The Roman colonies were responsible throughout the ancient world for the primary education of mankind' (Sismondi, Des colonies des Anciens comparées à celles des modernes, etc.). According to Cicero, `The Romans set up colonies in suitable places with so little danger of suspicion because they seemed the outposts of empire rather than cities of Italy' (De. Agr., 2: 27). `With so little danger of suspicion' shows that the people feared oppressive power on the part of military colonies. Cicero won the case against the agrarian law of P. Servilius Rullus by making the Roman people fear that the location of colonies in badly chosen places would be an attack on their freedom. Cf. Cicero's speech on this matter, ch. 27 ss.
(173) Attila's frequent insults, conveyed by his ambassadors to the Roman emperors of his time, are well known. He and his nation felt the need to impose themselves on the Romans. The leader is, in fact, incapable of achieving anything unless he finds the nation he guides to victory responding to his thoughts and seconding him with an eagerness equivalent to his own. Priscus, a contemporary of Attila and one-time legate to his court, relates that this ferocious warrior sent a message to Theodosius urging him to come to terms with him. `Otherwise', he said, `he (Attila) would not be able to restrain any longer his people's overwhelming ardour for battle' (Excerpta ex Historia Gothica Prisci Rhetoris de Legationibus, in corp. historiae Byzant., Paris, 1648).
(174) When does a nation begin to compare itself with other nations? — This requires a use of intelligence that is activated only at a certain epoch when the intellectual development of the nation has reached a determined level. Before this epoch, the nation is involved with itself, and acts instinctively without comparing itself with others. At most, it will go in search of the booty it may need. Glory and moral emulation, which make the nation capable of thinking itself more virtuous and courageous than others, is not yet the object of its stirrings. The moral and intellectual development of nations has to be noted carefully. This alone provides a causal explanation of all external happenings.
(175) Tac., Ann., 3: 4. Cf. Rome et les Barbares in Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève, August 1837. Civilis used the same kind of arguments to rouse the Germans against the Romans (Tac., Hist., 4: 12; German. 29).
(176) Jer 25: [9].
(177) The corruption of certain individuals is not to be confused with that of the nation as a whole. This important distinction may be clarified by the comments I made on the corruption of nations in Esame delle opinioni di M. Gioia in favore della moda, inserted in Opuscoli Filosofici (vol. 2, p. 107 ss., Milan, Tipografia Pogliani, 1828).
(178) The more peaceful nations of southern Asia either did not have slaves in the Greek and Roman sense or had them only much later. This is explained by the lack of wars. Arrian, according to Megasthenes, wrote of India: `The wonderful thing is that in India all Indians are free. None of them is a slave. In this, they are like the Spartans. The Spartans, however, have the Helots for servile duties, although they do not use other slaves; but the Indians have no slaves of any sort' (Arrian, Storia Indica, c. 10). Romagnosi wants to deduce from this passage of Arrian that the Codex Manu, which mentions slaves, `was not from India properly speaking, but from another country in which slaves existed' (Supplementi ed illustrazioni alla seconda parte delle Richerche sull'India di Robertson, §5). He did not notice, however, that Arrian perhaps takes the word `slave' in the Greek sense, that is, in the sense of people understood as things, not as persons. India had the Sudra caste, whose members could not rise higher in society than service to other castes. It is perhaps of these people that the Codex of Manu is speaking. In the second place, India cannot be considered as a single nation, but as a complex of nations. What Arrian says could therefore be true of one nation; what the Codex of Manu says, of another.
(179) At the time when Athenian activity reached fever pitch, Attica had twenty thousand citizens and three hundred and fifty thousand slaves. It is calculated that in the whole of Greece there were six times as many slaves as citizens.
(180) The Mosaic laws were more humane towards slaves than those of other nations. In fact, the word `slave' does not have the same meaning for the Hebrews as it does for the Greeks and Romans. Hebrew legislation always respects the personship of the slave. Moreover, amongst the Hebrews, slaves had to be freed every Sabbatical year. If they refused their freedom and preferred to serve their master, as sometimes happened, they could not regain their liberty. These laws were, therefore, exceptions in the whole of the ancient world. They can only be explained through reference to God, who had given them to his people.
(181) The various disturbances and wars brought about by slaves in antiquity are mentioned in C. Cantù's article, Schiavi Romani (Revista Europea, 15th November 1838).