And now again we see how inevitably the force of attraction correlates with the force of repulsion. The new channels of the spirit of union, being dug not by reason but by ignorance, become new channels for the reverse flow of the spirit of strife; and as sectarian zeal spreads, in the absence of openings, good or bad, for public spirit, there arise new forms of domestic hate and struggle. Crude religious fervours, excluding, or arising in lack of, the play of the saner and higher forms of thought and feeling, beget crude antipathies;[68] and Christianity leads back to bloody strifes and seditions such as had not been seen since the fall of the Republic. There is not intellectuality enough to raise men above this new superinduced barbarism of ignorant instinct; half of the old Christendom, disintegrated like the old politics, is overrun by a more robust barbarism that adopts a simpler creed; and the new barbaric Christendom exhibits in its turn all the modes of operation of the biological forces that had been seen in the old.
§ 5
Thus far we have considered Roman evolution in terms of a moral estimate of the reactions of classes. But lest we lose sight of the principle of total causation, it is fitting to restate the process in terms of that conception, thus explaining it non-morally. We may view Rome, to begin with, as a case of the unique aggrandisement of a State in virtue of fit conditions and institutions. Thus (1) the comparatively uncommercial situation of the early Latins, leaving them, beyond cattle-breeding and agriculture, no occupation save war for surplus energy, and no readier way of acquiring wealth;[69] (2) the physical collocation of a group of seven defensive hills, so close that they must be held by a federated group;[70] (3) the ethnic collocation of a set of tribe groups of nearly equal vigour and ardour, strengthening each other's sinews by constant struggling; (4) the creation (not prescient, but purely as a provision against kingship) of the peculiar institution of the annual consulate,[71] securing a perpetuity of motive to conquest and a continuous flow of administrative energy;[72] (5) the peculiar need, imposed by this very habit of all-round warfare, for accommodation between the ruling and ruled classes, and for the safeguarding of the interests of the latter by laws and franchises; (6) the central position of Rome in Italy, enabling her to subdue it piecemeal; and finally (7) the development by all these means of a specialist aristocracy, habitually trained to administration[73]—all these genetic conditions combined to build up the most remarkable military empire the world has ever seen. They obtrude, it is clear, half of the explanation of the fact that the Romans rose to empire where the much more early civilised Greek cities of Italy did not.
Of the latter fact we still receive the old explanation that it came of "the habit, which had ever been the curse of Hellenism, of jealous separation and frequent war between town and town, as well as internal feuds in the several cities themselves."[74] But this is clearly no vera causa, as these symptoms are duplicated in the history of Rome itself. The determining forces must, then, be looked for in the special conditions. The Greeks, indeed, brought with them the tradition of the separate City-State; but just as the cities remained independent in Greece by reason of natural conditions,[75] so the Greek cities of Italy remained isolated and stationary at a certain strength, because their basis and way of life were commercial, so that while they restricted each other's growth or dominance they were in times of peace mutually nutritive. They wanted customers, not plunder. For the Romans plunder was the first social need after agriculture, and as they began they continued. When Jugurtha learned that anything could be had of the Romans for gold, he had but read an open secret.
Of course, the functions that were originally determined by external conditions came in time to be initial causes—the teeth and claws, so to speak, fixing the way of life for the body politic. The upper-class Romans became, as it were, the experts, the specialists of war and empire and administration. Until they became wholly demoralised by habitual plunder, they showed, despite their intense primeval superstition of citizenship,[76] a degree of sagacity in the conciliation of their defeated rivals which was a main cause of their being able to hold out against Hannibal, and which contrasts markedly with the oppressive and self-defeating policy of imperial Carthage, Athens, and Sparta. Their tradition in part was still that of conquering herdsmen, not wholly turned into mere exploiters of humanity. Pitted against any monarch, they were finally invincible, because a still-growing class supplied their administrators, as the swarming provinces supplied their soldiers, and because for all alike war meant plunder and new lands, as well as glory. Pitted against a republic like Carthage, even when its armies were led by a man of genius, they were still insuppressible, inasmuch as Carthage was a community of traders employing mercenaries, where Rome was a community in arms, producing generals as Carthage produced merchants. Mithridates failed in turn, as Hannibal failed. The genius of one commander, exploiting passive material, could not avail against the accumulated faculty for organisation in the still self-renewing Roman patriciate.[77]
Carthage had, in fact, preceded Rome on the line of the evolution of class egoism. Herself an expression of the pressure of the social problem in the older Semitic world, she began as a colony, staved off domestic strife by colonies, by empire, and by doles,[78] and was already near the economic stage reached only centuries later by the Roman Empire. Save for Rome, her polity might have endured on the imperialist basis for centuries; but, as it was, it was socially exhausted relatively to the task and the danger, depending as it did on hired foreign troops and coerced allies. It is idle to speak, as men still do, of Hannibal's stay in Capua as a fatal mistake.[79] Had Hannibal taken Rome, the ultimate triumph of the Romans would have been just as certain. Their State was bound to outlast the other, so long as it maintained to any extent its old basis of a fecund rural population of free cultivators, supplying a zealous soldiery, headed by a specialised class equally dependent on conquest for all advancement. For the trading Carthaginians, war was, beyond a certain point, a mere act of self-defence; they could not have held and administered Italy had they taken it. The supreme general could last only one lifetime; the nation of warriors still yielded a succession of captains, always learning something more of war, and raising the standard of capacity as the progress of machinery widens the scope of all engineers.
The author of a recent and meritorious History of Rome, Mr. Shuckburgh, is satisfied to quote (p. 231) from Polybius, as explaining the fall of Carthage, the generalisation that "Italians as a nation are by nature superior to Phœnicians and Libyans, both in strength of body and courage of soul"; and to add: "That is the root of the matter, from which all else is a natural growth." This only leaves us asking: "What was the natural root of the alleged physiological superiority?" There must have been reasons. If they were "racial" or climatic, whence the later implied