From Fraser's Magazine. belied by all history, from Marathon to SeIMPERIALISM. bastopol. Was the administration of the THERE has been for some time past a grow- Aulic Council in the campaigns of Italy less ing desire for some kind of despotism. It is trammelled by "red tape" than those of the not settled whether it is to be the despotism English War-office in the Crimea? And as of the Caesars, of the Tudors, of the Bour- to favoritism, was it a people's minister or a bong, of the Stuarts, of the Buonapartes, or king's mistress that, after Rosbach, gave anof Jack Cade. But this much is clear, that other army to "poor Soubise ? " Was it a to some who owe all they are to English constitutional government or an enlightened freedom, English freedom has become a wear- despot that sent the dying St. Arnaud as the iness, an obstruction, and a nuisance. It is price of services in a conspiracy, to paralyze as well to look before we leap. Freedom comes to the unwilling, she does not return to the willing, slave.

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which alone makes decorations shine on the theories, the complete ascendency of which

soldier's breast. Czars find it more useful in may otherwise be delayed by the influence of extremity to serve out spirits; and if the sophists and the tardiness of the human crosses of the Buonapartes have a lustre, it mind, still lingering in the theological stage is the light of liberty which lingers on them of social investigation. These friends to buyet. These crosses will soon grow dull bits manity (they are sincere friends to humanity) of metal, graciously conferred by an imperial are necessarians. And necessarians hastenmaster's hand. Cæsar and Napoleon learnt ing the march of events are, philosophically victory to win the hearts of commonwealths. speaking, in rather a singular position. We Even Frederic played the hero, not so much might also say that they, like the despotic to his brother monarchs or his courtiers, as drainers, are cutting down the tree to reach to the philosophic republic of Voltaire. The one of the fruits: but they have distinctly legions of the Russian and German cam- ascertained from Destiny that their opinions paigns did not fulfil the ardent calculations are the last as well as the strangest birth of of their chief like the famished and unshod-time, and that the tree of liberty having den crusaders of Arcola. The destined des- borne this golden fruit, may as well be cut troyer of the Roman Commonwealth bridged down, for it will bear no more forever. the Rhine in face of the German hordes, because he thought it due to the majesty of the Senate and the people. When was such flattery offered to a Cæsar?

The emperor of these philosophers is not to be a common emperor, ruling by his own lights and after his own way, but an embodiment of national will and enlightened opinBesides, if we must have a despot for war, let ion. Figurative language is dangerous in us have him for war only. Let us take a lesson politics. A poet, and still more a poetess, from the Romans, who met a military emer- may be allowed, with an eye in a very fine gency as a military emergency,and boiled their frenzy rolling, to see all that is great and pot with a faggot and not with their roof-tree. wise in France concentred on the brow of Let us have, not a despotism, but a dictator; the Emperor; but in matter of fact Louis and let the dictator have full power to tax and Napoleon is Louis Napoleon, and nothing conscribe, to defy public opinion, to magnify all our victories in indisputable bulletins, and conceal all our disasters and defeats. A casemate may be a good thing in a siege; but why should we live in a casemate?

When

more. A man can have no will and no wis-
dom but his own you cannot transfuse
yours into him through a ballot-box.
you have made him and his heirs your lords
forever, there will be nothing in his heart or
brain which was not there before, except the
fire of unbridled power. He will not be a
bit more master of that vast range of social,
political, and administrative knowledge, which
would be as far beyond the grasp of a
Charlemagne now as modern science would
be beyond the grasp of an Aristotle, and
which is contributed from countless minds to
the laws and government of a free nation.
You will have placed the will of one again
above the reason of all, thereby reversing,
like true philosophers, the greatest step ever
made by man. But you will have done
nothing more. The first despot may be of
your party; and if so, he may carry out
your views by force, and oppress your oppo-
nents. But his successors?

But a despot is desired for peace as well as war. People wish we had a good despot to drain London. In other words, they wish they had a man master of their lives, property, and religion, and whose children should be masters of their children's lives, property, and religion, that he might by his fiat make a sewer. But in the first place, is it not as well to have a little patience with English liberty, which, having made London, may after all prove able to drain it? May it not be wise to give the science of Watt and Stevenson time to contrive a ladder be"fore you cut down the fruitful tree to reach that which is not the fairest of its fruits? And in the second place, does it appear that despots are as much given to making sewers as they are to building palaces for an august The Comtist imperialists promise us a scibeing, and monuments to an august name? entific hierarchy and Pope as a check to their The most philosophic imperialists, how-political despot. It is a great and unexever, are those who want an enlightened des- pected honor to the Papal system to be copied pot to hasten the march of their own social by M. Comte. But the copy is like the Chi

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nese copy of a steamer, with a burning straw for the smoke. system of spiritual control was

Is it that ignorance is

bundle of a peasant emperor. The Papal the next best thing in government to omniworked by science? Is it that the head of a peasant is the terrors of hell, for which we fear the less likely to be turned by the elevation? terrors of philosophic reprobation would Nature seems to have intended the educated prove but a Chinese substitute. The mediaæ- classes to contribute the work of their heads val chiefs of the Executive, when they took a fancy for your head or your money, cared little enough for being dammed; and the modern chiefs of the Executive, if disposed to depart from the true principles of social science, would, too probably, care less for being pronounced unscientific. Besides, we should fear another compromise between the two authorities, in virtue of which you would be cast out of the church of Science for suing out your Habeas Corpus, and burned for confuting M. Comte.

to the common fund of society, as the peasant contributes the work of his hands. But highly educated men wish to reverse this arrangement. Let them remember that reading and writing were treason under Jack Cade, and that the republic of the Sansculottes had no need of chemists. No doubt they say in their hearts that the right-minded among the educated classes will still be had in honor, and stand as ministers of wisdom beside the Sansculottic throne; and perhaps they think that the rest may be mercifully allowed to remain in a depressed state as the purchasers and admirers of strong publications against themselves. But again we say, remember Jack Cade!

It is fair to mention that the priests of social science are expected to have far more power over the lawless passions of men in general, and despots in particular, when morals shall have been re-constructed on We could understand a French terrorist physical principles. Justice and humanity desiring the despotism af a Lyons operative, will gain new force when we are once con- because such a despot would wreak the venvinced that they are physiological, and not geance of his class on the noble and the rich. divine. What makes men fall into vice is their French terrorists do the noble and the rich being still in the theological stage of social the honor, never done them by a Master of and ethical science, and fancying that virtue, the Ceremonies or a Herald's Office, to beinstead of being the dictate of their cranium, lieve that their blood can regenerate mankind. is the will of God. But we may reasonably But these cruel and cowardly hankerings ask that the regeneration of philosophy have not yet found a place in English hearts. should be actually accomplished before the destinies of man are staked on the result. Give the moonbeams of the Laputan sage time to ripen into cucumbers, before you place the ordinary vegetable beyond our reach. We say this in the most liberal sense, and merely from a desire, which we trust is not unphilosophical, of combining the existence with the progress of our species.

We have not yet been told how the first democratic emperor is to be appointed. By universal suffrage, we presume. But how to get to the ballot is the difficulty. In the case of Caesar, Cromwell, and both Bonapartes, the process was greatly simplified by a military pre-election. We should like a French Imperialist to tell us what would have happened if the people, in the free exercise of the highest of all prerogatives, had One thing is surprising. The Comtists voted No. Nor, again, is the mode of sucare most severe in exacting the highest sci- cession in a democratic empire yet settled. entific training for politics. You must go Sometimes it seems as if an occasional break through all the sciences in the inverse order in the hereditary line-such as that which of their complexity, from mathematics (of raised to the throne the late Czar Nicholas which it would seem you must be a master and the present Emperor of Austria—would in you teens) to biology, before you venture be enough to make the empire democratic. to open your lips upon political subjects. At other times it seems to be intended that Not only so if we understand rightly, you the empire should be bequeathed by sage to must trace the whole scientific progress of sage or clown to clown, nobody being capahumanity, and begin with fetich mathe-ble of the bequest before the age of thirty or matics to end in positive social science. Yet thirty-five-a rule which would always be some of M. Comte's disciples want to make kept in the spirit though it would often be

broken in the letter, since the wisdom of the The Roman emperors added to the com

sons of princes always outstrips their years. One thing only seems clearly determined, that is, that these despots are always to be wise and good. It is a sage provision; for if the life of a nation is summed up in one wan, and that man is a fool or a miscreant, what is the life of the nation?

mand of the army the tribuneship of the people, not as a check, but as a weapon of absolute power. They feared, like the Bourbons, the mob of their capital. They gorged its cruel cowardice with provincial slaughter, and its indolence with largesses of provincial corn, which extinguished forever the agriculture and the free peasantry of Italy. They gave it in public baths and theatres a tithe perhaps of what they lavished in golden houses, fabulous yachts, triumphal causeways over the sea, banquets of the gods, Tigellini and Narcissi. They gave it, too, the blood of the nobles: but that blood failed to redeem its degradation, or to lave its shame. Such was the democracy (which it seems has never before been noticed) of Imperial Rome. Milton had read the classics, and knew liberty and justice when he saw them, and knew a great ruler when he saw him too;

common tyrants. It is true that Milton thought of mind and spirit: to him mere order was not all.

It is strange that Comtists should go down to the uneducated classes for a despot; and it is equally strange that they should go back to the Roman Empire for the type of their government. Their key to history is the law of necessary progress. According to their philosophy (which we readily admit to be not without its merits in the way of enlarging our historical sympathies), every institution, slavery and canabalism included, is good for its day, and for its day only. Reaction is with them the one political sin. Julian and Philip the Second stand doomed in their calendar to everlasting execration, but to Milton the Roman Emperors seemed not for having been supremely wicked (which Julian at least was not), but for having been supremely retrograde; a doom which; by the way, seems to us, on the necessarian theory, rather hard, inasmuch as the receding wave is as necessary, and therefore as little open to stricture, as the advancing tide. And yet, this being the theory of the world, we, the heirs of all the ages, the contemporaries of M. Comte, are to retrograde eighteen centu- said upon the subject although little is ries, and, philosophically disregarding the most known. We know that the fairest lands of glaring difference of circumstance, borrow Italy became a waste; that in other counfrom a heathen empire of many subject nations a constitution for a single Christian nation at the present day. This is of a piece with the proposal to put back our international relations to a time when there were no Northern Powers, no Austria, no Prussia, no Holland, no British Colonies, no Turkey, no India, no United States, and when all the countries of the civilized world were provinces of Rome. So strange are the attempts which are made by generous hearts, and even by highly endowed minds, to put off the burden and change the lot of man.

The provinces accepted the Empire as a relief; and their state under the Senate half redeemed the usurpation which, in a modern free state without subject provinces, is an unmixed crime. They accepted it as a relief, but did they find it one? Much is

tries the canker of huge estates and slave labor spread till six grandecs owned a great province. We know the pregnant fact that a capitation tax, not taxes on property or luxuries, was the great fiscal expedient of this democratic, nay, Socialist, government. We know that the miserable serfage of Gaul ended in a peasant war as horrible as the Jacqueries. We know what was the condition and what the fate of the only people which did not worship Cæsar, but God. The imperial brow of Tiberius is much in fashion; we have no bust of Pilate.*

What the Roman Empire was to Rome and to the world, and whether English and are dwarfed by the Rev. John Rendle's "History *The puny paradoxes of the present Tiberians Christian liberty would be well exchanged of that inimitable Monarch Tiberius, who, in the for it, the historians of Rome and Constanti-fourteenth year of his reign, requested the Senate to

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nople and the writers of thh New Testament, must say. If they are not to be believed, there is no history of the Roman Empire at all. Fancy may revel in the void.

permit the worship of Jesus Christ; and who, in the sixteenth and three following years, or before the conversion of Cornelius by Peter, suppressed all opposition to it." According to this learned and ingenious writer (he seems both learned and ingenfous) Tiberius retired to Capres for religious

When the barbarians attacked the civilized world, did they find it defended by loyal citizens or by heartless slaves?

In judging the Empire, we must keep it clear of Christianity. We must see it by itself, with the morals of Juvenal and Petronius, and with Cæsar for God. It.1 t, persecuted the Church first, and made her a tyranny afterwards. It could not help persecuting her at first, because she taught the worship of God instead of Cæsar, and rebuked unbridled lust. It could not help making her a tyranny afterwards, for civil tyranny and religious tyranny have ever been one. Is the father of his people to be careless of their faith? Is the shepherd to allow his sheep to stray out of the fold of life?

graded Rome he could, by practice, emphatically condemned. The imperial stoic was called to the throne by a concurrence of happy accidents-by the childlessness of Hadrian, and by the death of the gay nobleman who was destined to be Hadrian's suuccessor. He did what wisdom and virtue invested with absolute power can do, by respiting misery and snatching an hour from decay. He could not bequeath to a race of hopeless slaves political virtue, or the public happiness which political virtue alone secures. He did bequeath them Commodus.

The founder of the Roman Empire is becoming the idol of literary men, who seem to think that they put off the reproach of a gentle calling and invest themselves with In Diocletian you had a peasant Emperor factitious manhood by identifying themof Rome; in both respects your very ideal. selves with the strong oppressors of the And did Diocletian keep a peasant heart world; and who have found room for the upon the throne? Was he the tribune of Cæsarian and Christian system of morals, the people? First of all the emperors, he as it were for the Ptolemaic and Copernican put off the last remnant of republican sim-systems of astronomy, in one comprehensive plicity, put on the full insignia of vulgar mind. Cæsar was in one sense a great man, royalty, hedged himself with the divinity as the founder of an empire will in one of eunuch pomp, and utterly ceased to live a man among his fellow-men. He first established that regular court hierarchy of oppression and extortion which makes one wail of the rest of Byzantine history. He set himself up to be worshipped as a god, and persecuted the religion of the poor. And let those who seek pence in political suicide remember that his reign-the consummation and perfection, according to Imperialists, of the imperial system-was followed by eighteen years of confusion and civil war.

sense always be: He had in perfection that genius for organization which is only inferior to the genius for giving life. His age tempted and excused profligate ambition. He did not look on the moral agony of a great nation struggling to be free and to free mankind, and see in that agony a vulgar crown for his own selfish pride. In him appeared the lust of his successors, but not yet mated with their cruelty; and his selfishness was the limit of his crimes. The founder of the Empire was a great man, but the Empire which he founded was Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, civil war.

A city of bandits and debauchees, an effete nobility, a rabble of political lazzaroni, a world of oppressed and plundered provinces, without a moral faith and without a God, sank down beneath a sensualist despotism. Such we are bidden to believe was the natal

It has been the fate of Marcus Aurelius to give lustre to a form of government which he by precept, and, so far as in depurposes and to avoid the malignity of the antichristian Senate: he forbade instant executions to prevent another hasty crucifixion, and abolished the right of assylum on account of the release of Barabbas. Tiberius is styled the "nursing father of the Catholic Church," and "the first defender of the faith." The book seems to have passed unnoticed. In 1813, when it was published. peo-hour, and such the origin, of the perfect ple were perhaps too much engrossed with the polity, the noblest work of man. And tremendous present to care much for paradoxes what were the authors of that work? about the past. There is one contemporary writer whose testimony respecting Tiberius should not be overlooked: it seems decisive at once as to the creed and the life of that prince. Quid scribam vobis, P. C. aut quomoda scribam, aut quid omnino non scribam hoc tempore, Dii me Dexque pejns perdant, quam perire me quotidie sentio, si

scio."

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Caesarian writers paint the infamy of the Antonies, who were destined to set their feet on the necks of Cicero and Cato, and applaud the irony of fate. Fate may be ironical, but Providence is not. Providence