The Emancipation of Massachusetts

A similar phenomenon occurred once before in German history, and it is not an uncommon incident in human experience when nature has already made, or is on the brink of making, a change in the seat of the economic centre of the world. In the same way, when Constantine won the battle of the Milvian Bridge, with his men fighting under the standard of the Labarum, it was subsequently found that the economic capital of civilization had silently migrated from the Tiber to the Bosphorus, where Constantine seated himself at Constantinople, which was destined to be the new capital of the world for about eight hundred years. So in 1792, when the Prussians and the French refugees together invaded France, they never doubted for an instant that they should easily disperse the mob, as they were pleased to call it, of Kellermann’s “vagabonds, cobblers, and tailors.” Nevertheless the Germans recoiled on the slope of Valmy from before the republican army, almost without striking a blow, nor could they be brought again to the attack, although the French royalists implored to be allowed to storm the hill alone, provided they could be assured of support. Then the retreat of the Duke of Brunswick began, and this retreat was the prelude to the Napoleonic empire, to Austerlitz, to Jena, to the dismemberment and to the reorganization of Prussia and to the evolution of modern Germany: in short, to the conversion of the remnants of mediæval civilization into the capitalistic, industrial, competitive society which we have known. And all this because of the accelerated movement caused by science.

If it be, indeed, a fact that the victory of Château Thierry and the subsequent retreat of the German army together with the collapse of the German Empire indicate, as there is abundant reason to suppose that they may, a shift in the world’s social equilibrium, equivalent to the shift in Europe presaged by Valmy, or to that which substituted Constantinople for Rome and which was marked by the Milvian Bridge, it follows that we must prepare ourselves for changes possibly greater than our world has seen since it marched to Jerusalem under Godfrey de Bouillon. And the tendency of those changes is not so very difficult, perhaps, roughly to estimate, always premising that they are hardly compatible with undue optimism. Supposing, for example, we consider, in certain of their simpler aspects, some of the relations of Great Britain toward ourselves, since Great Britain is not only our most important friend, assuming that she remain a friend, but our most formidable competitor, should competition strain our friendship. Also Great Britain has the social system nearest akin to our own, and most likely to be influenced by the same so-called democratic tendencies. For upwards of a hundred years Great Britain has been, and she still is, absolutely dependent on her maritime supremacy for life. It was on that issue she fought the Napoleonic wars, and when she prevailed at Trafalgar and Waterloo she assumed economic supremacy, but only on the condition that she should always be ready and willing to defend it, for it is only on that condition that economic supremacy can be maintained. War is the most potent engine of economic competition. Constantinople and Antwerp survived and flourished on the same identical conditions long before the day of London. She must keep her avenues of communication with all the world open, and guard them against possible attack. So long as America competed actively with England on the sea, even for her own trade, her relations with Great Britain were troubled. The irritation of the colonies with the restrictions which England put upon their commerce materially contributed to foment the revolution, as abundantly appears in the famous case of John Hancock’s sloop Liberty, which was seized for smuggling. So in the War of 1812, England could not endure the United States as a competitor in her contest with France. She must be an ally, or, in other words, she must function as a component part of the British economic system, or she must be crushed. The crisis came with the attack of the Leopard on the Chesapeake in 1807, after which the possibility of maintaining peace, under such a pressure, appeared, in its true light, as a phantasm. After the war, with more or less constant friction, the same conditions continued until the outbreak of the Rebellion, and then Great Britain manifested her true animus as a competitor. She waged an unacknowledged campaign against the commerce of the United States, building, equipping, arming, manning, and succoring a navy for the South, which operated none the less effectively because its action was officially repudiated. And in this secret warfare England prevailed, since when the legislation of the United States has made American competition with England on the sea impossible. Wherefore we have had peace with England. We have supplied Great Britain with food and raw materials, abandoning to England the carrying trade and an undisputed naval supremacy. Consequently Great Britain feels secure and responds to the full force of that economic attraction which makes America naturally, a component part of the British economic system. But let American pretensions once again revive to the point of causing her to attempt seriously to develop her sea power as of yore, and the same friction would also revive which could hardly, were it pushed to its legitimate end, eventuate otherwise than in the ultimate form of all economic competition.

If such a supposition seems now to be fanciful, it is only necessary to reflect a moment on the rapidity with which national relations vary under competition, to be assured that it is real. As Washington said, the only force which binds one nation to another is interest. The rise of Germany, which first created jealousy in England, began with the attack on Denmark in 1864. Then Russia was the power which the British most feared and with whom they were on the worst of terms. About that period nothing would have seemed more improbable than that these relations would be reversed, and that Russia and England would jointly, within a generation, wage fierce war on Germany. We are very close to England now, but we may be certain that, were we to press, as Germany pressed, on British maritime and industrial supremacy, we should be hated too. It is vain to disguise the fact that British fortunes in the past have hinged on American competition, and that the wisest and most sagacious Englishmen have been those who have been most alive to the fact. Richard Cobden, for example, was one of the most liberal as he was one of the most eminent of British economists and statesmen of the middle of the nineteenth century. He was a democrat by birth and education, and a Quaker by religion. In 1835, just before he entered public life, Cobden visited the United States and thus recorded his impressions on his return:

“America is once more the theatre upon which nations are contending for mastery; it is not, however, a struggle for conquest, in which the victor will acquire territorial dominion—the fight is for commercial supremacy, and will be won by the cheapest.... It is from the silent and peaceful rivalry of American commerce, the growth of its manufactures, its rapid progress in internal improvements, … it is from these, and not from the barbarous policy or the impoverishing armaments of Russia, that the grandeur of our commercial and national prosperity is endangered.” [Footnote: John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden, 107, 108.]

It is not, however, any part of my contention that nature should push her love of competition so far as necessarily to involve us in war with Great Britain, at least at present, for nature has various and most unlooked-for ways of arriving at her ends, since men never can determine, certainly in advance, what avenue will, to them, prove the least resistant. They very often make an error, as did the Germans, which they can only correct by enduring disaster, defeat, and infinite suffering. Nature might very well, for example, prefer that consolidation should advance yet another step before a reaction toward chaos should begin.

This last war has, apparently, been won by a fusion of two economic systems which together hold and administer a preponderating mass of fluid capital, and which have partially pooled their resources to prevail. They appear almost as would a gigantic lizard which, having been severed in an ancient conflict, was now making a violent but only half-conscious effort to cause the head and body to unite with the tail, so that the two might function once more as a single organism, governed by a single will. Under our present form of capitalistic life there would seem to be no reason why this fluid capital should not fuse and by its energy furnish the motor which should govern the world. Rome, for centuries, was governed by an emperor, who represented the landed class of Italy, under the forms of a republic. It is not by any means necessary that a plutocratic mass should have a recognized political head. And America and England, like two enormous banking houses, might in effect fuse and yet go on as separate institutions with nominally separate boards of directors.

But it is inconceivable that even such an expedient as this, however successful at the outset, should permanently solve the problem, which resolves itself once more into individual competition. It is not imaginable that such an enormous plutocratic society as I have supposed could conduct its complex affairs upon the basis of the average intelligence. As in Rome, a civil service would inevitably be organized which would contain a carefully selected body of ability. We have seen such a process, in its initial stages, in the recent war. And such a civil service, however selected and however trained, would, to succeed, have to be composed of men who were the ablest in their calling, the best educated, and the fittest: in a word, the representatives of what we call “the big business” of the country. Such as they might handle the railroads, the telegraph lines, the food supply, the question of competitive shipping, and finally prices, as we have seen it done, but only on condition that they belonged to the fortunate class by merit.

But supposing, in the face of such a government, the unfortunate class should protest, as they already do protest in Russia, in Germany, and even in England and here at home, that a legal system which sanctions such a civilization is iniquitous. Here, the discontented say, you insist on a certain form of competition being carried to its limit. That is, you demand intellectual and peaceful competition for which I am unfit both by education, training, and mental ability. I am therefore excluded from those walks in life which make a man a freeman. I become a slave to capital. I must work, or fight, or starve according to another man’s convenience, caprice, or, in fine, according to his will. I could be no worse off under any despot. To such a system I will not submit. But I can at least fight. Put me on a competitive equality or I will blow your civilization to atoms. To such an argument there is no logical answer possible except the answer which all extreme socialists have always advanced. The fortunate man should be taxed for all he earns above the average wage, and the State should confiscate his accumulations at death. Then, with a system of government education, obligatory on all, children would start equal from birth.

Here we come against the hereditary instinct, the creator and the preserver of the family: the instinct which has made law and order possible, so far as our ancestors or we have known order, as far back as the Ice Age. If the coming world must strive with this question, or abandon the “democratic ideal,” the future promises to be stormy.

But even assuming that this problem of individual competition be overcome, we are as far as ever from creating a system of moral law which shall avail us, for we at once come in conflict with the principle of abstract justice which demands that free men shall be permitted to colonize or move where they will. But supposing England and America to amalgamate; they now hold or assume to control all or nearly all the vacant regions of the earth which are suited to the white man’s habitation. And the white man cannot live and farm his land in competition with the Asiatic; that was conclusively proved in the days of Rome.

But it is not imaginable that Asiatics will submit to this discrimination in silence. Nothing can probably constrain them to resignation but force, and to apply force is to revert to the old argument of the savage or the despot, who admits that he knows no law save that of the stronger, which is the system, however much we have disguised it and, in short, lied about it, under which we have lived and under which our ancestors have lived ever since the family was organized, and under which it is probable that we shall continue to live as long as any remnant of civilization shall survive.

Nevertheless, it seems to be far from improbable that the system of industrial, capitalistic civilization, which came in, in substance, with the “free thought” of the Reformation, is nearing an end. Very probably it may have attained to its ultimate stages and may dissolve presently in the chaos which, since the Reformation, has been visibly impending. Democracy in America has conspicuously and decisively failed, in the collective administration of the common public property. Granting thus much, it becomes simply a question of relative inefficiency, or degradation of type, culminating in the exhaustion of resources by waste; unless the democratic man can supernaturally raise himself to some level more nearly approaching perfection than that on which he stands. For it has become self-evident that the democrat cannot change himself from a competitive to a non-competitive animal by talking about it, or by pretending to be already or to be about to become other than he is,—the victim of infinite conflicting forces.

BROOKS ADAMS,QUINCY, July 20, 1919.

THE EMANCIPATION OF MASSACHUSETTS

CHAPTER I. – THE COMMONWEALTH

The mysteries of the Holy Catholic Church had been venerated for ages when Europe burst from her mediæval torpor into the splendor of the Renaissance. Political schemes and papal abuses may have precipitated the inevitable outbreak, but in the dawn of modern thought the darkness faded amidst which mankind had so long cowered in the abject terrors of superstition. Already in the beginning of the fifteenth century many of the ancient dogmas had begun to awaken incredulity, and sceptics learned to mock at that claim to infallibility upon which the priesthood based their right to command the blind obedience of the Christian world. Between such adversaries compromise was impossible; and those who afterward revolted against the authority of the traditions of Rome sought refuge under the shelter of the Bible, which they grew to reverence with a passionate devotion, believing it to have been not only directly and verbally inspired by God, but the only channel through which he had made known his will to men.

Thus the movement was not toward new doctrines; on the contrary, it was the rejection of what could no longer be believed. Calvin was no less orthodox than St. Augustine in what he accepted; his heresy lay in the denial of enigmas from which his understanding recoiled. The mighty convulsion of the Reformation, therefore, was but the supreme effort of the race to tear itself from the toils of a hierarchy whose life hung upon its success in forcing the children to worship the myths of their ancestral religion.

Three hundred years after Luther nailed his theses to the church door the logical deduction had been drawn from his great act, and Christendom had been driven to admit that any concession of the right to reason upon matters of faith involved the recognition of the freedom of individual thought. But though this noble principle has been at length established, long years of bloodshed passed before the victory was won; and from the outset the attitude of the clergy formed the chief obstacle to the triumph of a more liberal civilization; for howsoever bitterly Catholic and Protestant divines have hated and persecuted each other, they have united like true brethren in their hatred and their persecution of heretics; for such was their inexorable destiny.

Men who firmly believe that salvation lies within their creed alone, and that doubters suffer endless torments, never can be tolerant. They feel that duty commands them to defend their homes against a deadly peril, and even pity for the sinner urges them to wring from him a recantation before it is too late; and then, moreover, dissent must lessen the power and influence of a hierarchy and may endanger its very existence; therefore the priests of every church have been stimulated to crush out schism by the two strongest passions that can inflame the mind—by bigotry and by ambition.

In England the Reformation was controlled by statesmen, whose object was to invest the crown with ecclesiastical power, and who made no changes except such as they thought necessary for their purpose. They repudiated the papal supremacy, and adopted articles of religion sufficiently evangelical in form, but they retained episcopacy, the liturgy, and the surplice; the cross was still used in baptism, the people bowed at the name of Jesus, and knelt at the communion. Such a compromise with what they deemed idolatry was offensive to the stricter Protestants, and so early as 1550 John Hooper refused the see of Gloucester because he would not wear the robes of office; thus almost from its foundation the church was divided into factions, and those who demanded a more radical reform were nicknamed Puritans. As time elapsed large numbers who could no longer bring themselves to conform withdrew from the orthodox communion, and began to worship by themselves; persecution followed, and many fled to Holland, where they formed congregations in the larger towns, the most celebrated of them being that of John Robinson at Leyden, which afterward founded Plymouth. But the intellectual ferment was universal, and the same upheaval that was rending the church was shaking the foundations of the state: power was passing into the hands of the people, but a century was to elapse before the relations of the sovereign to the House of Commons were fully adjusted. During this interval the Stuarts reigned and three of the four kings suffered exile or death in the fierce contest for mastery.

The fixed determination of Charles I. was to establish a despotism and enforce conformity with ritualism; and the result was the Great Rebellion.

Among the statesmen who advised him, none has met with such scant mercy from posterity as Laud, who has been gibbeted as the impersonification of narrowness, of bigotry, and of cruelty. The judgment is unscientific, for whatever may be thought of the humanity or wisdom of his policy, he only did what all have done who have attempted to impose a creed on men.

The real grievance has never been that an observance has been required, or an indulgence refused, but that the right to think has been denied. Provided a boundary be fixed within which the reason must be chained, the line drawn by Laud is as reasonable as that of Calvin; Geneva is no more infallible than Canterbury or Rome. Comprehension is the dream of visionaries, for some will always differ from any confession of faith, however broad; and where there are dogmas there will be heretics till all have perished. But in their fear and hatred of individual free thought regarding the mysteries of religion, Laud, Calvin, and the Pope agreed.

With the progress of the war, the Puritans, who had at first been united in their opposition to the crown, themselves divided; one party, to which most of the peers and of the non-conforming clergy belonged, being anxious to reestablish the monarchy, and set up a rigid Presbyterianism; the other, of whose spirit Cromwell was the incarnation, resolving each day more firmly to crush the king and proclaim freedom of conscience; and it was this doctrine of toleration which was the snare and the abomination in the eyes of evangelical divines.

Robert Baillie, the Scotch commissioner, while in London, anxiously watching the rise of the power of the Independents in Parliament, with each victory of their armies in the field wrote, “Liberty of conscience, and toleration of all and any religion, is so prodigious an impiety that this religious parliament cannot but abhor the very meaning of it.” Nor did his reverend brethren of the Westminster Assembly fall any whit behind him when they rose to expound the word. In a letter of 17th May, 1644, he thus described their doctrine: “This day was the best that I have seen since I came to England.... After D. Twisse had begun with a brief prayer, Mr. Marshall prayed large two hours, most divinely, confessing the sins of the members of the assembly, in a wonderful, pathetick, and prudent way. After, Mr. Arrowsmith preached an hour, then a psalm; thereafter, Mr. Vines prayed near two hours, and Mr. Palmer preached an hour, and Mr. Seaman prayed near two hours, then a psalm; after, Mr. Henderson brought them to a sweet conference of the heat confessed in the assembly, and other seen faults to be remedied, and the conveniency to preach against all sects, especially Anabaptists and Antinomians. Dr. Twisse closed with a short prayer and blessing.” [Footnote: Baillie’s Letters and Journals, ii. 18.]

But Cromwell, gifted with noble instincts and transcendent political genius, a layman, a statesman, and a soldier, was a liberal from birth till death.

“Those that were sound in the faith, how proper was it for them to labor for liberty, … that men might not be trampled upon for their consciences! Had not they labored but lately under the weight of persecution? And was it fit for them to sit heavy upon others? Is it ingenuous to ask liberty and not to give it? What greater hypocrisy than for those who were oppressed by the bishops to become the greatest oppressors themselves, so soon as their yoke was removed? I could wish that they who call for liberty now also had not too much of that spirit, if the power were in their hands.” [Footnote: Speech at dissolution of first Parliment, Jan. 22, 1655. Carlyle’s Cromwell, iv. 107.]

“If a man of one form will be trampling upon the heels of another form, if an Independent, for example, will despise him under Baptism, and will revile him and reproach him and provoke him,—I will not suffer it in him. If, on the other side, those of the Anabaptist shall be censuring the godly ministers of the nation who profess under that of Independency; or if those that profess under Presbytery shall be reproaching or speaking evil of them, traducing and censuring of them, as I would not be willing to see the day when England shall be in the power of the Presbytery to impose upon the consciences of others that profess faith in Christ,—so I will not endure any reproach to them.” [Footnote: Speech made September, 1656. Carlyle’s Cromwell, iv. 234.]

The number of clergymen among the emigrants to Massachusetts was very large, and the character of the class who formed the colony was influenced by them to an extraordinary degree. Many able pastors had been deprived in England for non-conformity, and they had to choose between silence or exile. To men of their temperament silence would have been intolerable; and most must have depended upon their profession for support. America, therefore, offered a convenient refuge. The motives are less obvious which induced the leading laymen, some of whom were of fortune and consequence at home, to face the hardships of the wilderness. Persecution cannot be the explanation, for a government under which Hampden and Cromwell could live and be returned to Parliament was not intolerable; nor does it appear that any of them had been severely dealt with. The wish of the Puritan party to have a place of retreat, should the worst befall, may have had its weight with individuals, but probably the influence which swayed the larger number was the personal ascendancy of their pastors, for that ascendancy was complete. In a community so selected, men of the type of Baillie must have vastly outnumbered those of the stamp of Cromwell, and in point of fact their minds were generally cast in the ecclesiastical mould and imbued with the ecclesiastical feeling. Governor Dudley represented them well, and at his death some lines were found in his pocket in which their spirit yet glows in all the fierceness of its bigotry.