Greater Greece and Greater Britain; and George Washington the Great Expander of England

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Freeman Edward Augustus. Greater Greece and Greater Britain; and George Washington the Great Expander of England

PREFACE

GREATER GREECE AND GREATER BRITAIN

GEORGE WASHINGTON, THE EXPANDER OF ENGLAND

APPENDIX

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The name of Greater Britain is one which of late years has become strangely familiar. It is possible that a generation back the words might have fallen harshly on patriotic ears. We were then used to believe that the Britain in which we lived was so great that there could be none greater. The name of “Great Britain” was perhaps used without any very clear notion of its history; but it was at least accepted as implying greatness of some kind. Whatever may have been the exact meaning with which the name of “Greater Britain” was first brought in, it was, we may be sure, suggested by the seemingly older phrase of “Great Britain.” Those who first spoke of “Greater Britain” perhaps hardly knew that the name is as old as that of “Great Britain,” and, more than this, that “Great Britain” and “Greater Britain” are in truth phrases of exactly the same meaning. I would not venture to say how much older the name of “Magna Britannia” may be than its somewhat irregular employment in the royal style by James Sixth and First. But “Greater Britain,” “Major Britannia,” is undoubtedly as old as the twelfth century. We perhaps sometimes forget that, besides this our isle of Britain, there is another Britain on the continent, no other than the land which, by a slight change of ending, we commonly call Britanny. But in Latin and in French the two names are the same, Britannia and Bretagne. The one land is Bretagne, the other is Grande-Bretagne; the one is Britannia minor, the other is Britannia major. In short, the Britain of the island, the Great or Greater Britain, was so called simply to distinguish it from the Lesser Britain on the mainland.

Here, be it remarked, the Greater Britain is the older, the Lesser is the younger; the Greater is the mother-country, the Lesser is the colony. The Lesser Britain of the mainland never took that name till it was settled by men fleeing from the Greater Britain in the island. Now in the sense in which we have of late years heard the phrase “Greater Britain,” all this has been turned the other way. “Great Britain” is not simply opposed to a Lesser Britain; it is opposed to a Britain which is confessedly great, but, it would seem, not so great as the Greater. And of these the one which is simply Great is the elder; the Greater is the younger; the Great is the mother-country, the ruling country; the Lesser is the plantation, the dependency, or rather an aggregate of plantations and dependencies all over the world. The change, the contrast, between the old use of “Major Britannia” and the new use of “Greater Britain” is so very singular that one is driven to ask whether those who brought in the new use ever had the old one in their thoughts at all.

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Now this difference is one that follows directly from the difference in scale between the world in which the old Greek settlers lived and the world in which modern European nations live. This difference in scale is a thing which we must remember at every step. The Greek, in planting his settlements round the coasts of his own Mediterranean Sea, had nowhere to deal with races of men so utterly unlike his own as the races with whom modern Europeans have had to deal in planting their settlements in the islands and continents of the Ocean. Those among whom the Greek settled were mainly men of the same great family as himself, men capable of being raised, by a swifter or slower process, to his own level. His world did indeed take in, as ours does, nations of ancient and rival civilizations altogether distinct from his own, but it was not among those nations that he planted his colonies. Where the Egyptian had dwelled from an immemorial antiquity, where the Phœnician had planted his abiding colonies in the first dawn of European history, there the Greek in his best days never settled; Egypt did in the end become in some sort part of the Greek world; but it was not by settlement from free Greece, but by the conquests of the Macedonian kings. Egypt under the Ptolemies was like India now, a land conquered but not, strictly speaking, colonized, a land in which the older nation kept on its own older life alongside of the intruding life of the younger settlers. But it marks the narrow area of the old Greek world, that Egypt, in some sort its India, in some sort its China, came within the physical limits of that world; it was a land whose shores were washed by the same waters that washed the shores of Hellas. This difference of scale must never be forgotten while we are comparing or contrasting the days of old Greece with our days. But while we ever bear in mind the difference, we must ever beware of being led away by the misleading inferences which shallow talkers have often drawn from that difference. The nature of man is the same, whether he has a wider or a narrower sphere for his work; and the narrower sphere has some advantages over the wider. It is in small communities, in commonwealths of a single city, where men are brought closer together than in greater states, where every man has a personal share in the political life of the community, that the faculties of man are raised to the highest level and sharpened to the finest point. It is, from a political point of view, the great merit of modern scientific discoveries that they have enabled the people of a great community, of a kingdom or commonwealth covering a great space, to have that direct personal knowledge of the political life of the community of which they are members, that direct personal share in it, which once could not be had save where the state was confined to the territory of a single city. Instead of despising earlier times because they had not printing and railways and telegraphs, let us rather say that printing and railways and telegraphs were needed to raise large states to the level of small ones. By means of those inventions the Englishman of our day has become far more like an Athenian of the age of Periklês than his forefathers were in any earlier time. A hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, the utmost the ordinary Englishman could do was now and then to give a vote, if he chanced to have one, at a parliamentary election, and to read or hear the most meagre accounts of what was going on in Parliament and elsewhere in public life. Very few Englishmen ever saw or heard Walpole or Pulteney, Pitt or Fox. Now the whole land has well-nigh become a single city; we see and hear our leading men almost daily; they walk before us as the leaders of the Athenian democracy walked before their fellow-citizens; they take us into their counsels; they appeal to us as their judges; we have in short a share in political life only less direct than the share of the Athenian freeman, a share which our forefathers, even two or three generations back, never dreamed of. But without the help of modern scientific discoveries, this active share in public affairs on the part of the mass of the inhabitants of a large country would have been simply a dream. Or look at a matter which more directly concerns the immediate subject of this discourse, look at the vast developement of English political life in the great English land beyond the Ocean; can any man believe that a hundred years back Maine, Florida, and California could have been kept together as a political whole by any power short of a despotism? Could those distant lands have acted as parts of one free political body, if they had had no means of intercourse with one another swifter than the speed of a horse? It is by the help of modern discoveries that the federal systems of old Greece can be reproduced on a gigantic scale, that a single Union of states can embrace a continent stretching from Ocean to Ocean instead of a peninsula stretching from sea to sea. In short, instead of despising those ancient communities which were the earliest form of European political life, we should rejoice that in many things we have gone back to the earliest form of European political life, that the discoveries of modern times have enabled the free states of old times to arise again, but to arise again, no longer on the scale of cities but on the scale of nations.

When then we compare the colonial system of modern times, like any other feature of modern political life, with the thing answering to it in the political life of the old Greek city-commonwealths, we must never forget the difference of area on which the political life of the two periods has been acted; but we must never allow ourselves to fancy that difference of area, any more than distance of time, wholly shuts us off from political fellowship with those earlier times or makes their experience of none effect for our political instruction. The communities of those days were cities, the communities of our days are nations; but cities and nations alike share in a common political life in which many of the ages that went between their days and ours had no share. The Greek settlements, like the Phœnician settlements before them, were settlements of cities, not of nations, not of kingdoms or of commonwealths on the scale of kingdoms. Till the political needs of a later age taught the Greek that several cities might be combined in a federal union, his whole political life had gathered round the single independent city as its essential unit. Every Greek city was not independent; but every Greek city deemed itself wronged if it was not independent; when its independence was lost, it was, within all Hellenic lands, lost by the rule of city over city. And the rule of city over city, if it took away the independence of the subject city as an equal power among other powers, did not wipe out its essential character as a separate city-commonwealth. The dependent city was not incorporated like an annexed land; it was not held in bondage like a subject province; it remained a city, with more or less of freedom in its local affairs, though bound, as against other powers, to follow the lead of the ruling city. The city was all in all; the smallness of the community, the narrowness of its area, brought every citizen face to face with his fellows and his leaders; it brought with it a fulness of political life, an extension of political power and political interests to every citizen, to which larger states have reached only by painful steps and by help of the inventions which have in some sort made time and distance cease to be. The Greek was before all things a citizen; his political life was wholly local; his powers and duties as a citizen could be discharged only in his own city, on some spot hallowed by old tradition, and hallowed most commonly in the more formal sense by the abiding presence and guardianship of the patron deity. He felt in the strongest sense the tie of membership of a community, the tie of all the duties which spring from membership of a community. For his city he would live and toil and die, but he would live and toil and die for it, because it was the whole of which he was himself a part. He owed faith and loyalty to his city – loyalty in its true and ancient sense of obeying the law, the law which he might be called on to help to administer, which he might, in some rare case, be called on to help to change. He might keep that faith and loyalty far away from his own city by doing all that he could in foreign lands for the interest and honour of that city. But in no other sense could he carry his citizenship with him beyond the bounds of the territory of his city; elsewhere he might act as a soldier or as an envoy, but hardly in the strictest sense as a citizen. The tie was local; the duty was local; of a personal tie of allegiance binding him to a personal superior, bringing with it personal duties which should everywhere dog his steps, which could not be cast off in any corner of the world – of loyalty in that sense, the old Greek, the old Phœnician, had never any thought in his mind.

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