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

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.

But the question becomes more curious still when we bear in mind that there was in a distant age of the world an use of a kindred phrase which is strikingly like, not the old, but the new use of the phrase “Greater Britain.” As there was a Greater and a Lesser Britain, so there was, perhaps not a Lesser, but assuredly a Greater Greece. And the Greater Greece did not answer to the “Major Britannia” of our older use, but to the “Greater Britain” of our newer. The Greater Greece was not an older Greece from which settlers went forth, as they went forth from the Greater Britain of old, to found a younger and a lesser. The Greater Greece, like the Greater Britain of modern times, was an assemblage of settlements from the elder Greece which were deemed, or deemed themselves, to have become greater than the mother-country. The Great or the Greater Greece (Ἡ μεγάλη Ἑλλάς, Magna Græcia, Major Græcia) became the received geographical name for the Greek colonies in Southern Italy. And they may be thought to have deserved the name in that short and brilliant time when those colonies distinctly outstripped the mother-country, when Sybaris and Tarentum ranked among the greatest cities of the earth, more brilliant and flourishing, beyond doubt, than Athens or Sparta or Corinth or any other of the cities of the older Hellenic land.

As in the former case the contrast, so in this case the analogy, is so striking that we again cannot help asking whether those who brought in the modern phrase of “Greater Britain” ever had it in their minds? One point of unlikeness however must be mentioned. By “Greater Britain” seems now to be commonly meant the whole aggregate of the scattered colonies and dependencies of the Great or Lesser Britain – those names have in the new use become synonymous – all over the world. But the name Greater Greece by no means took in all the scattered Greek colonies all over the world; it was confined to a single group of them. The name seems hardly to have spread from Southern Italy even to the neighbouring island of Sicily; it was certainly never applied to the Greek settlements in Asia or Libya or any other part of the world. Indeed the name had a peculiar fitness as applied to the Greek settlements in Southern Italy which it could not have had elsewhere. The geographical structure of the land enabled Southern Italy to put on the character of a second Greece in a way in which none other among the lands in which Greeks settled could put it on. Everywhere else out of old Greece there was merely a Greek fringe along the coast. For the Greek settlements were planted mainly on islands and promontories, along the coasts of solid continents the inland parts of which remained barbarian. Even in Sicily the Greek settlements strictly so called were little more than a fringe; the inland parts of the island did indeed in the end become Greek; but it was not by real Greek settlement, but by the spread of the Greek tongue and of Greek culture among men of other nations who became Greek by adoption. In Southern Italy alone, the shape of the land, branching off into two narrow peninsulas, enabled Greek settlement to become something more than a fringe on the coast, and to spread, as in the older Greek land, from sea to sea.

Thus then there were two lands, an older and a newer, in which it might be said, at all events at the first aspect, that the whole land was Greek. No doubt there was this difference, that in the older Greece all was, as far as we can see, Greek in the strictest sense, while in the younger Greece much was Greek only by assimilation and adoption. In the older Greece, if any relics lived on from times and people older than the first Hellenic settlements, they had been assimilated to the Greek mass before recorded history began. The existence in old Greece of any people earlier than the Greeks is matter of legend, of guess, of scientific inference, not matter of direct evidence. In the younger Greece of the Italian colonies, the existence of earlier inhabitants whom the Greeks found in possession, and who long lived on by the side of the Greeks, is as certain as the existence of earlier inhabitants in our own American and Australian colonies. But the earlier inhabitants whom the Greek settlers found in Southern Italy were indeed unlike those whom the English settlers found in America and Australia. Not very far removed, so some have thought, from the Greeks in blood, in any case belonging to the same great branch of the human family, the nations of the extreme south of Italy, like their neighbours of Sicily, had a special power of adapting themselves to Greek ways, of adopting Greek culture, of making themselves in short Greeks by adoption. They did not die out before the new settlers, like the savages of America or Australia; they were able to rise to the higher civilization of the strangers who settled down among them, and to become members of the same body. This is one of the most marked differences between the old Greek settlements and the settlements of modern Europeans. The settlements of different European nations have taken different courses, but there has been nothing exactly answering to the process by which so large a part of the barbarian neighbours of the old Greek colonies became adopted Hellênes. In the case of our own settlements, the spread of British settlement or dominion has meant either the gradual dying out of the native races, as in America or Australia, or else, as in India, their survival as a distinct and subject people. In no case have English settlers mingled to any important extent with the native races; in no case have the natives to any great extent put on the outward seeming of Englishmen. Something more like this result has taken place in the colonies of Spain. There the mingled race, the natives of unmixed race who have adopted at least the Spanish tongue, are important elements which have nothing answering to them in the colonies of England. The nearest approach to these elements to be found in any English colony must be looked for in the grotesque imitation of English ways where real assimilation is impossible. This we see, not on the part of the barbarians whom the English settlers found dwelling in the settled lands, but on the part of another race of barbarians whom they afterwards imported for their own ends. The negro of the Western continent and islands has truly nothing answering to him in any part of the Hellenic world. And, in the other case, while the process which made Sicily and Southern Italy Greek was mainly the raising of the older inhabitants to a higher level, the process which has made a large part of America in some sort Spanish has been largely the sinking of the European settler to a lower level. In the Greek and in the English case, it has been the higher civilization of the time that has been extended, and that by milder means in the Greek case than in the English. In the Spanish case we can hardly say that the highest civilization has been extended. If one race has risen, the other has fallen. This result nowhere took place in the Greek settlements, even where the Greek settlers, while communicating so much to the older inhabitants, did adopt something from them back again. On the whole, the work was a work of raising, not of sinking; but it is needful to remember that, when we speak of the narrow peninsulas of Southern Italy becoming Greek from sea to sea, we mean that they largely became Greek by the adoption of the earlier inhabitants into the Greek body. When we speak of the vast mainland of North America becoming wholly European, mainly English, from Ocean to Ocean, we mean that it has become so, not by the adoption of the earlier people by invaders who were also teachers, but by the gradual vanishing of the earlier people before invaders who to them at least have been destroyers.

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.

The change in the meaning of the word “loyalty” well marks that leading political characteristic of modern Europe which stands out in the fullest contrast to the political thoughts of the ancient commonwealths. Loyalty, once simply legalitas, obedience to the law, has for ages meant – when it has not meant something far baser – no longer obedience to the law, no longer duty to a community as a community, but faith and duty owed by one man to another man. It may be simply the personal duty of a man to his lord, the tie of chosen or hereditary comradeship, the tie known by the oldest Greek and by the oldest German, an ennobling tie indeed as regards the man himself, a tie which may lead to lofty prowess or to pure self-sacrifice, the tie of the true companions of Brihtnoth on the day of Maldon, when on the place of slaughter each man lay thegn-like, his lord hard by. Or it may take the less poetic, the more political shape, in which the thought of the commonwealth does come in, but where the commonwealth is perhaps overshadowed by its chief, perhaps only embodied in him. The notion of personal allegiance, a notion which could have been hardly understood by either the aristocratic or the democratic Greek, has been the essence of the political system of Europe for many ages. It is a notion which grows up as naturally in a kingdom as the other notion, the notion of duty to the community, grows up in a commonwealth which knows no abiding personal head. It by no means shuts out the notion of duty to the community; but, as has been just now implied, it has a tendency to overshadow it. In the higher types of the class, in the French nobles, for instance, under the old monarchy, the feeling of personal loyalty, of devotion to the particular man who wore the crown, perhaps reached its highest point since the days of the old Greek and Teutonic comradeship. It was a feeling that was by no means wholly degrading; but it tended to put in the shade, if not wholly to crush out, feelings higher and worthier. Men looked so much to the King of France, they looked so much on France as embodied in his person, that there was small room left in their thoughts for France herself, for France as embodied in her people. Since kingdoms have put on more nearly the practical shape of commonwealths, this extravagant devotion to a single man has been somewhat toned down, and more room is gained for feelings coming nearer to those which were felt in a free democracy of old. But the radical distinction still remains between the leading political ideas of the state which acknowledges a prince as its sovereign and the state which knows no sovereign but the commonwealth itself. The primary and formal duty of the member of a state that acknowledges a prince, a duty to which in many cases he is bound by direct personal promises, is a personal duty to a person. It is a duty which he cannot throw off under any circumstances of time and place; it follows him wherever he goes; on the most distant foreign soil he remains the subject of the prince in whose dominions he drew his breath. While the active duties of the citizen of a commonwealth can hardly be discharged beyond the territories of that commonwealth, the duties of the subject of a king, the subject, that is, of a personal master, are as binding on one part of the earth’s surface as on another. I have just used words which go to the root of the matter. I have used the words “citizen” and “subject.” The difference between the two conceptions can nowhere put on a more living shape than in the use of those two names. The Greek would have deemed himself degraded by the name of “subject.” To him the word that best translates it expressed the position of men who, either in their own persons or in the person of the cities to which they belonged, were shorn of the common rights of every city, of every citizen. We use the word “subject” daily without any feeling of being lowered by it. It has become so familiar that it is assumed as the natural phrase to express membership of a political body, and it is often used when it is quite out of place. I once read, and that in a formal document, of a “Swiss subject,” and I had the pleasure of explaining that there had been no subjects, no Unterthanen, in Switzerland since 17981. And the question comes, What are we to say instead? “Swiss citizen,” “French citizen,” “citizen of the United States,” have this awkwardness about them that the community whose membership they express is not a city. The very awkwardness points to the main difference between the world of old Hellas and the world of modern Europe, the difference in scale. Be it kingdom or be it commonwealth, the state with which modern politics have to deal is not a city but something vastly greater.