present itself is not very great. New States will more probably adopt documentary Constitutions, as did the insurgent colonies of England after 1776 and of Spain after 1811, and as the Christians of South-Eastern Europe did when they had rid themselves of the Turk. Upon the whole, therefore, it would seem that the future is rather with Rigid Constitutions than with those of the Flexible type. It is hardly necessary to close these speculations by adding the warning that all prophecies in politics must be highly conjectural. Circumstances change, opinion changes; knowledge increases, though the power of using it wisely may not increase 1. The subtlety of nature, and especially the intricacy of the relations she develops between things that originally seemed to lie wide apart, far surpasses the calculating or predicting wit of man. Accordingly many things, both in the political arrangements of the world and in the beliefs of mankind, which now seem permanent may prove transitory. Democracy itself, though most people treat it as a thing likely to grow stronger and advance further, may suffer an eclipse. Human nature no doubt remains. But human nature has clothed itself in the vesture of every sort of institution, and may change its fashions as freely in the future as it has done in the past. 1'Απανθ ̓ ὁ μακρὸς κἀναρίθμητος χρόνος Soph. Ajax, 646. NOTE TO ESSAY III CONSTITUTIONAL AND OTHER GOVERNMENTS THE races and nations of the world may, as respects the forms of Government under which they live, be distributed into four classes: I. Nations which have created and maintain permanent political institutions, allotting special functions to each organ of Government, and assigning to the citizens some measure of participation in the business of Government. In these nations we discover Constitutions in the proper sense of the term. To this class belong all the States of Europe except Russia and Montenegro, and, outside Europe, the British self-governing Colonies, the United States and Mexico, the two republics of South Africa, Japan and Chili, possibly also the Argentine Republic. II. Nations in which the institutions aforesaid exist in theory, but are seldom in normal action, because they are in a state of chronic political disturbance and mostly ruled, with little regard to law, by military adventurers. This class includes the republics of Central and South America, with the exception of Chili, and possibly of Argentina, whose condition has latterly been tolerably stable. III. Nations in which, although the upper class is educated, the bulk of the population, being backward, has not begun to desire such institutions as aforesaid, and which therefore remain under autocratic monarchies. To this class belong Russia and Montenegro. Japan has lately emerged from it: and two or three of the newest European States might, but for the interposition of other nations, have remained in it. IV. Nations which are, for one reason or another, below the level of intellectual life and outside the sphere of ideas which the permanent political institutions aforesaid presuppose and need for their proper working. This class includes all the remaining peoples of the world, from intelligent races like the Chinese, Siamese, and Persians, down to the barbarous tribes of Africa. Constitutions, in the sense in which the term is used in the preceding Essay, belong only to the first class, and in a qualified sense to the second. In the modern world they are confined to Europe and her Colonies, adding Japan, which has imitated Europe. In the ancient world they were confined to three races, Greeks, Italians, and Phoenicians, to whom one may perhaps add such. races as the Lycians, who had learnt from the Greeks. Their range is somewhat narrower than that of law, that is to say, there are peoples which, like the Musulmans of Turkey, Egypt, and Persia, have law, but have no Constitutions. No race that has ever lived under a lost Constitutional Government has permanently lost it, except those parts of the Roman Empire which now form part of the Turkish Empire; and the Roman Empire, though its Government never ceased to be in a certain sense constitutional, ultimately extinguished the habit of self-government among its subjects. IV THE ACTION OF CENTRIPETAL AND CENTRIFUGAL FORCES ON POLITICAL CONSTITUTIONS1 As every government and every constitution is the result of certain forces and tendencies which bring men together in an organized community, so every government and every constitution tends when formed to hold men together thenceforth, training them to direct their efforts to a common end and to sacrifice for that purpose a certain measure of the exercise of their individual wills. So strong is the aggregative tendency, that each community naturally goes on by a sort of law of nature to expand and draw in others, whether persons or groups, who have not previously belonged to it: nor is physical force the prime agent, for the great majority of mankind prefer some kind of political society, even one in whose management they have little or no share, to mere isolation. As this process of expansion and aggregation continues, the different political groups which it has called into being come necessarily in contact with one another. The weaker ones are overcome or peacefully absorbed by the stronger ones, and thus the number of groups is continually lessened. Where two communities of nearly equal strength encounter each other, each may for a time succeed in resisting the attraction of the 1 This Essay was composed in the early part of 1885. It has been revised throughout, but the substance remains the same. other. But in this changeful world it almost always happens that sooner or later one becomes so much stronger that the other yields to it: and thus in course of time the number of detached communities, i.e. of groups each with its own centre of attraction, becomes very small, because the weak have been swallowed up by the strong. This is the general, though, as we shall see, not the universal course of events. There is also another force at work, which has at some moments in history developed great strength. I. HOW THE TENDENCIES TO AGGREGATION AND TO DISJUNCTION RESPECTIVELY AFFECT CONSTITUTIONS. Of the many analogies that have been remarked between Law in the Physical and Law in the Moral World, none is more familiar than that derived from the Newtonian astronomy, which shows us two forces always operative in our solar system. One force draws the planets towards the sun as the centre of the system, the other disposes them to fly off from it into space. So in politics, we may call the tendency which draws men or groups of men together into one organized community and keeps them there a Centripetal force, and that which makes men, or groups, break away and disperse, a Centrifugal. A political Constitution or frame of government, as the complex totality of laws embodying the principles and rules whereby the community is organized, governed, and held together, is exposed to the action of both these forces. The centripetal force strengthens it, by inducing men (or groups of men) to maintain, and even to tighten, the bonds by which the members of the community are gathered into one organized body. The centrifugal assails it, by dragging men (or groups) apart, so that the bonds of connexion are strained, and possibly at last loosened or broken. That no community can be exempt from the former force is obvious. But neither can any wholly escape the latter. For every community |