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CHAPTER II.

CRITICISM OF THE MARTIAL GOVERNMENT.

'Would you proceed especially against Caius MARCIUS?'
'Against him FIRST: He's a very dog to THE COMMONALTY.'

IN this exhibition of the social orders to which human society

instinctively tends, and that so-called state into which human combinations in barbaric ages rudely settles, the principle of the combination - the principle of gradation, and subjection, and permanence is called in question, and exposed as a purely instinctive principle, as, in fact, only a principle of revolution disguised; and a higher one, the distinctively human element, the principle of KIND, is now, for the first time, demanded on scientific grounds, as the essential principle of any permanent human combination-as the natural principle, the only one which the science of nature can recognise as a principle of STATE.

It is the PEACE principle which this great scientific warhater and captain of the ages of peace is in search of, with his new organum; though he is philosopher enough to know that, in diseased states, wars are nature's own rude remedies, her barbarous surgery, for evils yet more unendurable. He has found himself chosen a justice of the peace- the world's peace; and it is the principle of permanence, of law and subjection — in a word, it is the principle of state, as opposed to revolution and dissolution — which he is judging of in behalf of his kind. And he makes a business of it. He goes about in his own fashion. He gets up this great war-piece on purpose to find it.

He has got a state on his stage, which is ceasing to be a state at the moment in which he shows it to us; a state

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which has the war principle -the principle of conquest within no longer working in it insidiously as government, but developed as war; for it has just overstepped the endurable point in its mastery. It is a revolution that is coming off when the curtain rises. For the government has been gnawing the Roman common-weal at home, with those same teeth it ravened the Volscians with abroad, till it has reached the vitals at last, and the common-weal has betaken itself to the Volscian's weapons: the people have risen. They are all out when the play begins on an armed hunt for their rat-like, gnawing, corn-consuming rulers. They are determined to kill them,' and have corn at their own price.' If the wars eat us not, they will,' is the word; and there's all THE LOVE they bear us.' 'Rome and her rats are at the point of battle,' cries the Poet. The one side shall have bale, is his prophecy. Without good nature,' he says elsewhere, using the term good in its scientific sense, 'men are only a NOBLER kind of VERMIN'; and he makes a most unsparing application of this principle in his criticisms. Many a splendid historical figure is made to show its teeth, and rat-like mien and propensities, through all the splendour of its disguises, merely by the application of his simple philosophical tests. For the question, as he puts it, is the question between animal instinct, between mere appetite, and reason; and the question incidentally arises in the course of the exhibition, whether the common-weal, when it comes to anything like common-sense, is going to stand being gnawed in this way, for the benefit of any individual, or clique, or party.

For the ground on which the classes or estates, and their respective claims to the government, are tried here, is the ground of the common-weal; and the question as to the fitness of any existing class in the state for an exclusive, unlimited control of the welfare of the whole, is more than suggested. That which stops short of the weal of the whole for its end, is that which is under criticism here; and whether it exist in 'the one,' or 'the few,' or 'the many,'-and these are the terms that are employed here, whether it exist in the civil

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magistracy, sustained by a popular submission, or in the power of the victorious military chief, at the head of his still extant and resistless armament, it is necessarily rejected as a principle of sovereignty and permanence, in this purely scientific view of the human conditions of it. It is a question which this author handles with a thorough impartiality, in all his political treatises, let them come in what name and form they will, with more or less clearness, indeed, as the circumstances seem to dictate.

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But nowhere is the whole history of the military government, collected from the obscurity of the past, and brought out with such inflexible design with such vividness and strength of historic exhibition, as it is here. It is traced to its beginnings in the distinctions which nature herself creates, those physical, and moral, and intellectual distinctions, with which she crowns, in her happier moods, the large resplendent brows of her born kings and masters. It is traced from its origin in the crowning of the victorious chief on the field of battle, to the moment in which the sword of military conquest is turned back on the conquerors by the chief into whose hands they gave it; and the sword of conquest abroad becomes, at home, the sword of state.

Nay, this Play goes farther, and embraces the contingency of a foreign rule-one, too, in which the conqueror takes his surname from the conquest; it brings home the enemy of the whole state,' as a king, in triumph to the capital, whose streets he has filled with mourning; and though the author does not tell us in this case, at he does in another, that the nation was awed with an offertory of standards' in the temple, and that 'orisons and Te Deums were again sung,' the victor 'not meaning that the people should forget too soon that he came in by battle'-points, not much short of that, in the way of speciality, are not wanting. More than one conqueror, indeed, looks out from this old chieftain's Roman casque. 'There is a little touch of Harry in the scene'; and though the author goes out of his way to tell us that he must by no means say his hero is covetous,' it will not be the Elizabethan Philosopher's fault, if we do not know which Harry it is that says

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Auf. Ay, Marcius, Caius Marcius; Dost thou think

I'll grace thee with THAT ROBBERY, thy STOLEN NAME

CORIOLANUS in CORIOLI '-[the conqueror in the conquest.]

Never, indeed, was 'the garland of war,' whether glistening freshly on the hero's brow on the fresh battle-field, or whether glittering, transmuted into civic gold and gems, on the brow of his hereditary successor, subjected to such a searching process before, as that with which the Poet, under cover of an aristocrat's pretensions, and especially under cover of his pretensions to an elective magistracy, can venture to test it.

This hero, who speaks of the people as if he were a god to punish, and not a man of their infirmity,' is on trial for that pretension from the first scene of this Play to the last. The author has, indeed, his own views of the fickle, ignorant, foolish multitude, - such views as any one, who had occasion to experiment on it personally, in the age of Elizabeth, would not lack the means of acquiring; and amidst those ebullitions of wrath, which he pours from his haughty hero's lips, one hears at times a tone that sounds a little like some other things from the same source, as if the author had himself, in some way, been brought to look at the subject from a point of observation, not altogether unlike that from which his hero speaks; or as if he might, at least, have known how to sympathise with the haughty and unbending nature, that had been brought into such deadly collision with it. But in the dramatic representation, though it is far from being a flattering one, we listen in vain for any echo of this sentiment. In its rich and kindly humour there is no sneer, no satire. It is the loving

eye of nature's own great pupil - it is the kindly human eye, that comes near enough to point those jests, and paint so truly; there is a great human heart here in the scene embracing the lowly. It was the heart that was putting forth then its silent but resistless energies into the ages of the human advancement, to take up the despised and rejected masses of men from their misery, and make of them truly one kind and kindred.

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And though he has had, indeed, his own private experiences with the multitude, and the passions are, as he intimates at least as strong in him as in another, he has his own view, also, of the common pitifulness and weakness of the human conditions; and he has a view which is, in his time, all his own, of the instrumentalities that are needed to reach that level of human nature, and to lift men up from the mire of these conditions, from the wrong and wretchedness into which, in their unaided, unartistic, unlearned struggle with nature, within and without, the kind are fallen. And so strong in him is the sense of this pitifulness, that it predominates over the sharpness of his genius, and throws the divinest mists and veils of compassion over the harsh, scientific realities he is constrained to lay bare.

And, in fact, it takes this monstrous pretence, and claim to human leadership, which he finds passing unquestioned in his time, to bring him out on this point fairly. The statesmanship of the man who undertakes to make his own petty personality the measure of a world, who would make, not that reason which is in us all, and embraces the world, and which is not personal, not that conscience which is the sensibility to reason, and is as broad and impartial as that—which goes with the reason, and embraces, like that, without bias, the common weal,- but that which is particular, and private, and limited to the individual,- his senses,-his passions, his private affections, his mere caprice,- his mere will; the motive of the public action;-the statesmanship of the man who dares to offer these to an insulted world, as reasons of state; who claims a divine prerogative to make his single will good

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