Moscow in 1908

Pathé. I have not been able to identify it further, but it appears several times on YouTube with an explanation in Russian. The music is Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880).

The Baltic coachman

Wikipedia’s article on the Baltic Germans of Estonia and Latvia, which were Russian provinces in the nineteenth century.

An older contemporary of the present writer’s who was a scion of one of the families of the ci-devant Baltic German landed aristocracy had heard, as a child, his father tell a story that is historically significant just by reason of its triviality. Some time about three-quarters of the way through the nineteenth century of the Christian Era, this Baltic Baron was travelling out of an Orthodox Christian Great Russia into the Protestant Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire in the company of one or two native Russian nobles. At the provincial boundary they changed carriages (they were travelling by road), and, as they were climbing into the Baltic carriage that had been awaiting them, the coachman happened to take out his handkerchief and blow his nose. The boyars, who were visiting the Baltic provinces for the first time, had been expecting surprises, but at this first exhibition of Baltic “politeness” they were overwhelmed. “Well,” they exclaimed to their Baltic host, “What a country! Even a coachman here has a handkerchief! Why, this is Europe!”

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954 (footnote)

The shot heard round the world 2

The shot heard round the world 1

The latter part of Toynbee’s public lecture at the University of Pennsylvania in spring 1961.

In the first part he looked at the impact of America’s revolution in other countries. But how direct was its influence? How did it affect the French revolution, which would have happened anyway? The American revolution’s roots were equally in the Enlightenment.

It was an inspiration, an exemplar for overturning a régime, like the Dutch Revolt and the English revolution.

The Marquis de Lafayette helped the Americans in the war of 1775-83 and was in America from 1777 to ’82, with a break in France in 1779. He returned as a hero in 1824-5, visiting every state. The Declaration of Independence influenced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was adopted by the National Constituent Assembly in 1789.

In the first extract, Toynbee, who was so aware of the temptations of nationalism, fails, like many nineteenth-century liberals, to distinguish carefully between nationalist and social revolutions, as if freedom from foreign oppression were itself Liberty. He speaks like an old-fashioned man of that century.

The American revolution was social first, national second. The Americans were overthrowing an oppressor, but it was their government and society that these colonies professed to be seeking to reform. What kinds of societies would the peoples who had heard the American “shot” produce?

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Once America had separated itself, it became clear that the fragment continued to oppress many of its members.

Toynbee is romantically unrealistic when he recalls the America of 1961, that “leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in defence of vested interests”, to its revolutionary traditions in its foreign policy. At one point he even seems to defend revolutionary violence. He was especially provocative in implying a sympathy for Castro.

This lecture was, perhaps, a turning-point in his relationship with America, the country that had welcomed him with something like adulation in the late ’40s and the ’50s. His Study of History had seemed to have important things to say to America, whether or not they were interpreted correctly, during its “rise to globalism”. He supported the civil rights movement, and opposed the Vietnam War in the ’60s and ’70s, and his later and bleak view of American foreign policy is reflected here in posts called Neo-colonialism: The view from 1969 and The frontier spirit.

What we are hearing now, above the echoing sound of that American shot, is the answering voice of the mass of mankind. This two-thirds – or is it three-quarters? – of the World’s population is still living only just above the starvation line and is still frequently falling below even that wretched line into death-dealing famine. Since the time when our pre-human ancestors became human, this majority of the human race has never dreamed, before today, that there would ever be any change for the better in its hard lot. Since the dawn of civilization, about 5000 years ago, the World’s peasantry has carried the load of civilization on its back without receiving any appreciable share in civilization’s benefits. These benefits have been monopolized by a tiny privileged minority, and, until yesterday, this injustice was inevitable. Till the modern industrial revolution began to get up steam, technology was not capable of producing more than a tiny surplus after meeting the requirements of bare subsistence. In our time, technology is coming within sight of being able to produce enough of civilization’s material benefits to provide for the whole human race. If technology does make it possible to get rid of the odious ancient difference in fortune between the few rich and the innumerable poor, future generations will perhaps bless the Industrial Revolution in retrospect, and will think kindly of its British, American and German pioneers.

We already have the means for making a start in improving the lot of the great depressed majority of our fellow human beings. But, in the last resort, we human beings have to do things for ourselves. The World’s peasantry cannot hope to improve its lot substantially unless it can awake from its age-old lethargy. It is being awakened at this moment by the sound of that American shot as that sound circles the globe for the third time. That sound has now been heard by the World’s whole depressed majority, and we, the affluent minority, are now hearing the majority’s reply. At last, the majority is shaking off the fatalism that has been paralysing it since the beginning of time. It is becoming alive to the truth that an improvement in its lot is now possible. More than that, it is realizing that it can do something towards this by its own efforts. Go to India; visit some of the thousands of villages there in which the Community Development Plan is already in operation; and you will see, with your own eyes, this new hope and purposefulness and energy breaking into flower. This is, to my mind, the most wonderful sight that there is to be seen in the present-day world. And this world-revolution of the peasantry is the most glorious revolution that there has been in the World’s history so far.

Well, perhaps I ought to have said “the most glorious secular revolution”; for the religious revolutions may have been more glorious; and these may also, in the long run, prove to have had still greater and more beneficent effects. By the religious revolutions I mean the advent of the World’s missionary religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and the others. The new world revolution of the peasantry perhaps cannot properly be called a religious revolution. At the same time it is unquestionably a spiritual one. It is true that the objectives that are its first aim are of a material kind. These material objectives are as elementary as they are indispensable for making a start. They are such fundamental things as a concrete lining and lip for the village well, to protect the water from being contaminated; a concrete surface for the village lanes, to redeem them from being wallows of pestilent filth; a dirt-road to link the village up with the nearest main road; and, after that, a village school. When a village reaches the stage of building a school and finding the means to provide a living for a schoolmaster, it is already beginning to raise a spiritual mansion on the preliminary material foundations. Without the foundations, the building could not go up. But the material foundations are a means to a spiritual end. And what could be more obviously spiritual than the awakening of hope and purposefulness and energy that is the driving force behind the whole of this glorious revolution? This driving force is the last and greatest of the revolutionary forces that have been released, all round the World, by the sound of a shot that was fired, on an April day, by embattled American farmers.

This exhilarating sound has not only roused the peoples of the World to action in their own homelands; it has also drawn them, like a magnet, to the land in which the shot was fired and from which the sound has gone forth. For a century, European farmers flocked to the United States in order to become American farmers, and, as the Industrial Revolution got up steam on both sides of the Atlantic, European industrial workers were soon crossing the Atlantic westward in the farmers’ wake. The tide of immigration into the United States began to flow mightily within a few years of the end of the Napoleonic Wars [when there was a severe depression in Europe]. It went on flowing till the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. And, as it flowed, it gathered volume. Before it was abruptly checked in 1914 by the action of the belligerent European governments that were concerned to conserve their cannon-fodder, the annual total of immigrants had risen to about two million in more than one year after the turn of the century.

When I think of this century of massive immigration from Europe into Europe’s American promised land, my mind focuses on my memory’s picture of an old farmer, Bavarian-born, whom I met on my first visit to this country, now nearly thirty-six years ago. His farm was in East Central Kentucky, where I was staying with a college friend of mine. At home in Bavaria, this farmer had had no farm of his own and no prospect of ever acquiring one there. It had been the hope of winning one in the New World that had lured him across the Atlantic. Though he had emigrated while he was still a young man, he had not arrived till some year in the eighteen-nineties, and by that time, of course, all the best land in the state had been taken up long ago. In Kentucky by the eighteen-nineties, settlement had been going on for more than a hundred years. All the same, this Bavarian farmer had come in time still to be a pioneer. In the western foothills of the Appalachians – “the Knobs” is their local name – he had hit upon a valley that was still unreclaimed because no predecessor of his had found it sufficiently inviting. The Bavarian had seized on that valley and had made it fruitful. To transform it had been his life-work. He had not only made it yield him enough for raising a family. By the time his sons were grown up – and there were several of them – the father had also saved enough to be able to buy for each son a better farm than the father’s own. But the old man would never buy a better farm for himself. The valley-farm had been his life-work, and, more than that, it had been his European dream translated into an American reality. As a boy in Bavaria he had dreamed of one day having a farm of his own if he could screw up his courage to pull up his roots and cross the Ocean. In this unpromising valley in Kentucky he had made his farm and his farm had made him. Nothing this side of death would part him from it.

Multiply this Bavarian-American farmer by some millions and you have a revolution inside America to match those revolutions all round the World of which I have given you a breathless catalogue. America’s revolution on her own ground and her revolutions abroad have been like each other in everything that is important in them. They have both been set going by the shot fired in April 1775; they have both been triumphs over social injustice, poverty, and hopelessness. These revolutions are true daughters of the American Revolution, and to have fathered this mighty brood is indeed an achievement to be proud of. And now come the paradox, and, I should also say, the tragedy. At the moment when the sound of that historic American shot was circling this planet for the third time, at the moment when the American revolutionary spirit had come within sight of inspiring the whole human race, America herself disowned paternity, at least for the younger and less decorous batches of her offspring.

It has been suggested recently by at least one American student of American history that America did not wait till the twentieth century to dissociate herself from the World’s response to the resounding American shot’s reverberations. The founding fathers of the United States lived to witness the French Revolution, and at least one of the most eminent of them, John Adams, put on record his repudiation and rejection of the American Revolution’s French eldest daughter after she had jilted Lafayette and had plunged into Jacobinism. I owe my knowledge of the following passage to an article by William Henry Chamberlin in The Wall Street Journal of 31 March 1961. John Adams is quoted by Mr Chamberlin as having said that “Helvetius and Rousseau preached to the French nation liberty till they made them the most mechanical slaves; equality, till they destroyed all equity; humanity, until they became weasels and African panthers; and fraternity, till they cut one another’s throats like Roman gladiators”.

This bitter verdict on the Jacobin revolution gives us some notion of how John Adams and like-minded American contemporaries of his would have reacted to the Communist revolution, if they could have lived to witness this still more violent subsequent response to the echoes of the revolution which the founding fathers themselves had launched. The founding fathers had, no doubt, carried their own revolution just as far as they had intended, and evidently some of them were unwilling to see revolution, either at home or abroad, go even one inch farther. This is indicated by the bitterness of those words of John Adams’s that I have just quoted. But his words are not only bitter; they are also ironic. They bring out the irony of the contrast between intentions and results; and this is one of the perennial ironies of human life. It is seldom indeed that the consequences of human action work out according to plan; and one might venture on the generalization that they never work out as intended when the action is of the violent kind represented by revolution and war. The more violent the initial act, the more likely it will be that its consequences will escape control. Has there ever been a revolution or a war that has produced the results, and none other than the results, that its authors intended and expected? The American revolutionaries, like their French counterparts, and unlike at least one celebrated batch of Roman gladiators [to what is he referring?], were not “too proud to fight”; and they could not fire their shot without its being heard by other ears, and without its being taken as a signal for non-American, and perhaps un-American, action. In illustrating the vanity of human wishes by the example of the Jacobins, John Adams was unconsciously passing judgement on himself as well. Fabula de te narratur is the comment that he invites in retrospect. But Adams’s anti-Jacobin invective, which thus recoils like a boomerang on Adams himself, leaves his co-founding father Jefferson unscathed. Jefferson recognized that the price of political liberty would be “turbulence”, and he was not distressed by this prospect. “I hold,” he wrote to Madison, “that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

“Too proud to fight” was a phrase used by Woodrow Wilson to defend American neutrality in the First World War. It was immediately used against him.

Thus Adams’s conservatism was not shared by all the founding fathers; and Emerson was not the first American to acclaim the World Revolution and to recognize it as being the American Revolution’s offspring. America had already given a blessing to the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century revolutions in Europe which it would be difficult for her ever to revoke, since it has been written into the map of American place-names. The names of the Corsican, Greek, Polish, and Hungarian revolutionary leaders Paoli, Ypsilandi, Kosciusko, and Kossuth have been thus immortalized. On the other hand, no Leninburg or Trotskyville has ever jumped out of the map of the United States to catch my eye. Of course there is less room for putting new names on this map nowadays than there used to be. Yet, if tomorrow a new territory of the United States were to be staked out on the face of the Moon, I do not think that any of the mushroom cities there would be likely to be called Fidel, though Fidel is really rather a beautiful name if American lips could pronounce it dispassionately.

Today America is no longer the inspirer and leader of the World Revolution, and I have an impression that she is embarrassed and annoyed when she is reminded that this was her original mission. No one else laid this mission upon America. She chose it for herself, and for one hundred and forty-two years, reckoning from the year 1775, she pursued this revolutionary mission with an enthusiasm which has proved deservedly infectious. By contrast, America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in defence of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome’s policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number. America’s decision to adopt Rome’s role has been deliberate, if I have gauged it right. It has been deliberate, yet, in the spirit that animates this recent American movement in reverse, I miss the enthusiasm and the confidence that made the old revolutionary America irresistible. Lafayette pays a high psychological price when he transforms himself into Metternich. Playing Metternich is not a happy role. It is not a hero’s role, and not a winner’s, and the player knows it. But, in those early nineteenth-century years when the real Metternich was fighting his losing battle to shore up the rickety edifice of restored “legitimacy”, who in the World would have guessed that America, of all countries, would one day cast herself for Metternich’s dreary part?

What has happened? The simplest account of it is, I suppose, that America has joined the minority. In 1775 she was in the ranks of the majority, and this is one reason why the American Revolution has evoked a world-wide response. For the non-American majority of the majority, the American revolutionary appeal has been as attractive as it was for eighteenth-century America herself. Eighteenth-century America was still appreciably poorer than the richest of the eighteenth-century West European countries: Britain, Holland, the Austrian Netherlands, France. No doubt America was, even then, already considerably richer than Asia or Africa; yet, even measured by this standard, her wealth at that time was not enormous. What has happened? While the sound of the shot fired beside the bridge at Concord has been three times circling the globe, and has each time been inciting all people outside America to redouble their revolutionary efforts, America herself has been engaged on another job than the one that she finished on her own soil in 1783. She has been winning the West and has been mastering the technique of industrial productivity. In consequence, she has become rich beyond all precedent. And, when the American sputnik’s third round raised the temperature of the World Revolution to a height that was also unprecedented, America felt herself impelled to defend the wealth that she had now gained against the mounting revolutionary forces that she herself had first called into existence.

What was the date at which America boxed the compass in steering her political course? As I see it, this date is pin-pointed by three events: the reaction in the United States to the second Russian revolution of 1917 and the two United States immigration restriction acts of 1921 and 1924.

The American reaction to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was not, of course, peculiar to the American people. It was the same as the reaction of the rich people in all countries. Only, in the United States, it was a nation-wide reaction, because, in the United States, the well-to-do section of the population had become, by that time, a large majority, not the small minority that the rich have been and still are in most other parts of the World so far.

Rich people, not only in the United States but everywhere, have, I think, taken Communism in a very personal way. They have seen in Communism a threat to their pocket-books. So Communism, even when it has raised its head in some far-away country, has not felt to the rich like a foreign affair; the threat has seemed close and immediate, like the threat from gangsters in the streets of one’s home town. I think this explains the fact – and I am sure this is the fact – that Russian Communist aggression has got under the skins of the well-to-do in the Western World, while German nationalist aggression has not angered them to the same degree. This relative complacency towards German aggressiveness, as contrasted with the violence of the reaction to Russian aggressiveness, has made an impression on me because, I confess, it makes me bristle. I have noticed it among the rich minority in my own country, and I have noticed it still more among a wider circle of people in the United States. It is a rather startling piece of self-exposure. It is startling because, among the various dangers with which we have been threatened in our time, the danger to our personal property is not the one that we ought really to take most tragically. As a matter of fact, the well-to-do Western middle class would have been fleeced economically by the Germans, as thoroughly as this could be done by any Communists, if Germany had happened to win either the first or the second world war – and Germany came within an ace of winning each of these wars in turn. But the tragic loss that would have been inflicted on the Western World by a German victory would have been the loss of our political and our spiritual liberty. In two fearful wars that have been brought upon us by Germany within the span of a single life-time, we have saved our liberty at an immense loss in infinitely precious human lives. We have had no war with Russia in our life-time, and the Western and the Communist camp are not doomed to go to war with each other, though at present the common threat of self-annihilation in an atomic third world war hangs over us all.

Of course someone might reply to what I have just been saying by admitting the whole of my indictment of Germany but pointing out, at the same time, that Russia, too, threatens our political and spiritual freedom, besides threatening just our pockets. This is true. Yet, if I had to make the terrible choice between being conquered by a nationalist Germany and being conquered by a Communist Russia, I myself would opt for Russian Communism as against German nationalism. I would opt for it as being the less odious of the two régimes to live under. Nationalism, German or other, has no aim beyond the narrow-hearted aim of pursuing one’s own national self-interest at the expense of the rest of the human race. By contrast, Communism has in it an element of universalism. It does stand in principle for winning social justice for that great majority of mankind that has hitherto received less than its fair share of the benefits of civilization. I know very well that, in politics, principle is never more than partially translated into practice; I know that the generous-minded vein in Communism is marred by the violent and intolerant-minded vein in it. I also recognize that Communism in both Russia and China has been partly harnessed to a Russian and a Chinese nationalism that is no more estimable than German nationalism or any other nationalism is. Yet, when all this has been said, I still find myself feeling that the reaction of rich individuals and rich nations in the West to Communism since 1917 has been an “acid test”, to use President Wilson’s memorable words [the phrase is used in his Fourteen Points]. Anyway, it is, I think, indisputable that the reaction in the United States to Communism in and since the year 1917 has been a symptom of a reversal of America’s political course. It is a sign, I think, that the American people is now feeling and acting as a champion of an affluent minority’s vested interests, in dramatic contrast to America’s historic role as the revolutionary leader of the depressed majority of mankind.

The United States immigration restriction acts of 1921 and 1924 are, I believe, pointers to the same change in the American people’s attitude during and immediately after the First World War. Naturally I realize the urgent practical considerations that moved the Administration and the Congress to enact this legislation. The First World War had just brought to light a disturbing feature in this country’s domestic life: I mean, the persistence of the hyphen. [He means in phrases such as Italian-American and Irish-American.] An appreciable number of United States citizens, and of immigrants who were on their way to becoming citizens, had proved still to have divided loyalties. The American melting-pot had not yet purged out of their hearts the last residue of their hereditary attachment to their countries of origin on the European side of the Atlantic. There was evidently a long road still to travel before the process of assimilation would be completed, and this race between assimilation and immigration might never be won for Americanism unless the annual intake of immigrants were drastically reduced. Moreover, the pre-war immigrants were under criticism not only for still being pulled two ways by divided loyalties; they were also under suspicion of perhaps not being representative samples of the best European human material. The introduction of an annual quota would enable the United States Bureau of Immigration to sift the candidates for admission and to select those who promised to make the best future American citizens, and the policy of restriction was thus recommended by a eugenic motive as well as by a political one.

These considerations, by themselves, would have made some measure of restriction and selection desirable after the First World War anyway. But the main motive for the enactment of the acts of 1921 and 1924 was, I believe, a different one. Europe had just been ravaged by a war of unprecedented magnitude and severity. European belligerent governments had stopped their subjects from emigrating in order to conserve their supplies of cannon-fodder. And, now that the war was over, it was feared in the United States that the flow of immigration would start again, and this time in an unprecedented volume. A flood of penniless Europeans might pour into the United States in quest of fortunes in the New World to compensate for ruin in the Old World, and this probable rush of millions of European paupers to win a share in America’s prosperity was felt to be a menace to the economic interests of the existing inhabitants of the United States, who had a monopoly of America’s wealth at present.

If I am right in this diagnosis of the main motive for the United States immigration restriction acts of 1921 and 1924, the American people went on the defensive at this time against the impact of European immigration for the same reason that made America react so strongly against Communism. Both these reactions were those of a rich man who is concerned to defend his private property against the importunity of a mass of poorer people who are surging all round him and are loudly demanding a share in the rich man’s wealth.

What would have been the effects on America’s economic life if immigration into the United States had been left, down to this day, as free as it was during the century ending in 1921? Presumably the present population of the United States would have been much larger than it actually is, but it does not necessarily follow that the average income per head would have been lower. Experience tells us that a country’s total annual product is not a fixed amount. It may be increased by various factors. One of these stimuli to production may be a steep rise in the volume of population through a reinforcement of the natural increase by immigration. For example, the massive and unrestricted immigration into West Germany from East Germany since the end of the Second World War has been one, at least, of the causes of West Germany’s unexpected and surprising post-war economic prosperity. On this analogy it is conceivable that the economic effects of the United States immigration restriction acts of 1921 and 1924 was contrary to the legislators’ intentions and expectations. While conserving the previous income per head of the existing population of the United States, the immigration restriction acts may have prevented the income per head from rising so fast and so high as it might have done if immigration had been left unrestricted. A continuance of unrestricted immigration might also perhaps have saved the United States from the great depression of the nineteen-thirties. These are hypothetical questions which even an economist might find it hard to answer, and I am not an economist. But I would suggest to you that, whatever the economic consequences of those immigration restriction acts may have been, these economic consequences have not been the most important. The political and psychological consequences have, I should say, counted for more, and these non-economic consequences have, I should also say, been unfortunate for America as well as for Europe.

So long as immigration into the United States from Europe was unrestricted, America’s ever open door kept America in touch with the common lot of the human race. The human race, as a whole, was poor, as it still is; and America was then still a poor man’s country. She was a poor man’s country in the stimulating sense of being the country that was the poor man’s hope. She was the country, of all countries, in which a poor immigrant could look forward to improving his economic position by his own efforts. America did not, of course, even then, offer this opportunity to immigrants from the whole of the Old World. The opportunity was always restricted to immigrants from one small corner of the Old World, namely Europe. All the same, so long as America still offered herself as even just the European poor man’s hope, she retained her footing as part of the majority of the human race. In so far as she has closed her doors since 1921, she has cut herself off from the majority. This self-insulation is the inevitable penalty of finding that one has become rich and then taking steps to protect one’s new-found well-being. The impulse to protect wealth, if one has it, is one of the natural human impulses. It is not particularly sinful, but it automatically brings a penalty with it that is out of proportion to its sinfulness. This penalty is isolation. It is a fearful thing to be isolated from the majority of one’s fellow-creatures, and this will continue to be the social and moral price of wealth so long as poverty continues to be the normal condition of the World’s ordinary men and women.

I will close this first lecture in the present series by trying to drive this point home in a piece of fantasy. Let us imagine a transmigration of souls in reverse. Let us slip our own generation’s souls into the bodies of the generation of 1775, and then set the reel of history unwinding with this change in its make-up. The result that we shall obtain by this sleight of hand will be startlingly different from the actual course of events in 1775 and thereafter. The Declaration of Independence will now be made, not in Philadelphia, but at Westminster. King George III will raise his standard, not at the Court of St. James’s, but at Independence Hall (of course that building will not bear its historic revolutionary name; it will be called “Royal Hall” or “Legitimacy Hall” or some other respectable conservative name of the kind). The other George, George Washington, will take command of his royal namesake’s army. There will be no Continental Congress here in Philadelphia for George Washington to serve. The revolutionary parliament will be on the other side of the Ocean. It will be at Westminster. And the revolutionary leader will not be a George, but a Charles, namely Charles James Fox. The bridge beside which the embattled farmers will fire their shot will not be the bridge at Concord. The flood that it spans will be the Thames. The shot will be heard round the World, but it will be an Old-World shot, not a New-World one.

This nonsense that I have just been talking will have had its use if it has illustrated my thesis. I am maintaining that, since 1917, America has reversed her role in the World. She has become the arch-conservative power instead of the arch-revolutionary one. Stranger still, she has made a present of her glorious discarded role to the country which was the arch-conservative power in the nineteenth century, the country which, since 1946, has been regarded by America as being America’s Enemy Number One. America has presented her historic revolutionary role to Russia.

Is this reversal of roles America’s irrevocable choice? Is it a choice that she can afford to make? And, if she were to change her mind once again, would it now still be possible for America to rejoin her own revolution after having parted company with it forty-four years ago? I shall be taking up these questions in the second and third lectures in this series.

The second and third lectures were called The Handicap of Affluence and Can America Re-Join Her Own Revolution? The first, of which I have quoted all but the opening in these two posts, was called The Shot Heard round the World.

For the first post, I referred to the extract in EWF Tomlin, editor, Arnold Toynbee, A Selection from His Works, with an introduction by Tomlin, OUP, 1978, posthumous.

For this post, ie the remainder of the lecture, I referred to Questia’s online version of America and the World Revolution and Other Lectures, New York, OUP, 1962, which prints three sets of lectures given in different places in 1961 and ’62. The quotation from Jefferson is garbled here. I have corrected it. I have presumptively corrected one or two other mistakes: texts on Questia are not page-images and are not reliable. The Pennsylvania lectures were printed in the UK on their own as America and the World Revolution, OUP, 1962.

America and the World Revolution and Other Lectures, New York, OUP, 1962

The shot heard round the world 1

In public lectures delivered at the University of Pennsylvania in spring 1961, Toynbee reminded his audience of “the revolutionary tradition which the United States had inaugurated and which she needed to re-join if she were to continue to play a positive role in the world” (EWF Tomlin).

I am just old enough to remember the time when Britain was still rich and strong enough to be the principal target for poorer and weaker peoples’ malice. Baiting is one of mankind’s oldest games, but the victim has to be a substantial one if the game is to be fun. Twisting the lion’s tail ceases to be rewarding if the lion shrinks to the size of a cat; but if a buzzard swells to the size of an eagle, it then becomes worthwhile to pull out the bird’s tail-feathers. It is not easy to adjust oneself to a rapid decrease in one’s wealth and power, but the transition is eased by one consoling form of relief. In being relieved of power and wealth, one is automatically relieved from odium. Experto crede. I am speaking from my own country’s experience in my own lifetime. We have been released from the odium that used to hang round Britain’s neck like the Ancient Mariner’s murdered albatross. The neck that is now adorned by the corpse of that albatross is America’s. When we British look at America nowadays, our feelings are mixed. We feel consoled for the recent change in our position in the world; at the same time we sympathize with you for the change in your position. I do hope that the second of these two feelings will make itself obvious to you in this present course of lectures by a British speaker. In examining America’s situation in the World today, I can say, with my hand on my heart, that my feelings are sympathetic, not malicious. After all, mere regard for self-interest, apart from any more estimable considerations, would deter America’s allies from wishing America ill. If, absit omen, America were to be worsted by her present ordeal, this would be as great a misfortune for her friends and associates as it would be for America herself.

I suppose many of us in this room have stood, more than once in our lives, on the bridge at Concord, Massachusetts, and have then crossed the bridge to read, engraved on a bronze plaque, a poem that we already knew by heart. As far as I remember, I first got to know this poem of Emerson’s through being given it, at school, to translate into Greek verse. The school was in England, not in America. The date must have been about 1905. That would be one hundred and thirty years after the day on which the historic shot had been fired by embattled American farmers. That was time enough to have made it possible for English schoolmasters and English schoolboys to look back at what had happened in April 1775 without having our vision blurred by irrelevant national sore feelings. What thrilled us, in England in 1905, at the sound of that shot, was the point that has been put inimitably by Emerson in the eight monosyllabic words of his immortal line. We forgot that the shot had been aimed at red-coats. We remembered that it had been heard round the world. That shot now meant for us, too, what it had meant for your ancestors. I myself, for instance, made my pilgrimage to the bridge at Concord the first time I visited the United States, which was in 1925.

A poet knows how to sum up in one line what it takes an historian at least several pages to recite. Within these last one hundred and eighty-six years the sound of that American shot has been travelling round and round the globe like a Russian sputnik. It had been heard in France before the eighteenth century was over. It was heard in Spanish America and in Greece while the nineteenth century was still young. In 1848, when the nineteenth century was not yet quite half spent, the sound reverberated, like a thunderclap, over the whole of Continental Europe. It was heard in Italy, and Italy arose from the dead. The Italian Risorgimento was evoked by that American shot. The sound was heard in Paris again in 1871; this time the Commune was Paris’s response to it. Travelling on eastward, the sound touched off the Russian revolution of 1905, the Persian revolution of 1906, and the Turkish revolution of 1908. By that date it had already roused the Founding Fathers of the Indian National Congress. I believe, by the way, that the original instigator of the Indian Congress Movement was an Englishman [he is thinking of Allan Octavian Hume or William Wedderburn]. If I am right about this, that Englishman launched a far bigger movement than he can have realized at the time. The Indian Congress Movement has been the mother of all the independence movements in all the Asian and African countries that, till recently, have been under the rule of West European colonial powers. But, anyway, whoever may deserve the credit for having started the Indian Congress Movement, the inspiration of it came from the sound of that American shot as this sound travelled over the Indian sub-continent on its eastward course. By this time it had gathered a speed that must have been greater than the speed of light. By 1911, the year in which the sound was heard in China, it had already been heard on the far side of the pacific, in Mexico. It had already touched off the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

By 1910, the eastward-travelling American sputnik had come round, full circle, to re-visit the New World. But it did not stop at that point. Its momentum was still unexhausted. It sped forward for the second time over the Atlantic to re-awaken the Old World’s seven sleepers with still more thunderous reverberations than it had detonated at its first visitation. In 1917 Russia heard that American sound for the second time, and this time she heard it with a vengeance. Turkey heard it for the second time after the end of the First World War, and this time the sound touched off the radical Westernizing Turkish revolution led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Compared with this second Turkish revolution of 1919-’28, the Turkish revolution of 1908 had been half-hearted. In April 1923, just one hundred and forty-eight years after the firing of that shot, far away, at the bridge at Concord, Massachusetts, I heard the sound reach Ankara, Turkey’s new capital, where I happened, at that moment, to find myself. There and then, I was given an inkling of what it must have felt like to be in the streets of Paris in 1789 or beside the bridge at Concord in 1775.

The sound did not flag or falter. It went on making its second circuit of the globe. In China, in 1948, its second visitation produced the same enormously enhanced effects as its previous second visitations in Russia and in Turkey. Speeding across the Pacific for the second time, the indefatigable sound called the Bolivian miners to arms and roused the Guatemalan peasants to demand a re-distribution of the land. In 1960 it roused the peasants of Cuba. Fidel Castro must have been surprised and gratified by the attention that he has won for himself in the United States. He has had the advantage of standing so close to the American people’s ear that, by shouting into it, he has been able to make it tingle. He wanted to annoy America, and he succeeded. But, if he had not had the luck to be so close to you, his oratory would have been drowned; for, before the end of 1960, the sound of the embattled American farmers’ shot had crossed the Atlantic for the third time and had roused up the whole of Africa from Sharpeville to Algiers.

At this moment at which I am speaking to you here in this room, I am surprised that I have succeeded, like Fidel Castro, in making my annoying words heard above that other sound’s roar. For, by now, the sound of the embattled farmers’ shot “is gone out through all the Earth”, to quote the Psalmist’s words. The noise has become world-wide and it has become deafening. Jefferson hit the mark when he said that “the disease of liberty is catching”.

“By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deeds redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.”

Emerson wrote Concord Hymn in 1836 for the dedication of the Obelisk, a battle monument in Concord, Massachusetts that commemorated the contributions of area citizens at the Battle of Lexington and Concord, April 19 1775, the first battle of the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4 1776. Emerson’s grandfather was at the bridge on the day of the battle; their family home, The Old Manse, was next to the bridge; and Emerson is known to have written the hymn while living there. And in 1837, the hymn was sung during Concord’s Fourth of July celebration to one of the greatest tunes ever composed: the Old Hundredth.

America and the World Revolution, OUP, 1962

Transoxiana and Bactria

It’s impossible to get a grasp of Central Asian history without understanding the geography – which is hard to understand because there are no convenient shorelines and, most of the time, no neat cultural or political or ethnic borders to break it all down. It is infinitely complex, so I’m moving slowly. I have created a sub-Category here called Maps of Central Asia: link on the left. (I’m a fan of simple maps. Several of them are relevant in understanding this post. See also this post, called Indic and Hindu.)

What are Transoxiana and Bactria?

Transoxiana (sometimes called Transoxania) corresponds with modern-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and southwest Kazakhstan and is the land between the Amu Darya (Oxus) and Syr Darya (Jaxartes) rivers. The Persians called it Sogdiana. I’ll use the Greek names for the rivers. Here’s a map: rather small, but at least simple.

The Oxus, the longest river in Central Asia, rises in the Pamir mountains and flows into the Aral Sea. The Jaxartes rises in the Tien Shan mountains and flows into the Aral Sea. I showed a map of those mountain systems here. The map above shows the shores of the Aral Sea c 1960. The sea is fast disappearing.

Sogdiana was a province of the Achaemenid Empire. Alexander the Great extended Greek culture into the region. Transoxiana was the northeastern point of the Hellenistic culture, and kept a hybrid Greek-Persian-Chinese-Buddhist culture until the Islamic invasion.

The Chinese explorer Zhang Qian, who visited Bactria and Parthia along with Transoxiana in 126 BC, made the first known Chinese report on this region.

Transoxiana flourished under the Sassanids (226-651), helped by wealth derived from the Northern Silk Road. Many Persian nobles and landlords escaped there after the Muslim invasion. (Pre-Islamic Persian empires: Median, Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian, Sassanid.)

The major cities are Samarkand and Bukhara. They remained centres of Persian culture and civilization after the Islamic conquest of Iran. Tashkent is more modern. All three are in Uzbekistan, one of the most appealing countries I’ve ever been to, though not politically: it has a wonderful cultural and physical mixture of Russian and Oriental.

The region was conquered by Qutaybah ibn-Muslim between 706 and 715 and loosely held by the Umayyads from 715 to 738. This conquest was consolidated by Nasr ibn-Sayyar between 738 and 740. It was under the Umayyads from 740 to 748; and under the Abbasids after 748.

Genghis Khan invaded Transoxiana in 1219. Before his death in 1227, he assigned the lands of Western Central Asia to his second son Chagatai, and this region became known as the Chagatai Khanate. In 1369 Timur, of the Barlas tribe, became the effective ruler while continuing the ceremonial authority of Chagatai Khan’s dynasty, and made Samarkand the capital of his future empire. In the map of Uzbekistan, below, you can see Farghana, the home of Babur, which was mentioned in an earlier post.

Bactria is further south. Its centre is the land between the Hindu Kush and the Oxus. Its historic capital was Balkh or Bactra, in northern Afghanistan. The Bactrian language is Indo-European. The people are Tajiks. The area to the east of the Hindu Kush – in eastern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan – is called Gandhara. Gandhara’s cities were Purushapura or Peshawar and Takshashila or Taxila.

It isn’t known whether Bactria formed part of the Median Empire, but it was subjugated by Cyrus, and from then formed one of the satrapies of the Persian empire. Alexander conquered Sogdiana (Transoxiana) and Iran without much difficulty; he met more resistance in Bactria. He defeated Darius III. Bessus, the satrap of Bactria, murdered Darius in the ensuing chaos and tried to organise a national resistance based on his satrapy. Bactria became a province of the Macedonian empire, but Alexander never successfully subdued the people. After Alexander’s death, the empire was divided up between his generals. Bactria and Transoxania became part of the Seleucid empire. Seleucus I and his son Antiochus I founded many Greek towns in eastern Iran.

The difficulties which the Seleucid kings had to face, and the attacks of Ptolemy II of Egypt, gave Diodotus, satrap of Bactria, the opportunity to declare independence (about 255 BC) and conquer Sogdiana/Transoxiana. He was the founder of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom. Diodotus and his successors were able to maintain themselves against the attacks of the Seleucids - particularly Antiochus III, the Great, who was ultimately defeated by the Romans (190 BC).

The so-called Indo-Greek kingdom, an extension of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, was founded when the Greco-Bactrian king Demetrius invaded India early in the second century BC. Alexander had reached India, but the Greek presence there had not lasted. Demetrius was more successful. The Indo-Greek king Menander I (known as Milinda in India, ruled 155-130 BC) was converted to Buddhism. His successors managed to cling to power, but by c AD 10 the Greeks were gone, though Greek influence remained.

The Greek kings were overthrown by Iranian nomadic invaders, the Sakas. They were followed by other Indo-European invaders of northern India, who are usually called by their Chinese name, Yuezhi. The Yuezhi eventually established the Kushan Empire (first to fourth centuries). The Kushans were supplanted in India by the first great Hindu power, the Gupta Empire.

The Arabs conquered Bactria – which they called Tokharistan – before they crossed the Oxus to subdue Transoxiana.

Uzbekistan

Eh bien, mon prince

“‘Eh bien, mon prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family. No, I warn you - if you are not telling me that this means war, if you again allow yourself to condone all the infamies and atrocities perpetrated by that Antichrist (upon my word I believe he is Antichrist), I don’t know you in future. You will no longer be a friend of mine, or my “faithful slave”, as you call yourself! But how do you do, how do you do? I see I’m scaring you. Sit down and talk to me.’

It was on a July evening in 1805 and the speaker was the well-known Anna Pavlovna Scherer, maid of honour and confidante of the Empress Maria Fiodorovna. With these words she greeted the influential statesman Prince Vasili, who was the first to arrive at her soirée.”

___

St Petersburg. War and Peace. Opening in Rosemary Edmonds’s translation. Tolstoy takes a handheld camera around the soirée, which was taking place in broad daylight. The only phrase of hers I don’t like is “influential statesman”; “a man of high rank and importance” or something like it is used in other translations. Hers is the only one that uses Eh bien, mon prince, except for a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky which gives the whole opening speech in French and English, following Tolstoy’s original, which is mainly French, with some Russian.

A Russian on Rome

The vanishing point

The upheaval of A.D. 235-74 was a revolt of the provinces against Italy, of the non-senatorial classes against the Senate, and of the uncultivated masses against the heirs of the Hellenic culture; and on all three battlefields the former “ascendancy” was decisively defeated. [Footnote: The social and cultural aspects of this great revolution in the Roman Empire have been imaginatively apprehended and brilliantly portrayed by M. Rostovtzeff in The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (Oxford 1926, Clarendon Press). The scholarly author of this magnificent piece of historical work has incurred some criticism on the ground that he has read into the history of the Roman Empire in the third century of the Christian Era his own experience of the Russian revolution of A.D. 1917. It is possible, perhaps, that here and there Rostovtzeff may have been carried by this analogy beyond the limits of the evidence; but it is certain that his illuminating and instructive interpretation of a momentous passage of history would not have enriched our whole understanding of History, as it has done, if Rostovtzeff had not lived through that experience as a human being and had not possessed the imaginative power to turn it to account as an historian.]

Rostovtzeff emigrated to the US in 1918 and published The Social and Economic History in English in 1926.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Nabobs and sahibs

A passage about the emancipation of “Western Christian traders who [had] lived the ghetto-life, under alien régimes, in the Ottoman Empire and Russia and India and the Far East”.

These formerly penalized Western Christian residents in Oriental countries have all been “emancipated” from their ghettos successively in the course of the last two and a half centuries: the “Niemci” from the Muscovite “Svoboda” in the time of Peter the Great; the French and English from their “factories” on the coasts of India after the death of Awrangzīb; the Franks from their segregated quarters in the Échelles du Levant after Bonaparte’s landing in Egypt in A.D. 1798; the “South Sea Barbarians” from their “factories” at Canton after the Anglo-Chinese “Opium War” of A.D. 1839-42; the Dutch from Deshima [island] after the visit of Admiral Perry’s squadron to Yedo Bay in A.D. 1853. The nature and manner and extent of the “emancipation” have been different in each case; but there is one thing that can be said of all these cases with equal truth. In all the cases, a more or less uniform “Jewish” ethos, which these Western residents under an alien régime had developed in response to a more or less uniform penalization, has faded or vanished altogether as the social conditions conducive to it have been mitigated.

Nabob is a version of Nawab. A Nawab was a provincial governor or viceroy of the Mughal empire and the term became a high title for Muslim princes. (The rulers of Hyderabad in southern India were called Nizams. A Nawab’s queen was styled Begum.) During the eighteenth century, “nabob” was used disparagingly to refer to East India Company merchants who, having made their fortunes in India, returned to Britain and aspired to be recognised as having higher social status than they had had previously. Sahib was a term of respect applied to both Muslim Indians and British and a formal style for some princes. Both words are Urdu and derived from Arabic. An English female might be called memsahib, in which the English word ma’am was added to sahib.

Sepoy comes from Persian. It meant an Indian Hindu or Muslim soldier allied to a European power, usually Britain. It was also a rank, referring to infantry privates (a cavalry trooper was a sowar) in the East India Company or later the British Indian Army, and is still so used in the modern Indian Army, Pakistan Army and Bangladesh Army (could it be used in that way for British as well as native privates?). Hindu sepoys ignited the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (the “Great Mutiny”) when they discovered that the new rifles being issued to them used animal fat to grease the casing. “Sepoy general” was Napoleon’s contemptuous description of the Duke of Wellington.

The most astonishing case is that of the servants of the English East India Company in India. In this case, the reversal of fortune was rapid and extreme. Within the span of less than a century, the Company’s servants rose from being a bevy of clerks and shopkeepers who were permitted to do their business on suiferance on the fringe of “the Great Mogul’s” dominions until they found themselves the undisputed masters of India and acknowledged heirs of “the Great Mogul” himself, who only retained a shadow of his hereditary sovereignty as the Company’s protégé and pensioner. The change of êthos which the English in India underwent in the course of this century was fully commensurate with their change in status. The “Nabob” of the eighteenth century became the “Sahib” of the nineteenth. In the character of Jos Sedley, Thackeray has simply given a touch of caricature to a life-like portrait of the “Anglo-Indian” [footnote: “Anglo-Indian” in the original sense of English resident in India, and not in the latter-day usage of the name as a euphemism for “Eurasian”.] as he continued to be until after the turn of the century. Yet already the revolutionary change of circumstances in India had made Thackeray’s picture an anachronism. The Battle of Waterloo, which is signalized in fiction by Jos Sedley’s headlong flight, was won as a matter of historical fact by a “sepoy general”; and in the decade of the Sikh Wars, when Thackeray was writing Vanity Fair, [footnote: Vanity Fair was written during the years 1846-8.] the typical servant of the East India Company was no longer a chicken-livered Jos nor even a ruffianly Clive, but an evangelical soldier or administrator of heroic build: a John Lawrence or a John Nicholson.

There is a further footnote about the word sahib.

This title “Sahib”, which has come to be applied to the Englishman in India, is an Arabic word which, in its classical usage, means “a companion of the Prophet Muhammad”. The application of a title with this connotation to the infidel son of a shopkeeper shows how completely “the nation of shopkeepers” was transfigured in the Indian imagination when it succeeded the Mughals in the role of being the ruling race; and this, in turn, shows how profound a change must have taken place in the êthos of the English in India themselves, since it is evident [is it?] that the Indians have always taken us approximately at our own valuation.

A Study of History, Vol II, OUP, 1934

Prokudin-Gorskii 3

Prokudin-Gorskii
Prokudin-Gorskii 2

Original colour photograph of a group of prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian Empire at an unidentified place in Russian Karelia, near the White Sea, 1915.

The men are probably Poles, Ukrainians and other Slavs. Most of Prokudin-Gorskii’s politically-sensitive plates were confiscated when he left Russia for good in 1918. This one escaped, perhaps because what is being represented is not obvious.

It, a little anachronistically, obeys my two laws on nineteenth-century group photographs.

The image, which looks as if it has been sharpened, is from the Library of Congress Prokudin-Gorskii site.

Assassination at Asculum

91 BC. The theatre at Asculum, what is now Ascoli Piceno in the Marche.

The Roman conquest of Italy in the fourth and third centuries had led to a collection of alliances between Rome and the Italian cities and communities, on terms more or less favourable to the cities. The cities were theoretically independent, but in practice Rome had the right to demand tribute money and a certain number of soldiers from them. By the second century BC, they were supplying between half and two-thirds of the soldiers in the Roman armies. Roman citizenship had not yet been granted to the inhabitants of most of them. The Roman government had virtual control over their foreign policy, including their interaction with one another.

In exchange for these exactions, the allies or socii – Toynbee calls them Confederates – had by tradition received a portion of the booty and lands taken in the course of Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean world. When Roman politicians redirected these profits to enrich Rome alone in the second century BC, the allies protested, and war followed: the so-called Social War (91-88 BC). Asculum was one of the first communities to rebel.

On the eve of this war, citizens and confederates sat at close quarters in the theatre.

Translation by Toynbee from Diodorus.

There happened to be a round of performances and the theatre was full of Roman citizens who had turned up as spectators, when an artist was assassinated [by one of the confederates] [...] while actually performing on the stage, because his acting was supposed to be out of keeping with the gravity of the crisis.

One assumes that the actor who was killed was a citizen, a Roman, but he could have been a confederate. His fellow-actor, Saunio, whom we are about to meet, and who feared in turn for his life, had, Toynbee says in a footnote, the “Latin franchise”. This was “the highest class of Confederate status, which carried with it some of the privileges of citizenship”.

In a moment the mask of festivity revealed the grim features of war; there was an agony of panic; and then Fortune came to the rescue with a piece of comic relief, in the shape of the humourist Saunio. This personage, who held the Latin franchise, possessed an extraordinary gift for drollery. He could not only make people laugh when he talked, but the slightest wriggle of his body fetched a smile from his audience without his having to speak a word. There was something about his personality that was irresistible, and any Roman audience might be relied upon to give him a tremendous reception. The Confederates determined to deprive the Romans of this innocent enjoyment by killing the poor producer of it; but happily Saunio saw what was in the wind and, although his unfortunate fellow artist had only been murdered a moment before, he promptly walked on to the stage and started to do a turn: “Ladies and gentlemen, here is luck! Well cut, Sir! All is well that begins badly, I hope. You know, I am not a Roman, but one of yourselves. I travel all round Italy, but I never see the last of Roman pussy with her nine tails. What do I travel in? My own humble gifts. And what am I after? A good time for you. That is what I call salesmanship. You wouldn’t hurt the world’s little swallow? I nest in all your houses and nobody minds me. That is my privilege. Kindly pass over the bird of passage. Supposing you didn’t, I am sorry to think how sorry you would be” – and so on and so forth, keeping them amused and in fits of laughter with the running fire of his patter, until he had coaxed them out of their ugly temper by his irresistible charm and felt himself out of danger.

I suppose you had to be there …

The outcome of the Social War was the law of L Julius Caesar, who proposed and carried the Lex Julia during his consulship. The law offered full citizenship to all Latin and Italian communities which had not revolted. However, the law offered the option of citizenship to whole communities, not to individuals. This meant that each community had to pass the law, most likely by a vote in assembly, before it could take effect. It was also possible under the Lex Julia for citizenship to be granted as a reward for distinguished military service in the field. The Lex Julia was followed by a supplementary statute, the Lex Plautia Papiria, which stated that a registered male of an allied state could obtain Roman citizenship by presenting themselves to a Roman praetor within 60 days of the passing of the law. This statute enabled inhabitants of towns disqualified by the Lex Julia to apply for citizenship if they desired. The right of a Roman citizen to vote was limited by the requirement of physical appearance in Rome on voting day. After 88 BC candidates regularly paid the expenses (at least partially) for their supporters to travel to Rome in order to vote.

In the modern world, theatres, inside or out, were ideal places for assassinations. No longer, since those who govern us no longer go to the theatre – which itself cannot be good for society.

We all know about Lincoln.

At midnight on March 16 1792, a masked ball took place at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm. Gustav III had arrived earlier that evening to attend a dinner in the company of friends. During the dinner, he received an anonymous letter that contained a threat to his life. He chose to ignore it and, after dining, left his rooms to take part in the masquerade. On entering, he was surrounded by Jacob Johan Anckarström and his co-conspirators Claes Horn and Adolf Ribbing. The king was easily spotted: the silver breast star of the Order of the Seraphim glowed on his cape. The conspirators wore black masks and accosted him in French with the words: “Bonjour, beau masque!” Anckarström fired a pistol into the left side of his back. The King jumped aside, crying in French: “Ah! Je suis blessé, tirez-moi d’ici et arrêtez-le!” He was carried back to his quarters, and the exits of the Opera were sealed. The conspirators were arrested and confessed. The king’s wound became infected and on March 29 he died, his last words being: “Jag känner mig sömning, några ögonblicks vila skulle göra mig gott.” The story is the basis of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera.

On May 15 1800, as George III sat in the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane for a performance of Colley Cibber’s She Would and She Would Not, a man in the pit fired a pistol at him during the playing of the national anthem. The king turned to Queen Charlotte and said: “It’s only a squib. We will not stir. We’ll stay the entertainment out.” The would-be assassin called out: “God bless your Royal Highness; I like you very well; you are a good fellow.” The King came forward to show that he had not been hurt and “les cris de joie de God save the King” rang out, as the Queen told her brother. Sheridan, the manager, advised the King to leave his box in case another shot was fired, but the King peered calmly round the house through his opera-glass. An actress came onto the stage and announced: “I have the pleasure to tell you the man is in custody.” The assassin, James Hadfield, had been suffering from religious delusions: see a Comment below this post. At the end of the play, the king had his usual doze in the box before the commencement of the farce.

On February 13 1820 the Duc de Berry, the younger son of Charles X and Marie-Thérèse de Savoie was stabbed and mortally wounded by a Bonapartist fanatic, Louis Pierre Louvel, when leaving the opera house in Paris. He weas helping his pregnant wife, Caroline Ferdinande Louise, the daughter of Francis I of the Two Sicilies, into a carriage.

On the evening of January 14 1858, as Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie were on their way to the theatre in the Rue Le Peletier, the precursor of the Opéra Garnier, to see Rossini’s William Tell, Felice Orsini, an Italian revolutionary, and his accomplices threw three bombs at the imperial carriage. The first landed among the horsemen in front of the carriage. The second wounded the animals and smashed the carriage glass. The third landed under the carriage and seriously wounded a policeman who was hurrying to protect the occupants. Eight people were killed. Napoleon and Eugénie were unhurt, proceeded to the performance and appeared in their box. Orsini escaped, wounded on the right temple and stunned. He returned to his lodgings, where police found him the next day. He was guillotined a few weeks later. The bombs had been made in England.

On September 14 [Old Style September 1] 1911, the Russian Prime Minister was shot twice in the Opera House in Kiev, once in the arm and once in the chest, by a young man in evening dress. He was was attending a performance, in the presence of the Tsar and his family, of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan (sic). (Rimsky’s fairy-tale world had collided with twentieth-century violence just as his spirit was encountering the twentieth century in the person of Igor Stravinsky. … Had the opera begun?) Stolypin had travelled to Kiev without his bodyguards, despite police warnings, and had refused to wear his bullet-proof shirt. The assassin, Dmitri Bogrov, was both a leftist radical and an agent of Okhranka, a secret police force and extended body-guard for the Tsar. The wounded Stolypin stood up from his chair, carefully removed his gloves, and unbuttoned his jacket, unveiling a blood-soaked waistcoat. He sank down and shouted “I am happy to die for the Tsar”, motioning to the Tsar in his royal box to withdraw to safety. Tsar Nicholas remained in his position and Stolypin blessed him with a sign of the cross. Stolypin died four days later. The following morning, the Tsar knelt at his hospital bedside and repeated the words “Forgive me”. Bogrov was hanged ten days after the assassination, and the judicial investigation was halted by order of Tsar Nicholas II. This led to suggestions that the assassination was planned not by leftists, but by conservative monarchists who were afraid of Stolypin’s reforms and his influence on the Tsar, though this has never been proved. This might have been the reason for the Tsar’s penitence, if the hospital story is true. The first line of Stolypin’s will read “Bury me where I am assassinated.”

For other strange events in Greek and Roman theatres, go to

Ephesus
Cimmerian darkness
Ephesus, c AD 57
Assassination at Asculum

See also

Athens, c AD 52-53 (the Areopagus at Athens)
Carabas and the mob (the Alexandrian Gymnasium)
Kaisarion (the Alexandrian Gymnasium)

The passage above is identified by Toynbee as

DIODORUS: Library of Universal History: ed. by C. Müller, Paris, 1844, Didot, Vol, II; and by L. Dindorf, Leipzig, 1868, Teubner, Vol. V: Book XXXVII, fragment 12

The translation by Toynbee is in

Introduction and translations, Greek Civilization and Character, The Self-Revelation of Ancient Greek Society, Dent, 1924 (I have referred to an American edition, but anglicised the spelling)

Lost opportunities of the Osmanlis

The ‘Osmanlis’ acquisition of Algeria in A.D. 1512-19 came just too late, and fell just too far short, to enable them to cut off, at its base, the Oceanic enterprise of the Castilians and the Portuguese. If Ottoman sea-power had been able to make itself felt at the western end of the Mediterranean some thirty years earlier, it might have come to the rescue of the last Moorish enclave in the Iberian Peninsula and have compelled the Castilians to fight for the retention of Andalusia at the moment when Ferdinand and Isabella were actually rounding off their Peninsular dominions by the conquest of Granada. In that event, the Spanish sovereigns might have lacked the leisure and the means for patronizing Christopher Columbus; and Columbus himself might have found it impossible, in A.D. 1492, to set sail across the Atlantic from Palos. (The ‘Osmanlis did take sufficient interest in the discovery of the New World to execute a careful copy of a very early map of the Americas which they found on board a Spanish prize that was captured by an Ottoman squadron in the Western Mediterranean.) [Footnote: See Kahle, P.: Die verschollene Columbus-Karte von 1498 in einer türkischen Weltkarte von 1513 (Berlin and Leipzig 1933, de Gruyter).] Again, if the ‘Osmanlis had followed up their acquisition of Algeria by making themselves also masters of Morocco, they might have brought Henry the Navigator’s work to naught by closing the Portuguese route round Africa to India and the Far East. The Portuguese circumnavigators of Africa who were scarcely hampered in their enterprise by the activities of the Moorish pirates of Salee [modern Salé, the twin city of Rabat] might have found themselves paralysed if the Atlantic coast of Morocco had given harbour to Ottoman fleets with the whole power of the Ottoman Empire behind them.

Similarly, the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in A.D. 1517 and of ‘Irāq in A.D. 1534 came just too late to forestall the arrival of the Portuguese mariners in the Indian Ocean; and although the acquisition of seaboards on the Red Sea and on the Persian Gulf, in addition to their seaboard on the Mediterranean, gave the ‘Osmanlis the great strategic advantage of holding the interior lines, this geographical asset did not make up for lost time. When an Ottoman naval squadron attacked the Portuguese at Diu in A.D. 1538, and Ottoman matchlockmen fought Portuguese matchlockmen in Abyssinia in A.D. 1542-3, these Ottoman operations were unsuccessful and they were never followed up.

Again, after the Ottoman victory over the Turkmen prince Uzun Hasan at Baiburt [north-eastern Turkey] in A.D. 1473, there was nothing at the moment to stop the expansion of the Ottoman Empire overland into the central and eastern sections of the domain of the Iranic Civilization; and the ‘Osmanlis would assuredly have been called in to the rescue by the Transoxanians and the Khurāsānīs at the beginning of the sixteenth century of the Christian Era, when the Eurasian frontier of the Iranic World was attacked by a new Nomadic invader in the shape of the Uzbegs [who pushed the Timurid prince Babur into Afghanistan, from where he invaded India to found the Mughal Empire], if this avenue for Ottoman expansion had not been closed, at that very moment, by the meteoric rise of Ismā‘īl Shāh Safawī [the founder of the Safavid dynasty of Persia, which survived into the eighteenth century].

Finally, we may note that the Grand Vizir Mehmed Sököllü’s project of cutting a canal from the Don to the Volga, and so securing for the Ottoman Empire the command of the great Eurasian network of waterways, miscarried when it was actually attempted, in A.D. 1568-70, because the Muscovites had just anticipated the ‘Osmanlis in securing command of the Volga by taking Qazan in A.D. 1552 and Astrakhan in A.D. 1554. This Ottoman project might well have succeeded if it had been put in hand in or immediately after A.D. 1475: the year in which the necessary base of operations had actually been secured by the conquest of Caffa [modern Feodosiya, Crimea] and Tana [modern Azov] and by the establishment of Ottoman suzerainty over the Crimean Tatars. In A.D. 1475 Muscovy had not yet doubled her power by the annexation of Novgorod, nor the Cossacks strengthened their hold on the Steppes by advancing from the line of the Dniepr to the lines of the Don and the Yaik [Ural].

A Study of History, Vol II, OUP, 1934

Dniepr, Don, Volga, Ural, showing the Don-Volga canal

Davos 1884

Davos in 1870 from schatzalp.ch. Perhaps the hotels came in the next decade.

As the skiers return to Davos, let’s join some Russians there in 1884.

“Davos

12-24 November 1884

“I arrived here at last at four o’clock after a complicated journey. After Munich I stayed a night at Lindau and another at Landwart (sic) station, where the railway ends. [It no longer ends in Landquart, but we have to change trains.] From there I had an eight hour drive. [The train takes a little over one.] In Landwart I was obliged to sleep in a rather miserable little room, but it was clean. From there you usually go by coach to Davos but fearing the close proximity of all the people in the cramped space of a coach I hired a carriage and travelled alone. The higher we went up into the mountains the more severe both nature and the cold became. I suffered badly from the cold, especially in my feet.

“Driving up to Davos I imagined it to be a wilderness and feared that I would not be able to get either cigarettes or cigars. But I found that at this great height there is a row of first class hotels, and shops where you can get whatever you like. They have their own newspaper [what we know as the Davoser Zeitung; it had been established in 1881 as Wochenblatt für die Landschaft Davos], theatre (where I went yesterday with Kotek); and as to cigarettes and cigars there are plenty. All this makes a fantastic impression and I still feel as though in a dream. When I arrived at the main hotel, where Kotek lives, he was out. He expected me on the coach later and had gone to look for a room for me. [Kotek was a violinist, whom Tchaikovsky was visiting.]

“For one night I had the room of a man who had gone away. At last Kotek appeared. I was afraid that I would see only a shadow of his former self and imagine my joy when I saw him looking much fatter, with a clear complexion, and seeming perfectly well. But this is only on the surface. When he started talking I understood how bad his lungs are. Instead of a voice he has a hoarse croak and an incessant heavy cough. …

“The place is crowded, and all the hotels are full. I got a poor little room far away from the Sanatorium. In spite of 5° (Centigrade) of frost all the patients are out all day. Many are dressed quite lightly and go about without coats, toboganning (Russian style), skating, and so on. The whole cure consists of breathing the pure but rarified air which is easy for the sick to breathe. About 200 people have their meals in the Sanatorium dining-room and the food is excellent. They say that healthy people feel suffocated and cannot stand the rarified air at all but up till now I feel perfectly well. But, in spite of the scenery being so grand and magnificent, it is sad and mournful here. My heart contracts from sorrow, and all I want is to leave as soon as possible. Maybe this feeling will pass after a time.

“I tactfully told Kotek that I am staying only for a few days, so if I stay a whole week, he will be very pleased. I am terribly sorry for him. He is tortured by the thought that he will not be able to go back to Berlin next year and work. However, he is not lonely, for there are plenty of nice people around, and some of them Russian. He knows everybody, though not intimately, and my staying with him for long would be too much of a sacrifice; so I am going to leave as soon as I can. It is extraordinary that a whole settlement of consumptive people live in a real Russian winter! But Kotek says that out of a hundred people at least sixty get perfectly well again.

“Good-bye for the present, Golubchik. I am glad you are pleased with your new home. …

Kotek sends his best love.

P. Tchaikovsky”

To his brother Modest, from Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Letters to His Family, translated by Galina von Meck, with additional annotations by Percy M. Young, USA, Stein & Day, 1982. November 12-24 means the day in the Gregorian and Julian calendars.

Another, also to Modest:

“Zürich

18-30 November 1884

Modichka!

“Last night I arrived here to have a rest and I go on to Paris today. I decided to go to Paris now as I am beginning to doubt if I shall go abroad in the spring, more probably to Kamenka or another place in the country, to work and to put some money by. I left Davos with the pleasant feeling that I had done right in going to see Kotek. You would not believe how much better and happier he feels. As to his health, my first impression was misleading. He is a very sick man … I did all I could for him. I visited the doctor, secretly, and begged him if he finds Davos no good for Kotek to send him to the Riviera. I left Kotek some more money and, having done what I could both spiritually and materially, I left Davos knowing that I had done my duty as a friend. Life in Davos is typical of hotel and restaurant life. I met a multitude of people, even became quite friendly with some of Kotek’s friends. A German, very nice chap, left a most pleasant memory of himself. Was invited to a tea party by Radecky who played his works to me; then to a tea party given by a Russian lady – Gulak-Artemovsky – a very stupid and empty-headed woman whose son is a school friend of [Tchaikovsky’s nephew] Bob’s and very nice. The frost was fierce all the time and my room so cold that I even got awful chilblains on my left hand. On the way back I was driven first in a sledge and then in an ordinary coach, alone, and enjoyed the wild beauty of the mountain road.

[...]

P. Tchaikovsky”

I am not sure who Radecky was. The son of the Count? Gulak-Artemovsky may have been the widow of Semen Hulak-Artemovsky or Semyon Gulak Artemovsky, a Ukrainian composer who had worked in Russia.

___

I have known those letters for a while, but had always wondered whether Tchaikovsky’s Manfred was inspired by Davos. It was – but he was thinking of it before he went there. The idea came from the composer Balakirev. Another portrait of Tchaikovsky is in Tchaikovsky, A Self-Portrait, by Alexandra Orlova. I’m referring to an English edition, translated by RM Davison, with a Foreword by David Brown, OUP, 1990, of a work previously published in Russian. This is a collage of letters without exact dates. (I won’t get into editions of the letters and ultimate sources here.) She quotes from an earlier letter, of 1882 or ’83, to Balakirev. Schumann and Byron were equally big in Russia.

“It could well be that Schumann is to blame for my incurable lack of enthusiasm for your programme. I am passionately fond of his Manfred and I have got so used to seeing Byron’s Manfred and Schumann’s Manfred as one indivisible whole [the Schumann was incidental music] that I do not know how to approach the subject so as to elicit from it any music other than that with which Schumann has already supplied it.”

Then from a letter of 1884 to his brother Anatoly:

“I have heard that Kotek really has got consumption and that he is painfully anxious to see me. I cannot settle until I see him and find out how much longer he will be with us. So I have decided to go abroad straight from here [Modest Tchaikovsky’s book makes it clear that this means St Petersburg], to Switzerland, to Davos, where Kotek is at the moment. He is all on his own and apparently hasn’t much longer to live. I simply must go.”

He then writes to Balakirev:

“I will call at a bookshop and buy a copy of Manfred. [Didn’t already he have it? He was a great reader of English literature and before he died was thinking of an opera based on a story by George Eliot.] At this very moment I am setting off for the summits of the Alps, and circumstances would be very favourable for the musical re-creation of Manfred if I were not going to see a dying man. At any event, I promise you to do my utmost to carry out your wishes.”

From Davos to Nadezhda von Meck, the patroness whom he never met, again from Orlova:

“At last I have got to Davos. Davos lies very high, in a grim, mountain landscape.”

To Balakirev:

“I am in a fairly melancholy state of mind; my surroundings are extremely gloomy and depressing, and on top of that I listen from morning to night to the consumptive coughing of my patient. I have read Manfred and have given it a great deal of thought, but I still have not started planning either the themes or the form. I have no intention of hurrying, but I give you my firm promise that, if I live to tell the tale, the symphony will be finished no later than this summer.”

To von Meck again:

“My stay in Davos was not very cheerful. The surroundings themselves depressed me, as did living in the hotel, which meant that I met a lot of people … and then, finally, my patient, who never stopped coughing from morning to night – it’s all rather gloomy, of course. The day before I left I saw the doctor who is treating Kolya and we had a long talk. It is now the condition of the throat which is worse than the lung, and the greater fear is of consumption of the throat rather than of the chest.”

To Anatoly again:

“This visit to Davos has in any case been of great service to Kotek and I am glad to know this. On the way back I travelled half the journey [Davos-Landquart] on sledges and the other half [Landquart-Zurich] in an excellent stage-coach, with the carriage to myself, and enjoyed the beauty of the Swiss winter landscape.”

___

Yosif Kotek died in Davos in 1885: I’ve seen different dates within that year. The notes to Alexander Poznansky, editor, Ralph C Burr Jr and Robert Bird, translators, Tchaikovsky Through Others’ Eyes, Indiana University Press, 1999 say December 24. Did he really live another year?

Kotek had been Tchaikovsky’s pupil and perhaps lover. At least one letter from Tchaikovsky to his brother Modest, from whom he kept few secrets, suggests the latter, though it describes Tchaikovsky’s feelings, not Kotek’s. Modest gives an account of the stay in Davos in his book whose first English edition (or at least the one now on the Internet Archive) was The Life and Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1906:

“On November 12th (24th) he arrived at Davos. He expected to find a wilderness, in which neither cigarettes nor cigars were to be had, and the civilised aspect of the place, the luxurious hotels, the shops, and the theatre made upon him the fantastic impression of a dream. He had dreaded the meeting with Kotek, lest his friend should be changed beyond recognition by the ravages of consumption. He was agreeably surprised to find him looking comparatively well. But this was only a first impression; he soon realised that Kotek’s condition was serious. He remained a few days at Davos, rejoiced his friend’s heart by his presence, had a confidential interview with the doctor, and left for Paris on November 17th (29th), after having provided liberally for the welfare of the invalid.”

Klaus Mann’s rather pathetic but readable bio-novel Pathetic Symphony does not mention the Davos stay except in retrospect.

Wikipedia, describing Byron’s play:

“Manfred is a Faustian noble living in the Bernese Alps. Internally tortured by some mysterious guilt, which has to do with the death of his most beloved, Astarte, he uses his mastery of language and spell-casting to summon seven spirits, from whom he seeks forgetfulness. (Some speculate that the relationship between him and Astarte is incestuous, and/or that Manfred had murdered Astarte, but this is not made explicit in the play, though the implicit suggestions are quite strong.) The spirits, who rule the various components of the corporeal world, are unable to control past events and cannot grant Manfred’s plea. For some time, fate prevents him from escaping his guilt through suicide. At the end, Manfred dies defying religious temptations of redemption from sin.”

What of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred? The old Penguin Guide to records and CDs gave the recording of it under Svetlanov with the USSR Symphony Orchestra a rosette, which was awarded to performances of special quality in the days before almost anything could be called a Great Recording of the Century. Manfred is a noble, not self-indulgent, work, if Byronic and noble go together, and Svetlanov’s performance is in a spiritual class of its own. Have woodwinds ever been made to sound colder? Does any passage in Tchaikovsky express more anguish, hope, and desperate longing, than 10:12 to 11:22 in the first movement?

It is a full-fledged, over-fledged, symphony. It has a druggy, hallucinatory atmosphere rare in his music, and a stylish gloom which Liszt could not have matched. There’s a trudging motto theme, which must have been conceived while walking in snow. The fantastic climax at the end of the first movement, a harrowing and elated statement of that theme, is like walking stoned through a blizzard. The last begins in a Cossack or swashbuckling style. The peroration, with organ, surpasses the end of first movement in grandeur.

Kotek had nearly been the dedicatee of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. In the event, Leopold Auer was, but he refused to give the first performance, describing it as unplayable. Which, of course, is the oldest story in the musical book. One could make a long list of performers, up to the present, who have said the same thing, in many cases before going on to champion the piece.

We don’t know – or I don’t – what sanatorium Kotek was staying in. There used to be many sanatoria in Davos. Their wide balconies dominated their façades, so that they looked like sponges. The doors inside were wide, so that beds could be moved easily. It was not the Schatzalp, which was opened as a sanatorium at the turn of the century and became a hotel later. The Guardian in 2004 said that there were around 30 sanatoria in the ’20s and ’30s and in 2004 only four. The Schatzalp, which is still a hotel and about to be radically redeveloped, is always described as the setting for Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain – but the Guardian article, if I read it correctly, says that it was something else, the Valbella Clinic, which closed in 2004.

Kotek and Tchaikovsky c 1877

Eviction

Israeli colonialism since the establishment of the state of Israel is one of the two blackest cases in the whole history of colonialism in the modern age; and its blackness is thrown into relief by its date. The East European Zionists have been practising colonialism in Palestine in the extreme form of evicting and robbing the native Arab inhabitants at the very time when the West European peoples have been renouncing their temporary rule over non-European peoples. The other outstanding black case is the eviction of five agricultural Amerindian peoples – the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creeks, Cherokees, and Seminoles – from their ancestral homes in what are now the states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee to “reservations” in what is now the state of Oklahoma. This eviction was started in 1820 and was completed for the most part by 1838. But the Cherokees were recalcitrant and the Seminoles resisted by force of arms. They [the Seminoles] withdrew into the swamps of Southern Florida, and their resistance there was overcome by the United States Army only in the course of the eighteen-forties. This nineteenth-century American colonialism was a crime; the Israeli colonialism, which was being carried on at the time when I was writing, was a crime that was also a moral anachronism.

Experiences, OUP, 1969

Marxist socialism: A page torn from a book

This passage was written at the time when Toynbee was making his closest personal approach to Christianity.

The social arrangements of the primitive Christian community are only referred to incidentally in the books of the New Testament, because the authors’ minds are pre-occupied with other aspects of the life of the Founder and his companions; but these incidental allusions give us glimpses of a picture of a common way of life which is undoubtedly Socialism and indeed Communism in the economic sense of a community of goods and services.

In the story of the Passion as told in the Gospel according to Saint John, Jesus and his companions are represented as having a common purse which is in Judas Iscariot’s keeping. [Footnote: John xii. 6, and xiii. 29.] And in the preface to the story of Ananias and Sapphira, as told in the Acts of the Apostles, the economic régime of the infant Church on the morrow of the Ascension is depicted as being that of a miniature and rudimentary yet authentic Communist commonwealth.

“The multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul; neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. And with great power gave the Apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus; and great grace was upon them all. Neither was there any among them that lacked; for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them and brought the prices of the things that were sold and laid them down at the Apostles’ feet; and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.” [Footnote: Acts iv. 32-5.]

The complete community of goods that is described in this passage did not, of course, become one of the permanent institutions of the Christian Church (as, for that matter, it is not being insisted upon to-day in the Soviet Union either); nor can the testimony of the Acts be taken as conclusive evidence that the picture here presented was ever strictly true to the life of the Church even in the Apostolic Age (any more than the first written constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics can be taken as conclusive evidence for the social condition of Russia even in the lifetime of Lenin). What the passage does attest is the social ideal of the early Christian milieu in which the Acts was conceived and written. And, even if this contemporary testimony were lacking, the Christian social ideal of the Apostolic Age could still be reconstructed by inference from the testimony of succeeding centuries, in which the Church was famous for a sensitiveness – that declared itself in material as well as in spiritual good works – to the emotional attitudes and moral responsibilities implied in being one’s brother’s keeper. This ingrained philanthropic vein in the post-Apostolic Christian tradition comes out in the legend of how St. Lawrence replied to the Roman Government’s summons to deliver up the Church’s treasures by collecting a crowd of the poor and needy from the slums of Rome [shades of Pasolini] and presenting himself, at their head, to the public authorities. But we need not appeal to an unverifiable Christian legend when we can cite the unimpeachable testimony of Julian the Apostate. The virtual monopoly of social-welfare work by the Christian Church in the Hellenic World of the fourth century of the Christian Era is sorrowfully confessed by Julian in a pastoral letter [footnote: Letter from the Emperor Julian to Arsaces, the Chief Priest of Galatia (= Letter No. 84 in Bidez, J.: L’Empéreur Julien: Œuvres Complètes: Tome i, 2e Partie: “Lettres et Fragments” (Paris 1924, Les Belles Lettres)).] to one of the pagan prelates of his Neoplatonic Antichurch [the square brackets in the extract are Toynbee’s]:

“If Hellenism [i.e. Neoplatonism] is not yet making the progress which we have a right to expect, it is we, its devotees, who are to blame. … Are we refusing to face the fact that Atheism [i.e. Christianity] owes its success above all to its philanthropy towards strangers and to its provision for funerals and to its parade of a high puritanical morality? These are all, surely, virtues which we ourselves ought to put into practice bona fide. … You must establish in every city [in your see] an ample number of hospices, in order that strangers may have the benefit of a philanthropy which will be recognized as ours; and this service must not be confined to strangers of our own persuasion; it must be at the disposal of anybody whatsoever who is in need. I have already provided for the allocation to you of the necessary funds. … A fifth of this grant should be spent on the poor who are in the clientèle of the [pagan] clergy; the balance should be distributed to strangers and beggars. It is a disgrace to us that our own people should be notoriously going short of assistance from us when in the Jewish community there is not a single beggar, while the impious Galilaeans are supporting not only their own poor but ours as well. You should instruct the votaries of Hellenism to make voluntary contributions towards these charitable services, and the Hellenic [i.e. pagan] parishes [in your see] to dedicate their first fruits [for this purpose]. You must get our Hellenic community into the habit of doing good works of this kind by instructing them that this is one of our most ancient traditional activities – as is testified by Homer. … Do not let us allow hostile competitors to outdo us in our own strong points while we give way to a slackness and indifference which are not merely a disgrace to our religion but a downright betrayal of it.”

These passages from the correspondence of the Emperor Julian and from the Acts of the Apostles and from the Gospel according to Saint John will perhaps suffice to demonstrate our three propositions. In the first place they make it clear that Socialism – and this in the strict formal sense of a community of goods – is one one of the principles of the primitive Christian Weltanschauung. In the second place they establish a very strong presumption that the Socialism, as well as the Oecumenicalism, of the Marxian scheme is derived from the Christian tradition. In the third place they reveal the element in the Christian Socialism which the Marxian Socialism has left – or cut – out.

The passage from Julian does suggest a “virtual monopoly of social-welfare work by the Christian Church in the Hellenic World of the fourth century”, but it does not say anything about communities of goods. Philanthropy is not Socialism or Communism.

The communistic ideal presented in the Scriptures no doubt survived in some primitive Christian communities, but in the subsequent history of Christianity it was confined to monasteries and some Anabaptist and other experiments. Monasteries were communistic internally and philanthropic externally.

It is also hard to see that these passages from the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles alone “establish a very strong presumption that the Socialism, as well as the Oecumenicalism, of the Marxian scheme is derived from the Christian tradition”, though Toynbee argues the point elsewhere. Wasn’t it also an independent response to the conditions presented by industrialism? In any case, the relationship between Christianity and Socialism/Communism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was extremely complex.

Before the passage I have just quoted, he made a number of propositions: “There is a Christian Socialism which was practised as well as preached before the Marxian Socialism was ever heard of.” “Marxian Socialism is derived from the Christian tradition as unmistakably as is the Marxian concern to convert the World.” “The Marxian version of the Christian ideal of philanthropy is an excerpt which has omitted the one thing needful – and indeed indispensable – for making any form of Socialism work.”

The passage in the Acts represents the philanthropy of the primitive Christian Society as flowing from a God-given grace which was the fruit of a belief in the divinity of Jesus. In other words, the charity which is here depicted as moving the primitive Christians to go – in their mutual concern for one another’s welfare – to the extreme length of sharing all their worldly goods is not a mere love of Man for Man (which is the limited literal meaning of the word “philanthropy”), but is a spiritual relation to which God is a party as well as His human creatures. In fact, this Christian Socialism is a practical application, on the economic surface of life, of the fundamental religious truth that the brotherhood of Man is a consequence of the fatherhood of God – a truth which is driven home with special force by a religion which teaches that God is not only the father and creator of Man, but also his saviour who has been incarnate in human shape and has suffered, and triumphed over, Death. Christians believe – and a study of History assuredly proves them right– that (beyond the narrow circle of the tribe, in which a parochial “honour among thieves” is maintained at the prohibitive moral price of an Ishmaelitish warfare against a world of foreign enemies) the brotherhood of Man is impossible for Man to achieve in any other way than by enrolling himself as a citizen of a Civitas Dei which transcends the human world and has God himself for its king. [Footnote: On this point see Bergson, H.: Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion (Paris 1932, Alcan), passim.] And anyone who holds this belief will feel certain, a priori, that the Marxian excerpt from a Christian Socialism is an experiment which is doomed to failure because it has denied itself the aid of the spiritual power which alone is capable of making Socialism a success. The Christian critic will have no quarrel with the Marxian Socialism for going as far as it does: he will criticize it for not going far enough. Its fatal flaw in his eyes will be a sin of omission and not a sin of commission.

Thus, from the Christian standpoint, the Marxian experiment in Socialism is a tragedy; but this cannot be the Christian observer’s last word; for the responsibility for this tragedy is manifestly shared by the Christian Church itself.

How, in face of such evidence as we have cited, are we to explain the Marxian attitude towards Christianity? The Mar