A Short History of England | Page 4

is a foundation of
which the fragments of tile and brick are but emblems; and under the
colours of our wildest flowers are the colours of a Roman pavement.
Britain was directly Roman for fully four hundred years; longer than
she has been Protestant, and very much longer than she has been
industrial. What was meant by being Roman it is necessary in a few
lines to say, or no sense can be made of what happened after, especially
of what happened immediately after. Being Roman did not mean being
subject, in the sense that one savage tribe will enslave another, or in the
sense that the cynical politicians of recent times watched with a

horrible hopefulness for the evanescence of the Irish. Both conquerors
and conquered were heathen, and both had the institutions which seem
to us to give an inhumanity to heathenism: the triumph, the
slave-market, the lack of all the sensitive nationalism of modern history.
But the Roman Empire did not destroy nations; if anything, it created
them. Britons were not originally proud of being Britons; but they were
proud of being Romans. The Roman steel was at least as much a
magnet as a sword. In truth it was rather a round mirror of steel, in
which every people came to see itself. For Rome as Rome the very
smallness of the civic origin was a warrant for the largeness of the civic
experiment. Rome itself obviously could not rule the world, any more
than Rutland. I mean it could not rule the other races as the Spartans
ruled the Helots or the Americans ruled the negroes. A machine so
huge had to be human; it had to have a handle that fitted any man's
hand. The Roman Empire necessarily became less Roman as it became
more of an Empire; until not very long after Rome gave conquerors to
Britain, Britain was giving emperors to Rome. Out of Britain, as the
Britons boasted, came at length the great Empress Helena, who was the
mother of Constantine. And it was Constantine, as all men know, who
first nailed up that proclamation which all after generations have in
truth been struggling either to protect or to tear down.
About that revolution no man has ever been able to be impartial. The
present writer will make no idle pretence of being so. That it was the
most revolutionary of all revolutions, since it identified the dead body
on a servile gibbet with the fatherhood in the skies, has long been a
commonplace without ceasing to be a paradox. But there is another
historic element that must also be realized. Without saying anything
more of its tremendous essence, it is very necessary to note why even
pre-Christian Rome was regarded as something mystical for long
afterwards by all European men. The extreme view of it was held,
perhaps, by Dante; but it pervaded mediævalism, and therefore still
haunts modernity. Rome was regarded as Man, mighty, though fallen,
because it was the utmost that Man had done. It was divinely necessary
that the Roman Empire should succeed--if only that it might fail. Hence
the school of Dante implied the paradox that the Roman soldiers killed
Christ, not only by right, but even by divine right. That mere law might

fail at its highest test it had to be real law, and not mere military
lawlessness. Therefore God worked by Pilate as by Peter. Therefore the
mediæval poet is eager to show that Roman government was simply
good government, and not a usurpation. For it was the whole point of
the Christian revolution to maintain that in this, good government was
as bad as bad. Even good government was not good enough to know
God among the thieves. This is not only generally important as
involving a colossal change in the conscience; the loss of the whole
heathen repose in the complete sufficiency of the city or the state. It
made a sort of eternal rule enclosing an eternal rebellion. It must be
incessantly remembered through the first half of English history; for it
is the whole meaning in the quarrel of the priests and kings.
The double rule of the civilization and the religion in one sense
remained for centuries; and before its first misfortunes came it must be
conceived as substantially the same everywhere. And however it began
it largely ended in equality. Slavery certainly existed, as it had in the
most democratic states of ancient times. Harsh officialism certainly
existed, as it exists in the most democratic states of modern times. But
there was nothing of what we mean in modern times by aristocracy,
still less of what we mean by racial domination. In so far as any change
was passing over that society with its two levels of equal citizens