045. THE PRINCIPLE OF REPRESENTATION
THE PRINCIPLE OF REPRESENTATION
How shall a widely extended empire be kept to gether? How can the separated parts be made to retain their interest in the whole? Mere incorporation will not accomplish it; besides giving protection to the parts, you must give to the parts an actual share in the government. Hence Aristotle, ignorant of the principle of representation, declared that a republic must be small,—none can be permanent where the free citizens number more than ten thousand. The Greek democracies were indeed of brief duration. The Roman Empire also fell. We hear occasional predictions that our own republic, simply because of its bigness, must some day fall to pieces. Such predictions fail to take into account the fact that a third method has appeared in history, a method which we can call English, as distinguished from the Oriental and the Roman. While the Oriental State was characterized by conquest without incorporation, and the Roman State by conquest with incorporation but without representation, the English State is marked by incorporation and representation together. The principle of representation is the gift of the German tribes to the world’s civilization. Wherever those tribes overran Europe, they planted the seeds of this new principle of civil unity and freedom. We see the signs of it in the Cortes of Spain and the StatesGeneral of France. But on the Continent it is only in secluded spots, such as Switzerland and the Netherlands, that the seed bore permanent fruit. The old Roman method of government by prefects crowded the new element out. The separate parts were too unintelligent and lifeless to clamor for the liberty, or to defend the right, of representation. And so the Continent in great measure lost its opportunity and relapsed into political despotism, just as afterward, when the Reformation came, it lost its opportunity and relapsed into ecclesiastical despotism. Only in England—and there mainly because of its isolation from Continental example and its separation from the Roman past—did the representative principle have a chance to show what it could do to make a nation united and free.
Even in England, as we shall see, the germ was not yet fully developed, and it needed to be carried across the Atlantic and planted in virgin soil, where there was absolute freedom from rival or adverse influences, before it could bear its largest and noblest fruit. But the Magna Charta had been wrung from King John, in 1215, and Simon de Montfort’s great victory, in 1264, had settled forever the principle that there can be no just taxation without representation. And though the Wars of the Roses drained England of her strength, and the death of Richard on Bosworth Field left Henry VII. free to rule almost without a parliament, yet the principle survived; it had indestructible vitality; it was destined still to animate the breasts of Englishmen, until they had brought a successor of this same Henry to the block, and had established a refuge and home for liberty beyond the sea.