The New Deal in Old Rome

CHAPTER XIII

WARNING SIGNALS

As we survey the collapse of Roman civilization we see that the trouble was not the strength of the invaders. It was internal decay. The reasons for that decay have proved the nightmare of historians from Gibbon to the present time. When the inquirer fixes upon certain causes, he usually is brought up sharply by the reflection that these same causes existed in other eras without fatal results. The slave system was at its worst during the Republic, but Rome went vigorously forward. So long as the people kept their nerve, the capital and Italy seemed able to assimilate foreign stocks, at least to such a degree that civilization was not impaired. It was when conditions became pathological that assimilation stopped. For centuries education in England was as deficient as education in Rome, and culture flourished in France under autocratic rule. A pertinent suggestion is furnished by a remark of Hugh Wilson’s in his Education of a Diplomat. Discussing the pre-war mentality, Mr. Wilson says: “To us the Victorian era of stability was normal. We needed a lifetime to realize, and some of us have not yet realized, that the Victorian era was an historical phenomenon, so unusual that it will be cited with the age of Augustus as one of the two great periods of peace and security in the history of western civilization.”

An unusual combination of circumstances made possible the Victorian stability and the stability of the Roman peace. When the balance was disturbed, the stability in both instances was lost. The civilization of the Roman world might have withstood some of the disintegrating influences. When they ganged up on it, Roman civilization could not withstand the mass attack. Perhaps if “the wandering of the nations “had been deferred a few centuries, Rome might have revived after a period of decay. In the course of history many nations have had their blank years in literature and the arts and have recovered. I have referred to sculpture in fourth-century Rome. It was as deficient in nineteenth-century America and England. In these countries it came back. In Rome it did not have the chance. The Eastern Empire, centred at Constantinople, suffered from many of the same complaints that affected the Western Empire, but did not find them fatal. Apparently it escaped the precise combination of forces that caused the collapse in the West.

Without going into the general problem, I believe we may profit from certain parts of the Roman experience. It was a very different experience from our own. But, in spite of the differences, it carries warning signals for the present age.

As was said earlier, civilization involves collective action through government. Many of the instances of governmental intervention that we have just examined proved useful. Some of them mitigated distress. In times of crisis state loans were helpful. Cæsar was able to stop the flight of capital and restore confidence by government action. The panic of 33 was ended by Treasury loans provided by the Emperor Tiberius. Under the younger Gracchus and in the early period of the Empire public works cushioned the evils of unemployment. The problem was dealt with fairly effectively at times through Resettlement Administrations. On the other hand, the history of the dole carries a warning. Relief was necessary. But under the Republic it was so handled as to build up a powerful and unmanageable pressure group. No means test was applied until the dictatorship of Cæsar. Even under the Empire it became a permanently demoralizing factor in the social and economic life. People were schooled to expect something for nothing. This failure of the old Roman virtues of self-reliance and initiative was conspicuously shown in that part of the population that was on relief. It had far wider aspects. Emergencies that would not have dismayed the men of the Republic were too much for the men of the later Empire.

Rome, as I remarked in a previous chapter, was demoralized by prosperity. The sharp social division that attended the get-rich-quick era was destructive first to the Republic and later to the Empire. The new rich lost initiative and self-reliance and became selfish, arrogant, uncompromising. The wretchedly poor were always liable to be preyed upon by designing politicians. The Roman people developed their great qualities under conditions that approximated those of the American frontier. They were energetic, hard-working, thrifty men and women, with a strong love of country and a high sense of justice. With sudden prosperity these virtues began to crumble.

Living became more interesting and in many ways more humane. The hard narrowness of frontier life gave way to a broader outlook. But there were other less happy effects on both sides of the social line. The rich refused to make even moderate concessions in the handling of privileges which they had been able to monopolize through their control of the government. The poor had sunk to a level where the selling of votes was widespread and elections went to the highest bidder. “Rome is for sale,” exclaimed a North African prince of the second century B.C. “It will perish when it finds a purchaser.” The authenticity of the line has been challenged. But it carried bitter truth for the future.

We saw the effects of the boom years in America in breaking down standards and undermining character. Flaming youth got the idea that the highest aim in life was to have a good time. Many of its elders confused their moral values. The official scandals of the Harding administration had their counterpart in Rome under similar conditions.

As for elections, the Handbook written by Cicero’s brother recommending bribery and lavish promises is not out of date in the modern world. A successful politician, the Governor of a state, remarked in conversation not long ago that he was “terrified “over the outlook for democratic institutions in this country. “In these days,” he said, “we have to make promises that we know we can’t carry out. We have to promise the old people pensions that would bankrupt the state if we paid them. We have to promise higher salaries to the school-teachers, higher wages to the working people, higher prices to the farmers, bigger allotments of public funds from the federal government. I am ashamed of what I have done. But I wanted to win.” In the last days of the Republic many Roman politicians could have made the same confession. The American Governor’s remarks were cynical and extreme. Still, in view of what happened in Rome, we cannot dismiss them as simply fanciful.

The autocracy, reflecting as it did a deterioration in the character of the Roman people, contributed to a further undermining of their spirit. The process began under the liberal emperors of the second century after Christ, long before the advent of the totalitarian state. The central government undertook such far-reaching responsibility in affairs that the fibre of the citizens weakened. Evidently it is a fine question of statesmanship how far government can go without crossing the line between services that are wholesome, that strengthen character, and those that are demoralizing and weaken it.

The most disastrous policy in its immediate effects was extravagant spending by the government of the Empire. Part of the money went into the magnificence of the cities, part into the maintenance of the army and of the vast bureaucracy required by a centralized government. Gradually the soldiers and the civil servants became dominating pressure groups. The expense they entailed led to strangling taxation with repeated devaluations of the currency that fatally weakened the middle class and decimated its natural leaders. A sturdy middle class might have prevented the military anarchy that completed its liquidation. The attempt to cure the resulting disorder with the complete regimentation of the totalitarian state merely gave a temporary check to the progressive decay. Disintegration followed the stifling of initiative.

The modern world has far greater resources than the Roman Empire. It is quite impossible to draw a safe inference from the Roman experience as to the limits of modern spending. There is merely the obvious warning that it is possible to go so far as to involve destructive taxation with the dangers of inflation. But certainly in Europe there are disquieting and spectacular analogies to the last years of Rome. To pass over the waste and devastation from war, there are uncertainties affecting the currencies of most countries with potentially disintegrating effects on the social structure. There is the spread of totalitarian systems in which Diocletian and his successors would have felt at home. The lives and activities of people are increasingly controlled by regimes that refuse to allow freedom of spirit.

It required a century or more for the destructive forces in Rome to work out their effects. The modern tempo is faster. The history of the later Roman Empire carries a warning to present-day authoritarians.

There is another aspect to the decline of Rome, the economic. The underlying economic trouble of the Roman system was its failure to provide opportunities for the people to find work through which they might maintain decent minimum standards of living. As Russia has demonstrated, no society is on a stable foundation when it is divided into a world of beggars and a world of the rich. We have seen the difficulties in which Rome repeatedly became involved because of this division, from which poverty and ignorance finally emerged triumphant. The disorders of the first century B.C. grew out of struggles between rich and poor. Prosperity sagged into the stagnation of the second century of the great peace partly from the same cause. The farms no longer furnished a market to the factories because the small independent farmer was absorbed by the great landlord. Industrial progress ceased because of the lethargy of slaves and undernourished free workmen and the failure of a sleek upper class to produce energetic and intelligent leadership.

It is true, as Professor Homo has remarked, that Roman culture was essentially aristocratic. It had been imposed on the world by superior groups which he calls “the general staff of civilization,” and had failed to send its roots deep into the mass of the people. That was because the people virtually were excluded from the well-being of the general staff. They had no sense of partnership in the glittering life above them which they helped support. So when the staff of empire-builders and administrators disappeared in the anarchy of the third century, “Roman civilization suffered a mortal blow.” The inhabitants felt a certain sense of solidarity. They valued the Roman peace as the source of all their blessings. But their feeling for the Empire was only passive. In the day of peril it could not be stirred to effective action.

Rome did a magnificent and lasting service to mankind. We may consider its final failure without attempting to pass moral judgments based on modern experiences and standards. In the same sense in which Metternich said that “indignation is not a political attitude,” we may assume that neither is indignation a historical attitude. Short-sighted self-interest affected the mass of the people as it affected their leaders. The rich landowners were anxious to avail themselves of cheap slave labour, without regard to the effect on the free workers or on the future of farming and industry. The people deserted their champion, Gaius Gracchus, lured by appeals to their selfishness. Would modern men have been less shortsighted under similar conditions? Certainly the short-run selfish view often prevails today.

The fundamental modern social problem is the problem that Rome failed to solve. It is the problem of building a unified yet free society, with decent minimum standards of living. A society so intelligently and justly organized that there is no menacing submerged class. A society that provides reasonable incentives for the free rise of a general staff of competent managers whose ranks are always open to fresh recruits. A society that develops a social pressure under which leaders accept an enlightened and far-sighted view of their responsibilities. This is the society which the long experience of Rome sets as a goal before the modern world.