THE PART PLAYED BY THE PEOPLE IN REVOLUTIONS1.The stability and malleability of the national mind.
The knowledge of a people at any given moment of its history involves an understanding of its environment and above all of its past.Theoretically one may deny that past, as did the men of the Revolution, as many men of the present day have done, but its influence remains indestructible.
In the past, built up by slow accumulations of centuries, was formed the aggregation of thoughts, sentiments, traditions, and prejudices constituting the national mind which makes the strength of a race.Without it no progress is possible.Each generation would necessitate a fresh beginning.
The aggregate composing the soul of a people is solidly established only if it possesses a certain rigidity, but this rigidity must not pass a certain limit, or there would be no such thing as malleability.
Without rigidity the ancestral soul would have no fixity, and without malleability it could not adapt itself to the changes of environment resulting from the progress of civilization.
Excessive malleability of the national mind impels a people to incessant revolutions.Excess of rigidity leads it to decadence.Living species, like the races of humanity, disappear when, too fixedly established by a long past, they become incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions of existence.
Few peoples have succeeded in effecting a just equilibrium between these two contrary qualities of stability and malleability.The Romans in antiquity and the English in modern times may be cited among those who have best attained it.
The peoples whose mind is most fixed and established often effect the most violent revolutions.Not having succeeded in evolving progressively, in adapting themselves to changes of environment, they are forced to adapt themselves violently when such adaptation becomes indispensable.
Stability is only acquired very slowly.The history of a race is above all the story of its long efforts to establish its mind.
So long as it has not succeeded it forms a horde of barbarians without cohesion and strength.After the invasions of the end of the Roman Empire France took several centuries to form a national soul.
She finally achieved one; but in the course of centuries this soul finally became too rigid.With a little more malleability, the ancient monarchy would have been slowly transformed as it was elsewhere, and we should have avoided, together with the Revolution and its consequences, the heavy task of remaking a national soul.
The preceding considerations show us the part of race in the genesis of revolutions, and explain why the same revolutions will produce such different effects in different countries; why, for example, the ideas of the French Revolution, welcomed with such enthusiasm by some peoples, were rejected by others.
Certainly England, although a very stable country, has suffered two revolutions and slain a king; but the mould of her mental armour was at once stable enough to retain the acquisitions of the past and malleable enough to modify them only within the necessary limits.Never did England dream, as did the men of the French Revolution, of destroying the ancestral heritage in order to erect a new society in the name of reason.
``While the Frenchman,'' writes M.A.Sorel, ``despised his government, detested his clergy, hated the nobility, and revolted against the laws, the Englishman was proud of his religion, his constitution, his aristocracy, his House of Lords.These were like so many towers of the formidable Bastille in which he entrenched himself, under the British standard, to judge Europe and cover her with contempt.He admitted that the command was disputed inside the fort, but no stranger must approach.''
The influence of race in the destiny of the peoples appears plainly in the history of the perpetual revolutions of the Spanish republics of South America.Composed of half-castes, that is to say, of individuals whose diverse heredities have dissociated their ancestral characteristics, these populations have no national soul and therefore no stability.A people of half-castes is always ungovernable.
If we would learn more of the differences of political capacity which the racial factor creates we must examine the same nation as governed by two races successively.
The event is not rare in history.It has been manifested in a striking manner of late in Cuba and the Philippines, which passed suddenly from the rule of Spain to that of the United States.
We know in what anarchy and poverty Cuba existed under Spanish rule; we know, too, to what a degree of prosperity the island was brought in a few years when it fell into the hands of the United States.
The same experience was repeated in the Philippines, which for centuries had been governed by Spain.Finally the country was no more than a vast jungle, the home of epidemics of every kind, where a miserable population vegetated without commerce or industry.After a few years of American rule the country was entirely transformed: malaria, yellow fever, plague and cholera had entirely disappeared.The swamps were drained; the country was covered with railways, factories and schools.In thirteen years the mortality was reduced by two-thirds.
It is to such examples that we must refer the theorist who has not yet grasped the profound significance of the word race, and how far the ancestral soul of a people rules over its destiny.
2.How the people regards Revolution.
The part of the people has been the same in all revolutions.It is never the people that conceives them nor directs them.Its activity is released by means of leaders.
Only when the direct interests of the people are involved do we see, as recently in Champagne, any fraction of the people rising spontaneously.A movement thus localised constitutes a mere riot.
