The Anniversaries of King Alfred and Julius Cæsar

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

BY a suggestive coincidence, the celebration of the thousandth anniversary of King Alfred’s death falls in the same month as the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Julius Cæsar. The great Roman who invaded Britain in 55 B. c., and the great Saxon who resisted the Danish invasions of Britain a thousand years later, were veritable kings of men. Each of them summed up in himself the highest racial characteristics and capacities. Each became a national hero, not more through natural superiority of mind and character than through the performance of such political tasks as could scarcely have been wrought out by other hands. Though neither of them was by preference a soldier, both accomplished military feats of extraordinary skill. But they were rather administrators of the very highest type, men of rare executive power and of incessant activity. The problems of peace with enemies, of order and good government, were matters with which they were constantly concerned. The difference between the cool, pagan, skeptical temper of the Roman democrat and the devout humility of the Saxon king needs no illustration to those who have read the Commentaries on the Gallic War and Alfred’s prefaces to his translations. But however far apart the two men stand in respect of moral character, — and we really know little about the personal life of either, — it is well to be reminded by the mere coincidence of their anniversaries how perpetual an inheritance of human society are those problems of government with which the two rulers had to deal.

To-day the descendants of the Saxon Alfred — no longer the penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos of the Augustan poet — are the dominant force in world politics. Yet British and Americans alike are grappling at the present moment with that very question of the government of subject races which, we are told, converted the Roman republic into a military empire. It brings the times of Julius Cæsar strangely near to our own to read these sentences from the opening paragraph of Froude’s Cæsar. “ The early Romans possessed the faculty of self-government beyond any people of whom we have historical knowledge, with the one exception of ourselves. In virtue of their temporal freedom, they became the most powerful nation in the known world; and their liberties perished only when Rome became the mistress of conquered races, to whom she was unable or unwilling to extend her privileges. ... If there be one lesson which history clearly teaches, it is this : that free nations cannot govern subject provinces. If they are unable or unwilling to admit their dependencies to share their own constitution, the constitution itself will fall in pieces from mere incompetence for its duties.”

Whether Froude, writing in 1879, was right or wrong in his interpretation of Roman history is not here in issue ; but the passage may serve to remind us that the recent decision of our Supreme Court deals with very old matters, and that a thousand years, or two thousand, are very little space in which to work out satisfactorily the fundamental problem of how human beings, in a world apparently intended for their habitation, shall live side by side.