MARCH OF PROGRESS

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 26 November 1927, Page 11

MARCH OF PROGRESS

A VIATORS have made 1927 an liistorical milestone. On the long road of the past we have reason to believe the future historian will see it as a date marking the beginning of man’s practical dominion of_ the air and the conquest of ocean and distance and time by the machine. It seems a longawaited goal in the march of civilisation (writes Eunice Fuller Barnard m the “New York Timos’ ). Apparently the heavens have often conspired, as now, to - make 27 a crucial number in the chronology of the Western calendar. Almost two thousand years ago, on a January day in 27 8.C., a handsome, masterful man stood before the Roman Senate much as Mussolini stands today. Octavian, however, was a victorious general. His- legions and his gallcvs had conquered his rival, Antony, and only a smuggled asp had saved Cleopatra herself from decorating his triumph. After a century of civil war Rome was at peace, and for the first and only time in history the Mediterranean was enci re led by a single empire. And now the Senate gavo Octavian the title of Augustus; or, in effect, his Sacred Majesty. Into the hands of this youngish general Rome abandoned the republic. And with this gesture Europe unwittingly renounced democratic government and placed itself under a succession of Roman Emperors. But it. was the beginning also of an achievement the modern world has never equalled—two hundred years of peace. From the wildest German at one end of the empire to the most sophisticated Alexandrian at the other, men lived in security under tlic common Roman law. Already Horace and Virgil, the eulogists of Augustus, had begun to hail the Golden Age. And Augustus’ friend Agrippa had begun to rebuild Rome in marble much as Mussolini now plans to do. THE SYRIAN CARPENTER, In 27 A.D. the scene shifts to the common people. A young carpenter in a Svrinn town left his home and began to wander about the countryside, thinking and talking about a new way of life, glorifying not the mastery but the service of one’s fellow-man. Only a few peasants knew about him, and no one probably in the magnificent Roman world dreamed that he -would be worshipped more than a thousand years after the temples to Augustus, the GodEmperor, had fallen to ruin, and that the monarchs of Europe would spend the better part of two centuries fighting to possess his very tomb. Just a century later, in 327, Hadrian, most indefatigable of Roman perors, started on a journey to his Eastern possesisons. For he supplemented the work of Augustus. Under him the empire was not so much a world subject to Rome as it was a league of coordinate provinces under his administrative care. Yet the effect of his reign was to Romanise them all. Roman roads ran smoothly alike through Spain and Asia Minor. All through this prosperous Mediterranean world ranged Roman millionaires, building their villas on thousand-acre estates, maintained by regiments of slaves. Yet at this pinnacle of administrative efficiency, when Europe was better organised than it ever has been since, and when culture was rapidly spreading, little new achievement in science or literature or art or industry came from . it. After all, this monarchical, slave- I holding empire was almost a robotcivilisation that Augustus had created, with little spontaneous energy after the first excitement of the creation. FIRST CURB TO ROMAN POWER. The year 227 saw the first curbing of Roman power in the East. Then the Persians, long under foreign rule, rose again into empire and disputed Rome’s control in Asia. Erom this date for an even four centuries the Persians, united under a god-emperor of their own, were able to battle with the Roman hosts, back and forth in Asia Minor.

In 327 Constantine was reigning, the first Christian Roman Emperor. And the principle of empire, introduced by Augustus, and that of Christianity, were already fairly combined. Though he had built the first St. Peter’s at Rome, he no longer had his capital there. Instead, he had chosen a Greek city on the Bosphorus, which was renamed Constantinople, and which was to remain the capital of a Christian empire for more than a thousand years. By 427 the Roman Empire had split

THROUGH THE CENTURIES GREAT EVENTS AND ’27

Two Emperors ruled, one at Rome and one at Constantinople. On the throne of Rome sat Valentinia-n 111., son of a Roman Princess and a Gothic barbarian conqueror. Temples to Jupiter and the god-emperors stood grass-grown and ruined. And Valentinian was soon to decree that of all the Christian bishops he in Rome was supreme, thus foreshadowing a new Christian unity under a Pope. • At Constantinople ip 527, Justinian, greatest of Eastern Emperors, ascended the throne, to build the domed church of St. Sophia, to reconquer Rome and to hold it for a few years from the barbarian grasp. So, for a moment, the reunited empire flashed up again in a burst of both Roman and Christian grandeur. Eastern monarch though Justinian was, he had his jurists collect the Roman statutes of the past thousand years and the decisions of the Roman judges, and so make available tbo Civil Code, an invaluable legacy of the empire to the modern world.

One of the momentous dates in human history is (527. It was then that Heraclius, the Christian Emperor at Constantinople, defeated the Persians and put an end to tlieir menace of cento ries.

While Western Europe went through the anarchy and mental inertia of the Dark Ages, the Chinese Empire became vaster than any that Rome had ever known. And it fostered beautiful and ingenious works —blue canals with marble bridges, carved and painted temples, gorgeous silks, and many things unknown to Europe, such as gunpowder, paper and printing from wood blocks. Yet all this splendour and activity, coming to a meridian under the second Tang monarch, whose rule began in 627, was attained, according to H. G. Wells, “without any such general boredom, servitude, indignity and misery as underlay the rule of the rich in the Roman Empire.” Moreover, there was religious toleration for Buddhists and for Christian missionaries, and even for Arabs coming to build a Mohammedan mosque in Canton.

It is 627, too, which marks a victorious turning point of that amazing new religion which, starting like a whirlwind out'of the Arabian desert, was to sweep steadily on for the next few centuries into Europe. Mohammed, a caravan-driver, had had a revelation of a One True God, whose prophet he believed 'himself to be. And he had incited his followers to war upon all believers. Thus, in 627, entrenched' in Medina, he put to rout an army from the old sacred city of Mecca, and wms in a fair way to become “Pope and King” of t-hc Arabian w T orld. CHRISTIANITY SPREADS NORTH. Steadily into the north of Europe, especially among the Angles, Saxons and Celts of the islands, Christianity kept on spreading. Monkish missionaries persuaded and warrior chiefs subdued men into professing the new belief. In 727, according to some historians, Peter’s pence were first paid in England. Five vears later at Tours, the Christian Franks put a final stop to the Mohammedan advance northward into Europe, thus in effect holding all the Continent save Spain for Christendom. But even in 527 the Mohammedan advances were not over. From Africa that year they began to swarm into Sicily, to rule there almost 300 years. And now throughout the Mohammedan world genius had begun to flower. In Spain, in Sicily, in Egypt and Asia Minor rose that intricate series of mosques and towers and palaces that was to culminate in the famous Alhambra five centuries later. From now on for three centuries the whole Mohammedan world teemed with new ideas in industry and art. Alone in the world the Arabs revived science, practically dead since the Greeks.

In these ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, while the Arabs were permanently- advancing civilisation in the south, Northern Europe was a vast battleground, strewn with isolated groups of combatants. They were peoples fighting their way, as it now seems, toward the national units- of modern times. At the same time they were fusing into a kind of super State under the Chritsian Church. Tn 927 Athelstan, fair-haired grandson of Alfred the Great, conquered Northumbria, and so for a few years held the welter of little English States united against the Danes. It was a momentary- step toward an English nation. In- .1027, the German King Conrad 11. was crowned by the Hope as Holy Roman Emperor. For 200 years, ever since Charlemagne,

the Popes had crowned such a monarch. Though his sway covered only the present Germany and Italy, Conrad 11. was thought of as a successor of the old Roman emperors, a kind of temporal head of Christendom. But for the most part the real supreme head of Christendom was the Pope, at whose call before the end of the eleventh century all nations were to be in arms for a hundred and fifty years against the Mohammedans, in the Crusades. in 1127, in a lull between Crusades, Matilda, grand-daughter of William the Conqueror, prepared to marry a French count. She was to become the mother of the Plantagenet kings, who, for a century, ruled both England and most of France.

Now, 1227 . marks another crisis in human affairs like that of 627. At that time, Gregory IX. became Pope, and in the height of his authority actually excommunicated Frederick 11., the Holy Roman Emperor, for failing to go on a Crusade as he had promised. For now flic Church was at its zenith of ■power. Its vigour blossomed in the new architectural form of the Gothic cathedrals, just as the Mohammedan Empire had produced the colonnaded mosque, and the Roman, the triumphal arch.

THE GOLDEN HORDE

In the East, a new .empire swept across Asia. Up from flic plains of North China'galloped a man on horseback. Jengis Khan, leader of the nomad Mongol tribe, which could ride days on end almost without food or rest, suddenly drilled an army such as the world has seldom 'seen. He took China, Turkestan and Persia, and led his hordes across what is now Siberia and Russia. In 1227, as riiler of- the greatest empire the world had yet known, he died, leaving his son to conquer Poland and Hungary in the heart of Europe. By 1327, according to J. H. Robinson, brass cannon and halls had .been made for a year in Florence —-a forewarning of the end of castles and coats-of-mail two centuries later. In 1327 also the Pope was no longer practically ruling the nations of Europe from Rome, but was living at Avignon under the influence of the French King. It was a symbol of the rise of nationalism above superstate. A century later, in 1127, when the Pope was reinstated at Rome, the commercial and artistic rise of the Italian towns which was to culminate in the Reinaissance had already begun. The cathedral at Florence and the Doge’s palaoe at Venice were building. And out from Genoa and Venice and Portgual and Spain plied the busy caravels which, with the compass, before the century’s end, were to find a new world , and a way round Africa at last.

By 1527 Church and State were taking * their present forms. England, France, Portugal, • and Spain were already in full nationalistic rivalry for possessions abroad and in the new treasure continent overseas. In that year Machiavelli, expounder of statecraft, died. In that year, too,. Henry VIII. took the first step towards severing England from the religious headship of the Pope by starting a secret suit before the Pope’s legate for his divorce from Catherine. Meanwhile the Pope was shut up in the Castle of St. Angelo at Rome, a prisoner of Catherine’s nephew, Charles V., the- last Holy Roman Emperor. In Germany thousands of peasants, following the lead of a revolting monk,, Martin Luther, were denying the rule of the Pope. An English, physician, William Harvey, in 1027, was* about to publish his Latin treatise, showing how the blood circulated through the arteries and back through the veins. Galileo was experimenting with mechanics, and Lord Bacon, patron of scientific research, had just died. The English Parliament, resisting the exactions of Charles 1., drew up the Petition of Rights. Democracy and scientific method, destined to be the ruling passions of the next three centuries, were being born. A century later they were growing up. In 1727 Voltaire, who was visiting England, attended the funeral of Sir Isaac Newton, discoverer of gravitation. Robert Walpole, first Prime Minister, was in power, and Parliament and the cabinet, rather than the. King, really governed the country. In 1827 two tram railroads were built in the United States, a three-mile road in Quincy, Mass., and a nine-mile one in Maueli Chunk, Pa. The/age of steam was just around the corner, and those of gasoline and electricity within the compass of the century.