me features of a novel
and alien scheme of irresponsible oppression that was sought to be
imposed on them by Harald Fairhair, and which they incontinently made it
their chief and immediate business to evade. They also set up no joint
or collective establishment with powers for the Common Defense, nor does
it appear that such a notion had occurred to them.

In the history of its installation there is no hint that the men who set
up this Icelandic Commonwealth had any sense of the need, or even of the
feasibility, of such a coercive government as would be involved in
concerted preparation for the common defense. Subjection to personal
rule, or to official rule in any degree of attenuation, was not
comprised in their traditional experience of citizenship; and it was
necessarily out of the elements comprised in this traditional experience
that the new structure would have to be built up. The new commonwealth
was necessarily erected on the premises afforded by the received scheme
of use and wont; and this received scheme had come down out of
pre-feudal conditions, without having passed under the discipline of
that regime of coercion which the feudal system had imposed on the rest
of Europe, and so had established as an "immemorial usage" and a "second
nature" among the populations of Christendom. The resulting character of
the Icelandic Commonwealth is sufficiently striking when contrasted with
the case of the English commonwealth of the seventeenth century, or the
later French and American republics. These, all and several, came out of
a protracted experience in feudalistic state-making and State policy;
and the common defense--frequently on the offensive--with its necessary
coercive machinery and its submissive loyalty, consequently would take
the central place in the resulting civic structure.

To close the tale of the Icelandic commonwealth it may be added that
their republic of insubordinate citizens presently fell into default,
systematic misuse, under the disorders brought on by an accumulation of
wealth, and that it died of legal fiction and constitutional formalities
after some experience at the hands of able and ambitious statesmen in
contact with an alien government drawn on the coercive plan. The clay
vessel failed to make good among the iron pots, and so proved its
unfitness to survive in the world of Christian nations,--very much as
the Chinese are today at the mercy of the defensive rapacity of the
Powers.