But we must beware of excess in the direction of the unalterability of race. The dogma of the non-transmissibility of acquired qualities is by no means established; it seems not improbable that mental acquisitions are so transmitted in some degree, though with only very slight effect in each generation. Even now, when the difficulties of the principle of transmission of acquired qualities are generally understood, almost all those who deal with the problem of the genesis of mental and physical peculiarities of races find themselves driven to postulate the principle in order to explain the facts. And this in itself constitutes evidence of a certain value in support of the validity of the principle.
Again, we must beware of assuming that there are no selective processes operating among us. Although natural selection may be almost inoperative, there may well be at work other forms of selection, social selections; and these are specially powerful amongst populations of blended stocks.
Summing up on the durability of racial peculiarities, we may say that racial qualities are extremely persistent; but that, nevertheless, they are subject to slow modifications when the conditions of life are greatly changed, as by emigration, or by changes of climate, or by social revolutions, and especially among populations of mixed origin.
To return now to the question of mental homogeneity of a population as a condition of national character and collective mental life. Purity of race is the most obvious condition of such homogeneity; but few, if any, nations that have attained any high level of civilisation have been racially homogeneous; probably for the simple reason that the civilisation of such a nation would crystallise at an early stage into rigid forms which would render further progress impossible. This has been the fate of most civilisations of the past; as Walter Bagehot put it, their cake of custom has so hardened as to become brittle, incapable of partial modification and growth, so that, like a crystal, it must either resist completely every modifying influence or be shattered irretrievably[62].
Certainly none of the European nations are racially homogeneous. Nevertheless, some of them approach homogeneity of innate qualities, or, rather, the degree of heterogeneity is much less in some than in others. Consider the case of England. Before the Anglo-Saxon invasion the population consisted in all probability of a mixture of the northern fair race with a darker race, probably that of H. Mediterraneus, in some proportion that we cannot determine, with small islands of H. Alpinus or of stocks formed by an earlier blending of this with the Nordic race. The Anglo-Saxon invasion brought great numbers of the pure representatives of the Northern race of closely allied stocks; and these did not confine themselves to any one region, but, entering at many points of the south and east coasts, diffused themselves throughout almost all England, imposing themselves as masters upon those Britons whom they did not drive out. Ever since that time a crossing of the stocks has been going on freely, little hindered by differences of area, language, law, or custom. And, with the exception of small numbers of the Northern stock, Danes and Normans, the population has not received any considerable additions since the Saxon invasion.
Now it has been shown by a simple calculation that, given three generations to the century, each one of us might claim ten million ancestors in the year 1000 A.D.; while in the fifth century, when this process of intermarriage began, the number would be enormous, some thousands of millions; that is, if consanguine marriages had never taken place. These figures make it clear that, in any mixed population in which intermarriage takes place freely, the two or more stocks must, after a comparatively brief period of time, become thoroughly blended, on one condition—namely, that the cross between the pure stocks is a stable stock, fertile inter se and with both the parent stocks. There seems to be no doubt that this was the case with the British and the Anglo-Saxon stocks, and that the English form now a stable new subrace, or secondary race, in which the qualities of the northern race predominate. The subrace may be regarded as innately homogeneous in fairly high degree; not so homogeneous as a people of unmixed racial origin, or one formed by a blending of more remote date, but more so than most of the European nations. This is the sense in which we must understand the word race, in discussing the influence of race upon national character.
In most of the European countries the original mixture of races has been greater and the degree of blending less intimate. Thus France has the three stocks, H. Europaeus, Alpinus, Mediterraneus, all largely represented; but they have remained in some degree geographically separated in three belts running east and west[63]. Hence there are greater innate mental differences between Frenchmen than between Englishmen. Nevertheless the strength of the Roman civilisation of Gaul sufficed to abolish differences of language and institutions and to assimilate the later coming Northmen, Franks and Normans; while the centralised system of administration, established in accordance with the innate tendencies of the major part of the population, has completed the work of a long series of national wars, and has produced a firmly united nation, bound by common traditions and moulded by common institutions. The greater centralisation of France seems to have compensated for the less degree of innate uniformity, so that the French people is hardly, if at all, less truly a nation than our own.
In our own nation one racial cleft still remains. The Irish have never undergone that intimate mixture and blending with the Anglo-Saxon stock which has produced the English subrace; and so they remain an element which seriously disturbs the harmony of the national mind. And the same is perhaps true in a less degree of the Welsh people. On the other hand, the Scottish people, although they enjoyed their independent system of government for much longer periods than the Irish and Welsh and have a system of laws and customs differing in many respects from the English, and indeed may be said to have achieved a considerable degree of independent nationhood, have nevertheless become thoroughly incorporated in the British nation; for in the main mass of the Scotch the same Northern race is the greatly predominant element.
But it is not till we consider such a country as Austria-Hungary that we see the full importance of homogeneity of a people for the development of a national mind. There several races and subraces, one at least with a strong yellow strain, are grouped together under one flag; but they remain separated by language and by distribution and by tradition, and, therefore, are but little mixed and still less blended. Under such conditions a national mind cannot be formed. The elements of different racial stock threaten to fall apart at any moment[64].
Going further afield, contrast India with China, two regions geographically comparable in area and in density of population and in other ways. The population of China is the most racially homogeneous of all large populations in the world. Hence an extreme uniformity of culture and social environment, which still further accentuates the uniformity of mental type. Hence, in spite of the imperfection of means of communication, we find great political stability and a considerable degree of national feeling, likely to be followed before long by harmonious national thought and action on the part of this vast nation. The one great distracting and disturbing factor in the life of China has been the intrusion of the Manchus, a people of somewhat different race and traditions.
On the other hand, India is peopled by many different stocks, and, although these are geographically much mixed, they are but very little blended, owing to the prevalence from early times of the caste system. The light coloured intellectual Brahman lives side by side with small black folk, as different physically and mentally as the Englishman and the Hottentot; and there are also large numbers of other widely differing racial stocks, including some of yellow race. Hence an extreme diversity of social environment, save in the case of the Moslem converts, who, however, being scattered among the rest, do but increase the endless variety of custom, creed, and social environment. Hence the people of India have never been bound together in the slightest degree, save purely externally by the power of foreign conquerors, the Moguls and the British; and hence, even though nations have begun at various times to take form in various areas, as e.g. the Sikh nation, they have never achieved any high degree of permanence and stability and are restricted in area and numbers.
Now let us consider for a moment an apparent exception from the conclusion to which the foregoing argument seems to point—namely, that homogeneity of innate qualities is the prime condition of a developed and harmonious national life.
The most striking exception is afforded by the people of the United States of America, or the American nation. There we see a great area populated by immigrants from every part and race of Europe in times so recent that, although they are pretty well mixed, they are but little blended by crossing; a considerable part of the population still consisting of actual immigrants and their children. Here, then, there can be no question of any homogeneity as regards innate mental qualities. Nevertheless, the people is truly a nation and, perhaps, further advanced in the evolution of national consciousness, thought, and action than many other of the civilised peoples. This we must attribute to homogeneity of mental qualities which is in the main not innate but acquired, a uniformity of acquired qualities, especially of all those that are most important for national life.
Following Münsterberg’s recent account of The Psychology of the American People we may recognise as individual characteristics, almost universally diffused, a spirit of self-direction and self confidence, of independence and initiative of a degree unknown elsewhere, a marvellous optimism or hopefulness both in private and public affairs, a great seriousness tinged with religion, a humourousness, an interest in the welfare of society, a high degree of self-respect, and a pride and confidence in the present and still more in the future of the nation; an intense activity and a great desire for self-improvement; a truly democratic spirit which regards all men (or rather all white men) as essentially or potentially equal, and a complete intolerance of caste.
Such high degree of acquired homogeneity of individual qualities seems to be due in about equal parts to uniformity of social and of physical environment, both of which make strongly in the same direction. The physical environment consists in a great and rich territory, still only partially developed, a fairly uniform climate, and a uniformity of the physical products of human labour resulting from the immense development of the means of communication. The importance of the physical uniformity we may realize on reflecting that the one great divergence of physical conditions, the sub-tropical climate of the southern States, gave rise to the one great and dangerous division of the people which for a time threatened the harmonious development of the national life; that is to say, the civil war was due to the divergence of the social system and economic interests of the southern States resulting from their sub-tropical climate.
The uniformity of social environment we must ascribe, firstly and chiefly, to the fortunate circumstance that the first immigrants were men of one well marked and highly superior type, men who possessed in the fullest measure the independence of character and the initiative of the fair northern race, and who firmly established the superior social environment of individualistic type that had been gradually evolved in England. Secondly, to the fact that the peopling of the whole country has taken place by diffusion from this strongly organised initial society; its institutions and ideas, especially its language, its political freedom, its social seriousness, being carried everywhere. Thirdly, to the fact that the country was just such as to give the greatest scope to, and so to develop, these innate tendencies of the earliest settlers and their successors. Fourthly, to the fact that the great diffusion of the population of mixed origin has only taken place since the means of communication have become very highly developed. Consider, as one example of the effects of the ease of communication between all parts, the influence of the American Sunday newspapers. These papers are read on an enormous scale all over the continent; and the bulk of the contents of those published in different places is identical, being prepared and printed in New York, or other great city, and then sent out to be blended with a little local matter in each centre of publication; thus every Sunday morning vast numbers are reading the same stuff. Lastly, it must be added, it is largely due to the fact that in the main the population has been recruited by those elements of different European peoples who shared in some degree the leading tendencies of the American character, independence, initiative, energy and hopefulness; for it is only such people who will tear themselves from their places in an old civilisation and face the unknown possibilities of a distant continent. In spite of an increasing proportion of emigrants of a rather unlike type from south-eastern Europe, there seems good ground for hope that these factors will continue to secure a sufficient uniformity of acquired qualities, until the diverse elements shall have been fused by intermarriage to a new and stable subrace, innately homogeneous.
The Americans are, then, no exception to the rule that the evolution of a national mind presupposes a certain considerable degree of homogeneity of mental qualities among the individuals of which the nation is composed. They merely show that, under peculiarly favourable physical and social conditions, a sufficient degree of such homogeneity may perhaps be secured in spite of considerable racial heterogeneity. But the favourable issue of the vast experiment is not yet completely assured.
There remains in the American people one great section of the population, namely the negroes and the men of partly negro descent, whose innate qualities, mental and physical, are so different from those of the rest of the population, that it seems to be incapable of absorption into the nation. This section remains within the nation as a foreign body which it can neither absorb nor extrude and which is a perpetual disturber and menace to the national life. The only hope of solving this difficult problem seems to lie in the possibility of territorial segregation of the coloured population in an area in which it might, with assistance from the American people, form an independent nation. At present it illustrates in the most forcible manner the thesis of this chapter.
The geographical peculiarities of the country inhabited by a nation may greatly favour, or may make against, homogeneity, in so far as this depends on acquired interests and sentiments.
The division of the territory occupied by a nation by any physical barrier makes against homogeneity and therefore against national unity; whereas absence of internal barriers and the presence of well marked natural boundaries afford conditions the most favourable to homogeneity.
Almost all the great and stable nations have occupied well-defined natural territories. In Great Britain and Japan the national spirit is perhaps more developed than elsewhere. How much does Great Britain or Japan owe this to the insular character of its territory, which from early days has sharply marked off the people from all others, making of them a well-defined and closed group, within which free intermarriage has given homogeneity of innate qualities, and within which a national culture has grown up undisturbed; so that by mental and physical type, and by language, religion, tradition and sentiment, the people are sharply marked off from all others, and assimilated to one another!
A unitary well-defined territory of well marked and fairly uniform character tends to national unity, not only through making the community a relatively closed one, but also by aiding the imagination to grasp the idea of the nation and offering a common object to the affections and sentiments of the people.
Contrast in this respect the physical characters of England and Germany. The boundaries of the latter are almost everywhere artificial and arbitrary and have fluctuated greatly. It would be impossible for a poet to write of Germany as Shakespeare wrote of England:—
This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war; This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea,and all the rest of that splendid passage. France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Denmark, Scandinavia, are all more fortunate than Germany or Austria in this respect; and the lack of such natural boundaries has been in the past, and threatens to be in the future, a source of weakness to the German nation. We may, I think, not improbably attribute, in part at least, to this circumstance a peculiarity often noticed in German emigrants—namely, that they rapidly become denationalised and assimilated by the peoples among whom they settle, and that an Americanised German, for example, has often less sympathetic feeling for Germany than a foreigner. For, owing largely to the lack of natural boundaries and the consequent fluctuations that have occurred, and the mingling and blending with other peoples, Germany is a less clear-cut conception than Great Britain or France; to be a German is something much less definite than to be an Englishman or a Japanese, or even a Frenchman or a Spaniard[65]. And the presence or lack of definite natural territorial boundaries operates in a similar way through many centuries, determining on the one hand historical continuity to a people as a whole, or on the other hand breaches of historical continuity.
The United States of America afford a fine example of the binding influence of a well-defined territory; for here the effect is clearly isolated from racial factors and from slowly accumulated tradition. The Monroe doctrine is the outward official expression of this effect. The private individual effect is a sense of part ownership of a splendid territory with a great future before it. And we are told, I believe truly, that this sense is very strong and very generally diffused even among immigrants; that it inspires an unselfish enthusiasm for the work of developing the immense resources of the country; that this is the idealistic motive of much of the intense activity which we are apt to ascribe to the love of the ‘almighty dollar’; and that it is one of the main causes of the rapid assimilation of immigrants to the national type of mind.
The Chinese nation, again, owes its existence and its homogeneity of mental and physical type to geographical unity. Roughly, China consists of the basins of two immense rivers, not separated from one another by any great physical barrier, but forming a compact territory well marked off save in the north. It comprises no such partially separate areas as in Europe are constituted by Spain, or Italy, or Greece, or Scandinavia, or even France; almost all parts are well adapted for agriculture. Hence, largely, the national unity and the national sentiment which have long existed, and possibly a latent capacity for national thought and action.
Perhaps the most striking instance of all is ancient Egypt. There, in the long strip of land rendered fertile by the waters of the Nile, a people of mixed origin was long shut up and isolated; there all men felt their immediate dependence on the same great powers, the great river which once a year overflows its banks, and the scorching sun which passes every day across a cloudless sky. There all men looked out on the same unvarying and unvaried landscape, hoped and feared for the same causes, suffered the same pains, prayed for the same goods. There was formed one of the most stable and enduring of nations, whose uniform culture certainly bears the impress of the uniform monotonous physical environment[66].
The other way in which physical environment affects homogeneity is by determining similarity or difference of occupations and, through them, similarities or differences of practical interests and of acquired qualities. So long as such differences are determined in many small areas, the result is merely a greater differentiation of the parts, without danger to the unity of the whole nation. But, when the physical differences divide a whole people into two or more locally separate groups differing in occupation and interests and habits, they endanger the unity of the whole. There are to-day many countries in which the distribution of mineral wealth is exerting an influence of this sort, giving rise to the differentiation of an industrial area from agricultural areas and a consequent divergence of interests and of mental habits; notably South Africa, Spain, and Italy.
Great Britain is fortunate in this respect also. Its geological formation presents on a small scale all the principal strata from the oldest to the most recent, a fact which secures great diversity within a compact area, an area too compact to allow of divergences of population being produced by differences of geological formation; so that it enjoys the advantages of diversity without its drawbacks. Although a certain degree of differentiation between north and south may be noted, it is not sharp or great enough to be dangerous. But let us imagine that coal and iron had been confined to Scotland. Would there be now the same harmony between the two countries as actually obtains? The United States of America afford a good illustration of this principle, as I have already pointed out; the sub-tropical climate of the southern states gave rise to a differentiation of occupation, and consequently of ideas and interests and sentiments, which was almost fatal to the unity of the nation. A similar differentiation between the agricultural west and the industrial and commercial east seems to be the greatest danger to the future unity of the nation; and the same may be said of the Canadian people.
Ireland illustrates well the effects of both kinds of physical influence. The Irish Channel has perpetuated that difference of race and consequent difference of religion, which, but for it, would probably have been wiped out by free intermarriage; while the lack of coal and iron in the greater part of the country has prevented the spread of industrialism, and has thus accentuated the difference between the Irish people and the English. And it is obvious that among the Protestants of Ulster the accessibility of coal and iron, maintaining a divergence of occupations and of interests which prevents racial and cultural blending, perpetuates the racial and traditional differences between them and the rest of the population.
CHAPTER VIII
FREEDOM OF COMMUNICATION AS A CONDITION OF NATIONAL LIFE
Let us consider now very briefly in relation to the life of a nation a second essential condition of all collective mental life—namely, that the individuals shall be in free communication with one another. This is obviously necessary to the formation of national mind and character. It is only through an immense development of the means of communication, especially the printing press, the railway and the telegraph, that the modern Nation-State has become possible, and has become the dominant type of political organism. So familiar are we with this type, that we are apt to identify the Nation and the State and to regard the large Nation-State as the normal type of State and of Nation, forgetting that its evolution was not possible before the modern period.
In the ancient world the City-State was the dominant type of political organism; and to Plato and Aristotle any other type seemed undesirable, if not impossible. For they recognised that collective deliberation and volition are essential to the true State. Aristotle, trying to imagine a vast city, remarks—“But a city, having such vast circuit, would contain a nation rather than a state, like Babylon.” The translator there uses the word ‘nation,’ not in the modern sense, but rather as we use ‘people’ to denote a population of common stock not organised to form a nation. The limits of the political organism capable of a collective mental life were rightly held to be set by the number of citizens who could live so close together as to meet in one place to discuss all public affairs by word of mouth.
The great empires of antiquity were not nations; they had no collective mental life. Although the Roman Empire, in the course of its long and marvellous history, did succeed in generating in almost all its subject peoples a certain sentiment of pride in and attachment to the Empire, it cannot be said to have welded them into one nation; for, in spite of the splendid system of roads and of posting, communication between the parts was too difficult and slow to permit the reciprocal influences essential to collective life. As in all the ancient empires, the parts were held together only by a centralised despotic executive organisation; there was no possibility of collective deliberation and volition[67].
All through history there has obviously been some correlation between the size of political organisms and the degree of development of means of communication. At the present time those means have become so highly developed that the widest spaces of land and sea no longer present any insuperable limits to the size of nations; and the natural tendency for the growth of the larger states at the expense of the smaller, by the absorption of the latter, seems to be increasingly strong. It seems not unlikely that almost the whole population of the world will shortly be included in five immense States—the Russian or Slav, the Central European, the British, the American, and the Yellow or East Asiatic State. The freedom of communication between the countries of Europe is now certainly sufficient to allow of their forming a single nation, if other conditions, such as diversities of racial type and of historical sentiments, would permit it.
Although, then, the platform and the orator and the assembly remain important influences in modern times, it is primarily the telegraph, wireless telegraphy, the printing press, and the steam engine, that have rendered possible the large modern nations; for these have facilitated the dissemination of news and the expression of feeling and opinion on a large scale, and the free circulation of persons[68].
Without this freedom of communication the various parts of the nation cannot become adequately conscious of one another; and the idea of the whole must remain very rudimentary in the minds of individuals; each part of the whole remains ignorant of many other parts, and there can be no vivid consciousness of a common welfare and a common purpose. But, more important still, there can be none of that massive influence of the whole upon each of the units which is of the essence of collective mental life. Of these means of reciprocal influence the press is the most important; though, of course, its great influence is only rendered possible by the railway and the telegraph.
Hence we find that it is as regards the press that Great Britain and America differ most markedly from such states as Germany, and still more Russia. To an Englishman or American the meagre news-sheets which in Germany take the place of our daily and weekly press bring a shock of astonishment when he first discovers them; and that astonishment is not diminished when he finds that the best people hardly trouble to look at them occasionally[69].
It is interesting to note how the general election of January, 1910 illustrated the importance of improved means of communication. It was found that the number of citizens voting at the polls was a far larger proportion of those on the register than at any previous election; and, in this respect, the election was a more complete expression of the will of the people than any preceding one. This seems to have been due to the use of the motor-car, at that time the latest great addition to our means of communication.
The modern improvements of means of communication tend strongly to diminish the importance of the geographical factors we considered in the foregoing chapter; for they practically abolish what in earlier ages were physical barriers to intercourse; they render capital and labour more mobile; and they make many forms of industry less dependent upon local physical conditions and, therefore, less strictly confined by geographical factors. As instances of important developments of this order in the recent past or near future, the reader may be reminded of the railway over the Andes between Chile and Argentina, the tunnels through the Alps, the Channel tunnel, the Siberian railway, the Suez and Panama canals, the Cape to Cairo railway, and, above all, aerial transport. All these make for free intercourse between peoples.
Easy means of communication promote development in the direction of the organic unity of a nation in another way—namely, they promote specialisation of the functions of different regions; they thus render local groups incapable of living as relatively independent closed communities; for they make each local group more dependent upon others, each upon all and the whole upon each; hence they develop the common interest of each part in the good of the whole.
This influence already extends beyond national groups and it had been hoped that its further growth was about to render war between nations impossible[70]. To-day England is contemplating a task never before attempted, the fusing into one nation of the peoples of the mother-country and her distant colonies. Whether or no she will succeed depends upon whether the enormously increased facilities of communication can overcome the principal effects of physical barriers that we have noted—namely, lack of intermarriage and divergence of occupations, with the consequent divergence of mental type and interests. The task is infinitely more difficult than the establishment of such an Empire as the Roman; not because the distances are greater, but because the union must take the form of nationhood, because it must take the form of a collective mind and not that of a merely executive organisation. But, in the considerations which have shown us that membership in and devotion to a smaller group is by no means adverse to membership in and devotion to a larger group, we have ground for believing that the task is not impossible of achievement.
The slow rate of progress towards nationhood of such peoples as the Russian and the Chinese has been largely due to lack of means of free communication between the parts of these countries. On the introduction of improved communications, we may expect to see rapid progress of this kind; for many of the other essential conditions are already present in both countries.
The fact that in the Nation-State the communications between individuals and between the parts of the whole are in the main indirect, mediated by the press, the telegraph, and the printed word in general, rather than by voice and gesture and the other direct bodily expressions of thought and emotion, modifies the primary manifestations of group life in important ways which we must notice in a later chapter.
CHAPTER IX
THE PART OF LEADERS IN NATIONAL LIFE
We turn now to a third very important condition of the growth of the national mind, one which also has its analogue in both the crowd and the army. A crowd always tends to follow some leader in thought, feeling, and action; and its actions are effective in proportion as it does so. To follow and obey a leader is the simplest, most rudimentary fashion in which the crowd’s action may become more effective, consistent, intelligent, controlled. Not any one can be such a leader; exceptional qualities are necessary. In every army the importance of leadership is fully recognised. A hierarchy of leaders is the essence of its organisation. In the deliberately organised army, the appointment of leaders is the principal and almost the sole direct means taken by the State to organise the army. Everything is done to give to the leaders of each grade the greatest possible prestige, especially by multiplying and accentuating the distinctions between the grades. Though much can be accomplished in this way, unless the men chosen as leaders have in some degree the superior qualities required by their position in the hierarchy, the whole organisation will be of little value.
The same is true in much higher degree of nations. If a people is to become a nation, it must be capable of producing personalities of exceptional powers, who will play the part of leaders; and the special endowments of the national leader require to be more pronounced and exceptional, of a higher order, than those required for the exercise of leadership over a fortuitous crowd.
Such personalities, more effectively perhaps than any other factors, engender national unity and bring it to a high pitch. There are regions in which the other main conditions of national unity have long obtained, but which have failed to become the seat of any enduring nation. Although the greater part of Africa, perhaps the richest continent of the globe, has been in the possession of the negro races during all the ages in which the European, Asiatic, and American civilisations were being developed, those races have never founded a nation. Nevertheless many, perhaps most, negroes are capable of acquiring European culture and of turning it to good account. And, when brought under the influence of Arabs or men of other races, they have formed rudimentary nations[71]. The incapacity to form a nation must be connected with the fact that the race has never produced any individuals of really high mental and moral endowments, even when brought under foreign influences; and it would seem that it is incapable of producing such individuals; the few distinguished negroes, so called, of America—such as Douglas, Booker Washington, Du Bois—have been, I believe, in all cases mulattoes or had some proportion of white blood. We may fairly ascribe the incapacity of the negro race to form a nation to the lack of men endowed with the qualities of great leaders, even more than to the lower level of average capacity. On the other hand, there is at least one people which, in the absence of every other condition, has continued to retain something of the character of a nation for many generations—namely, the Jews. The Jews are not even racially homogeneous, and they are scattered through all the world under the most varied physical conditions; yet the influence of a succession of men of exceptional power, Moses and his successors the prophets, all devoted to the same end—namely, the establishment of the Jewish nation and religion—has lived on through many generations and still holds this people together, marking it off from all others.
This is an extreme instance. But another almost equally striking case is that of the Arab nation, which has owed its existence to one man. The Arab nation was made by the genius of Mahomet, who welded together, by the force of his personality and the originality and intensity of his religious conviction, the warring idolatrous clans of Arabia. Until his advent these had been a scattered multitude, in spite of racial and geographical uniformity, geographical isolation, and fairly free intercommunication. We have here one of the purest, clearest instances of the effect of great personalities in furthering nationhood; for there seems to be no reason to believe that, if Mahomet had not lived, any such development of the Arabian people would have taken place.
M. le Bon has produced a curious piece of evidence bearing on this question. He has measured the cranial capacity of a great number of skulls of different races, and has shown that any large collection of skulls from one of the peoples who have formed a progressive nation invariably contains a certain small number of skulls of markedly superior capacity, implying exceptionally large brains; while any similar collection of skulls from one of the unprogressive peoples, like the negro, differs, not so much in the smaller average size of the brain, as in the greater uniformity of size, that is to say, the absence of individuals of exceptionally large brains[72]. He, rightly, I think, sees in the absence of such individuals a main condition of the unprogressive character of these races; and, in the exceptionally large brains produced among the other peoples, a main condition of their progress.
These indications are borne out by a review of the history of any nation that has achieved a considerable development. Every such people has its national heroes whom it rightly glorifies or worships; for to them it owes in chief part its existence.
To them also it owes in large measure the forms of its institutions, its religion, its dominant ideas and ideals, its morals, its art and literature, all that of which it is most proud, all its victories of peace as well as of war, the memory of which and the common pride in which is the strongest of all national bonds[73].
Who can estimate the enormous influence of Confucius and Laotse in moulding and rendering uniform the culture of China? The influence of single individuals has undoubtedly been greater in the early than in the later stages of civilisation; for there was then a more open field, a virgin soil, as it were, for the reception of their influence. In the developed nation the mass of accumulated knowledge and tradition is so much greater, that the modifications and additions made by any one man necessarily are relatively small.
The leading modern nations owe their position to their having produced great men in considerable numbers; for that reason also no one man stands out so prominently as Mahomet or Confucius or Moses. Nevertheless their existence can in many cases be traced to some few great men. Would Germany now be a nation, but for Frederick the Great and Bismarck? Would America, but for Washington, Hamilton, and Lincoln? Would Italy, but for Garibaldi and Mazzini and Cavour? How greatly is the unity of national spirit and tradition among Englishmen due to the great writers who have produced the national literature, and to the great statesmen and soldiers and sailors who have given her a proud position in the world! What would England be now if Shakespeare, Newton and Darwin, Cromwell and Chatham, Marlborough and Nelson and Wellington had never been born?
And it is not only the men of great genius who are essential to the modern nation, but also men of more than average powers, though not of the very highest.
Let us try to imagine the fifty leading minds in each great department of activity suddenly removed from among us. That will help us to realise the extent to which the mental life of the nation is dependent on them. Clearly, we should be reduced to intellectual, moral, and aesthetic chaos and nullity in a very short time. If a similar state of affairs should continue for some few generations, Britain would very soon cease to be of any importance in the world. The force of national traditions might keep up a certain unity; but we should be a people, or a crowd, living in the past, without energy, without pride in the present or hope in the future, having perhaps a little melancholy national sentiment, but incapable of national thought or action.
The continuance of the power and prosperity and unity of national life, the continued existence of the national mind and character, depends, then, upon the continued production of numbers of such men of more than average capacity. It is these men who keep alive from generation to generation, and spread among the masses and so render effective, the ideas and the moral influence of the men of supremely great powers. These men exert a guidance and a selection over the cultural elements which the mass of men absorb. They praise what they believe to be good, and decry what they believe to be bad; and, in virtue of the prestige which their exceptional powers have brought them, their verdict is accepted and moulds popular opinion and sentiment.
Consider how great in this way has been the influence of men like Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and Ruskin. The tone and standard of taste, thought, and sentiment are set and maintained by such men. It is in their minds chiefly that the system of ideals and sentiments, which are the guiding principles and moving forces of the national mind, is perpetuated. They are truly ‘the salt of the earth’; without them the nation would soon fall into fragments, or become an inert and powerless mass of but low degree of organisation and unity.
It is because the national ideals and sentiments are formed by these leading spirits, and are perpetuated and developed by them, and by them impressed in some degree upon the mass of the people, and because in all national movements their influence predominates, that the judgments and actions, the character and the sentiments, of a nation may be different from, and in the higher nations are superior to those of the average men of the nation. As Fouillée said—“The national character is not always best expressed by the mass, by the vulgar, nor even by the actual majority. There exists a natural élite which, better than all the rest, represents the soul of the entire people, its radical ideas and its most essential tendencies. This is what the politicians too often forget[74].” That is to say, it is what they forget when, as is too often the case in this country, they consider that no movement must be undertaken till the mass of the people demands it. They ignore the fact that leadership is essential to the maintenance of national life at a high level, and, instead of exercising initiative, they wait for it to come from below—wait for a mandate, as they say. The late President Rooseveldt was a fine example of the contrary type of statesmanship. The character of the talents displayed by these exceptionally gifted individuals determines largely the form of the civilisation and, through shaping the social environment, tends to bring the minds of the mass of individuals more or less into harmony with it, giving them something of the same tendencies.
The men of genius of certain peoples, more especially peoples of relative racial purity, have excelled in some one direction. Thus the Semites have produced great religious teachers and little else, and have given to the world its three great monotheistic religions. The Tartar race has produced from time to time great soldiers and little else. It has made immense conquests and established dynasties ruling over other peoples. But, as in the case of the Turks, who owe their national existence to a line of great despots of the house of Othman, they make little progress in civilisation and they do not unify the peoples they rule; for they produce ability of no other kind.
We see in most of the leading European nations the predominance of certain forms of genius. Modern Italy boasts chiefly men great in religion and art, perhaps owing to the predominance of Homo Mediterraneus; Spain in pictorial art and military conquest; England in poetry and administration and science; Germany in music and philosophy. Nevertheless, each of these peoples has produced men of the greatest power in all or several kinds; and this we may connect with the fact that they are all of very mixed racial composition. And we may add that France, the most composite or mixed racially, has produced the greatest variety of genius.
The production of the largest numbers of eminent men by peoples of mixed and blended racial elements, not too widely different, is what biological knowledge would lead us to expect. For, if a subrace is produced by crossing of varieties, it will be one of much greater variability than a pure race; as we see in the cases of the domesticated horse and dog and pigeon, of which the modern varieties are only kept pure by continual rejection of the departures from the standards, and of which the great variability renders possible the production, by selection of very marked new features in a brief period of time.
The many elements which go to form the mental constitution of an individual become, in a mixed race, variously combined. If the crossed races are very widely different, the results seem to be in nearly all cases bad. The character of the cross-bred is made up of divergent inharmonious tendencies, which give rise to internal conflict, just as the physical features appear in bizarre combination; what examples we have—the Spanish Americans, the Eurasians, the Mulattoes, the half-breeds of Java and Canada—seem to show that a people so composed will produce few great men and will not become a great nation.
But, when the crossed races are less widely divergent, the elements of which the mental constitution is composed (and which direct observation and analogy with physical heredity show to be transmitted more or less independently of one another from parent to offspring) have opportunities to come together in new combinations, which result in mental constitutions unlike those of either parent (that is to say, the cross-breds are variable); and among these new combinations, while some will form minds below the average, others will form minds above the average in various degrees; and these, so long as the constitution is not too much weakened by radical lack of harmony of its elements, will be the effective great men.
Incidentally, these considerations perhaps throw light on a fact much discussed—namely, that exceptional powers, especially when of highly specialised nature, are often exhibited by persons of unstable mental constitution; whence arises the popular belief that genius is allied to, or is a form of, insanity.
These considerations also raise a presumption that peoples derived by the blending of several stocks may be expected to have progressed further in civilisation and in national growth than those of purer stock; and that, while the racial purity of a people may give stability, such a people will be liable to arrest and crystallisation of civilisation at an early stage, before culture is sufficiently advanced to render possible a highly developed national life. These indications are well borne out by a survey of the peoples of the world. We may see here, in all probability, one of the main causes of the early crystallisation of Chinese civilisation. Homogeneity and racial purity have produced extreme stability, but at the cost of the variability which produces great and original minds, and, therefore, at the cost of capacity for national progress beyond an early stage.
CHAPTER X
OTHER CONDITIONS OF NATIONAL LIFE
In the two foregoing chapters, we have considered in relation to the life of nations three principal conditions essential to all collective mental life and action, even that of the unorganised crowd—namely, homogeneity, free communications and leadership. We have now to consider other conditions which may render the collective mental processes of nations very different from, and superior to, those of a mere crowd.
In considering a patriot army as exemplifying collective life of a relatively high level, we distinguished five principal conditions that raise it above the level of the mental life of the crowd, in addition to one which is present in some crowds. This last was a common well-defined purpose present to, and dominant in, the minds of all individuals. It is this condition mainly that renders the collective mental life of such an army so simple, so relatively easy to understand, and so extremely effective.
This condition—a clearly defined common purpose dominant in the minds of the great mass of the constituent units—is for the most part lacking in the life of nations; its absence is one of the principal reasons for the ineffectiveness and bewildering complexity of their mental life. It is, however, occasionally realised in national life, and then we see how immense is its influence. Such an occasion is a war for national existence. Consider how, when the excesses of the French Revolution excited all the monarchies of Europe to attack France, the French nation, becoming animated with the one strong purpose of asserting its right to exist and to choose its own form of government, successfully drove back all its enemies and rose to a height of power and glory greater than at any other period; and how, at the same time, its parts were welded more firmly together, so that it displayed a high degree of unity as well as of efficiency. Having achieved this high degree of unity and efficiency, the French nation, led on by the ambitions of Napoleon, became aggressive. And we are told by the historians that the attacks of Napoleon upon the various European peoples, which threatened to destroy whatever degree of national life those peoples had attained, were like the blows of a smith’s hammer and resulted in welding together and hardening into nations the loosely aggregated races ruled over by the various monarchs; and that in this way these attacks initiated the modern period of Nation-States[75].
War for national existence unifies nations. So long as the nation is not utterly shattered and crushed, such war greatly develops the national mind; because it makes one common purpose dominate the minds of all the citizens.
We are told that it is a practical maxim of cynical rulers to plunge their people into war when they are faced by dangerous internal discontents; and the reason usually given is that war diverts the attention of the people from their domestic grievances. But if it is a national war, a war in which the national existence is at stake, it does far more than merely divert attention; it binds the nation into a harmonious efficient whole by creating a common purpose; whereas, if the war is not of this order and is waged in some distant country and merely for some territorial aggrandisement, it has little or no such effect. Thus the recent Russo-Japanese war did little or nothing at the time to raise the Russian people in the scale of nationhood; it was followed by a period of national weakness; the national existence was not endangered, the objects of the war were too remote from the interests of the mass of the people to appeal to them strongly. Whereas the same war and the years of preparation for it, following upon the previous Chino-Japanese war, have made the Japanese one of the most efficient and harmonious nations of the world.
Another striking example of the same principle was the formation of modern Bulgaria as a strong Nation-State out of a population of quiet peasant proprietors united only by spatial proximity and by their racial distinctness from the surrounding populations. This creation of a strong nation out of a mere population of peasants was in the main the work of the war of 1885, by which the unprovoked attack of Servia was triumphantly repelled[76].
The unity and nationhood of modern Germany is largely due to similar causes; and the war of 1871 may fairly be said to have led to a further integration of the national life of the French people, in spite of their defeat. America owes something of the same kind to the Spanish war; and the entry of that nation into the Great War, long delayed as it was, will probably be found to have had a similar effect. The French and Italian nations have undoubtedly been welded more firmly by the Great War; while England and her sister and daughter nations (with the one sad exception of the Irish) have been united, by their co-operation in the one great purpose, to a degree which no other conceivable event could have achieved and which many generations of peaceful industry and enlightened political efforts might have failed to approach.
History offers no parallel to these effects of war; and it is difficult or impossible to imagine any other common purpose which could exert this binding influence in a similar degree. But it is worth while to notice that other and minor forms of international rivalry have corresponding effects. The international rivalry in aeronautics affords a contemporary illustration. Perhaps every one in this country has felt some degree of interest and satisfaction in the achievements of the adventurous spirits of our nation who have traversed the Atlantic by air. And it is probably largely owing to the prevalence of this national pride and purpose that, at a time demanding strict national economy, no voice has been raised against the enormous current expenditure of the government upon aeronautics.
Another and more important effect of the same kind is produced by the assumption of great national responsibilities in the way of administration in respect of backward peoples and undeveloped territories. The greatest example in history is the responsibility of Great Britain for the administration of India, gradually and only half-consciously assumed, but now keenly felt as at once a legitimate ground of national pride and a moral responsibility that cannot be laid aside. It is like the responsibility of the father of a family in its semi-instinctive origin and in its effects in steadying and strengthening character, for it imposes a responsibility which the nation, like the individual, cannot discharge indifferently without seriously damaging its reputation and prestige in the eyes of the world. Holland owes some of the strength of her nationhood to such influences; and the assumption by the American nation of responsibility for the peoples of Cuba and of the Phillipine islands cannot fail to bring them in some degree similar moral benefits[77].
Of the five other conditions of the higher development of a collective mind, let us notice, first and very briefly, continuity of existence, material and formal. Of course every nation has this in some degree, but some have it in much higher degree than others. The English nation is fortunate in this respect also. It has preserved both its formal and its material continuity in very high degree throughout many centuries, in fact ever since the Norman Conquest. No European nation can compare with it in this respect; it is only surpassed by China and perhaps Japan. The French nation has preserved its material continuity, its population and territory, in high degree. But the Great Revolution cut across and destroyed to a great extent its formal continuity, so that, as is sometimes said, the French nation has cut itself off from its past and made a new start; although, in doing so, it did not get rid of its highly centralised system of administration. The modern Italian and German nations are quite recent growths, their formal continuity having been subject to many interruptions. Spain, with her almost insular position, might have had continuity; but it was greatly disturbed by the imperial ambitions of her rulers in the sixteenth century and by the expulsion of the Moors. Greece is a striking example of loss of both material and formal continuity. The population of ancient Greece, which put her in the van of civilisation, has been largely abolished and supplanted by a different race; and her formal continuity also has suffered a number of complete ruptures.
Now material and formal continuity is, as we said, the essential presupposition of all the other main conditions of development of the collective mind. On it depends the strength of custom and tradition and, to a very great extent, the strength of national sentiment. It is, therefore, a principal condition of national stability; from it arise all the great conservative tendencies of the nation, all the forces that resist change; accordingly, the more complete and long enduring such continuity has been in the past, the greater is the prospect of its prolongation in the future. It is owing to the unbroken continuity of the English nation through so long a period that its organisation is so stable, its unwritten constitution so effective, at once stable and plastic, its national sentiment so strong, its complex uncoded system of judge-made law so nearly in harmony with popular feeling and therefore so respected. National organisation resting upon this basis of custom and traditional sentiment is the only kind that is really stable, that is not liable to be suddenly overthrown by internal upheavals or impacts from without. For it alone is rooted in the minds of all citizens in the forms of habit and sentiment. All other organisation is imposed by authority.
In this respect modern England and Germany offer a striking contrast that forces itself upon the most casual observation. As regards the mass of the people, the position of each individual in the organism of the German nation is officially determined by the written and codified law of the State; all personal status and relations are formally determined by official positions in this recently created system. Almost every individual carries about some badge or uniform indicating his position within the system. In England, the status and relations of individuals are determined by factors a thousand times more subtle and complex, involving many vaguely conceived and undefined traditions and sentiments. In Germany, it is almost true to say, if a man has no official position he has no position at all. In England, the comparatively few persons who have official positions have also their social positions by which their private relations are determined. They are officials only in their offices; whereas the German official is an official everywhere.
Other important topics we have to consider are (1) the organisation of the national mind; (2) the national self-consciousness; (3) the interaction of the nation as a whole with other nations. All these we may advantageously consider in the light of an analogy, the analogy between the individual mind and the collective mind of the nation. This is a much closer and more illuminating analogy than that between the nation, or society, and the material organism. The latter analogy has been developed in detail by H. Spencer, Schäffle[78] and others; it has now fallen into some disrepute. It has no doubt a certain value, but it is popularly used in a way that leads to quite unjustifiable conclusions. Of these fallacies by far the most commonly accepted is that which asserts that, just as every animal organism inevitably grows old and dies, so too must nations.
This is one of the most popular dogmas of amateur philosophers, and so distinguished a statesman as the late Lord Salisbury gave it countenance; while Mr A. J. Balfour in his recent Sidgwick Memorial Lecture[79] courageously breaks away and proposes to substitute for senility as the cause of decay the word decadence—a proposal which merely implies that he trusts less to the analogical argument from the material organism and more to empirical induction, to the observation of the fact that so many nations have decayed.