PART II
THE NATIONAL MIND AND CHARACTER
Chapter Vi
Introductory
What is a Nation?
Having studied the most general principles of the collective mental
life, as exemplified in the two extreme forms of the unorganised
crowd and the highly organised army, having briefly noted the
principal classes of groups that enjoy a collective mental life, and
having examined the nature and function of the group spirit in the
organisation of the group mind, we may now take up the study of
the most interesting, most complex and most important kind of
group mind, namely the mind of a nation-state[42].
Many attempts have been made to define more exactly the
popular notion of a nation. The word has sometimes been applied
to large groups of primitive folk that show evidence of close racial
affinity and similarity of customs, such as the Iroquois tribes of
North America, or the Hun invaders of medieval Europe. In popular
usage the word is more commonly restricted to the great nation-states
of modern times. It must be recognised that, since human
societies of present and past times present every conceivable variety
of composition and structure, it is impracticable to lay down any
strict definition and to classify populations as falling definitely
within or outside the class.
But, though we may not hope to lay down a definition which
shall clearly mark off the nation from all other human groups, we
may usefully define the nation-state or nation in the most highly
developed form that it has yet attained, and recognise that various
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peoples partake of the nature of, or approach the type of, the nation
in so far as they exhibit something of its essential character.
It is perhaps hardly necessary to point out that it is only in the
nation-state, or nation in the fullest sense of the word, that the
state becomes identical with the nation, and that this identification
has only been achieved in modern history by the growth among
a few peoples of representative institutions and the democratic
spirit.
In the work mentioned above Prof. Ramsay Muir writes—“What
do we mean by a Nation? It is obviously not the same thing as
a race, and not the same thing as a state. It may be provisionally
defined as a body of people who feel themselves to be naturally
linked together by certain affinities which are so strong and real
for them that they can live happily together, are dissatisfied when
disunited, and cannot tolerate subjection to peoples who do not
share these ties[43].” The provisional definition has the merit of
recognising that nationhood is essentially a mental condition and
must be defined in psychological terms. The author goes on to
inquire—“What are the ties of affinity which are necessary to
constitute a nation?” He then considers the following conditions:
(1) “occupation of a defined geographical area,” (2) “unity of race,”
(3) “unity of language,” (4) “unity of religion,” (5) “common subjection,
during a long stretch of time, to a firm and systematic
government,” (6) “community of economic interest, with the similarity
of occupations and outlook which it brings,” (7) “the possession
of a common tradition, a memory of sufferings endured and victories
won in common, expressed in song and legend, in the dear names
of great personalities that seem to embody in themselves the
character and ideals of the nation, in the names also of sacred places
wherein the national memory is enshrined.” Of the last he says
that it is “the most potent of all nation-moulding factors, the one
indispensable factor”; thus showing his sense of the essentially
psychological nature of nationhood. But of all the other six ‘factors’
enumerated, he shows that they are unessential. After reaching this
negative conclusion, that nationhood cannot be defined by any one
of these marks or factors, he writes: “Nationality, then, is an elusive
idea, difficult to define. It cannot be tested or analysed by formulæ,
such as German professors love. Least of all must it be interpreted
by the brutal and childish doctrine of racialism. Its essence is a
sentiment, and in the last resort we can only say that a nation is
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a nation because its members passionately and unanimously believe
it to be so. But they can only believe it to be so if there exist among
them real and strong affinities; if they are not divided by any artificially
maintained separation between the mixed races from which
they are sprung; if they share a common basis of fundamental moral
ideas, such as are most easily implanted by common religious beliefs;
if they can glory in a common inheritance of tradition; and their
nationality will be all the stronger if to these sources of unity they
add a common language and literature and a common body of law.
If these ties, or the majority of them, are lacking, the assertion of
nationality cannot be made good. For, even if it be for the moment
shared by the whole people, as soon as they begin to try to enjoy
the freedom and unity which they claim in the name of nationality,
they will fall asunder, and their freedom will be their ruin.” In the
last sentence the author clearly shows that the conclusion at which
he seemed to have arrived, namely that “a nation is a nation
because its members passionately and unanimously believe it to be
so,” is untenable. At the present time there are populations
claiming the rights of nationality just upon this fallacious ground;
a fact which illustrates the importance of achieving some satisfactory
definition of nationhood. Indeed at the present moment,
when Europe is being remoulded by the Paris Conference, the
need for clear notions and some working definition of nationhood
has acquired a most urgent importance. For, as our author remarks,
“we say, loosely, that every nation has a right to freedom
and unity,” and the principle of “self-determination of nations”
has become almost universally accepted as a kind of moral axiom
of political justice; and this axiom is being applied to determine
the political boundaries of the world now and for all time. Yet
how can we hope to make a proper use of this principle, if we
cannot define a nation, if a modern historian, who has devoted
himself to the study of nationality, finds himself compelled in the
year 1917 to give up the attempt to define the meaning of the term
nation? For that is the issue of Prof. Ramsay Muir’s interesting
discussion. “We have not attained,” he confesses, “in this discussion
any very clear definition of nationality, or any very satisfactory test
of the validity of the claims put forward for national freedom. We
are not to base the doctrine of nationality upon abstract rights.
We must recognise that there is no single infallible test of what
constitutes a nation, unless it be the peoples’ own conviction of their
nationhood, and even this may be mistaken or based upon inadequate
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grounds[44].” And the dire consequences of this failure are made
clear on the following page—“There seems no escape from the conclusion
that nationhood must mainly determine itself by conflict.
That conclusion appears to be the moral of the history of the national
idea in Europe.” Which is as much as to say that, when any
population declares itself to be a nation and claims the rights of
nationhood, the Statesmen of the Paris Conference are to reply—“We
do not know whether your claim is well-founded; for the
historians and political philosophers cannot tell us the meaning of
the word ‘nation.’ Go to and fight, and, if you survive, we shall
recognise the ‘fait accompli’ and hail you a Nation.”
I have dwelt at some length on this perplexity of the historian,
grappling with the task of defining nationhood, because it illustrates
so well a fact on which I wish to insist—namely, that it is not sufficient
for the historian and the political philosopher to be willing to
recognise the mental factors in the phenomena with which he deals.
It is necessary to recognise that these factors are of overwhelming
importance, and that they cannot be satisfactorily dealt with by
aid of the obscure and confused psychological concepts of popular
thought and speech. We must recognise these political problems
for what they truly are—namely, psychological through and through,
and only to be attacked with some hope of success if we call to our
aid all that psychological science can give us. This conclusion cannot
fail to be unpalatable to very many workers in this field; for it
implies that equipment for such work demands some additional
years of preparatory study. But, it may fairly be asked, if the
medical man must devote six years to the intensive study of the
human body, before he is permitted to practise upon it, and even
then without any scientific knowledge of the human mind, should
not he who would practise upon the body politic, in which not
merely the bodies but the minds of men interact in the most subtle
and complex fashion, prepare himself for his exalted task by an
even more extended course of study?
Prof. Ramsay Muir has the merit of recognising the essentially
psychological nature of his problem; for his provisional definition
(cited above) is wholly psychological, and he tells us that the essence
of nationality is a sentiment; but he reveals the inadequacy of his
psychological equipment by telling us in the same paragraph that
its essence is a belief, the belief that they are a nation, passionately
and unanimously held by the members of some group. If we look
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again at the list of seven proposed marks of nationhood, we shall
see that they are rather of the nature of conditions favourable to
the growth of nationhood; and, as we shall find, this list may be
considerably enlarged. He comes nearest to the truth perhaps when
he says “its essence is a sentiment.” But he does not attempt to tell
us what is the nature of this sentiment, nor even what is its object.
We may imagine a group of people of considerable magnitude,
say the Mormons, or the Doukhobors, the Swedenborgians, or the
Christian Scientists, withdrawing themselves to some defined territory,
in order to form themselves into a nation; then, although each
of the seven conditions enumerated by Prof. Ramsay Muir might
be realised, and even though the community possessed the two
conditions described by him as the essence of nationality—namely,
a strong sentiment (presumably one of loyalty to the group) and a
passionate belief in its nationality—it would, in the absence of other
essential conditions, lamentably fall short of being a nation and would
suffer the fate indicated; namely “as soon as they begin to try to
enjoy the freedom and unity which they claim in the name of
nationality, they will fall asunder, and their freedom will be their
ruin[45].”
What, then, is the essential condition for lack of which any such
people would fall short of nationhood? What is the factor which
has escaped the analysis of Prof. Ramsay Muir? The answer must
be—organisation; not material organisation, but such mental organisation
as will render the group capable of effective group life, of
collective deliberation and collective volition. The answer to the
riddle of the definition of nationhood is to be found in the conception
of the group mind. A nation, we must say, is a people or population
enjoying some degree of political independence and possessed
of a national mind and character, and therefore capable of national
deliberation and national volition. In this and the succeeding chapters
we have to examine the nature of such national mind and character,
to give fuller meaning to these vague popular terms, and to study
the way in which various conditions of national life contribute to
their development.
Nationhood is, then, essentially a psychological conception. To
investigate the nature of national mind and character and to
examine the conditions that render possible the formation of the
national mind and tend to consolidate national character, these are
the crowning tasks of psychology.
Let me remind the reader at this point of the general sense of
the words mind and character. The two words really cover the same
content; when we speak of the individual mind or character, we
mean the organised system of mental or psychical forces which
expresses itself in the behaviour and the consciousness of the individual
man. Any such organised system has two aspects or sides
which, though intimately related, maybe considered abstractly as distinct—namely,
the intellectual or cognitive aspect and the volitional,
conative, or affective aspect. When we use the word ‘mind’ in
speaking of any such system, we give prominence to its intellectual
side; when we say ‘character’ we draw attention to its conative or
affective side. The group mind of a nation is a mind in the sense
that, like the mind of the individual, it is an organised system of
mental or psychical forces; and, like the individual mind, it also
has its intellectual and its affective sides or aspects. And this remains
true whether or no there be any truth in that notion of the ‘collective
consciousness’ as a synthesis of minor consciousnesses which we have
provisionally rejected[46]; that is to say, we accept unreservedly the
notion of the collective mind, while suspending judgment upon the
notion of ‘collective consciousness,’ until we shall find that this
hypothesis is, or is not, required for the interpretation of the facts.
It will be observed that we are getting far away from the old-fashioned
conception of psychology which limited its province to the
introspective description of the contents of the individual’s consciousness.
The wider conception of the science gives it new tasks
and new branches, of which the study of the national mind is one.
Like the main trunk of psychology and most of its branches, this
branch has to become an empirical science which shall take the place
of what has long been regarded as a branch of speculative philosophy
and pursued by the deductive a priori methods of philosophy. In
this case the branch of philosophy in question has generally been
called the Philosophy of History. It has been well said by Fouillée
that the Philosophy of History of the past is related to the psychological
social science, that is now beginning to take shape, as alchemy
was related to chemistry, or astrology to astronomy. That is to say,
it was a realm of obscure and fanciful ideas, of sweeping and ill-based
assumptions and slipshod reasoning. It was an elaborate
attempt “to lay the intellect to rest on a pillow of obscure ideas.”>
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The task of scientific analysis and research was avoided by bringing
in, as the main explanatory principles or causal agencies, vaguely
conceived entities regarded as presiding over the development of
peoples—such entities as Providence, or the Destiny of nations, the
Genius of a people, or the Instinct of a nation, the Unconscious Soul
of a people, or the Spirit of the Age; and, when the problem was to
account for some great secular change, for example, some change
of national character, nothing was commoner than to appeal to Time
itself, and thus to make of this most empty of all abstractions a
directive agency and an all powerful cause of change. The strictly
national gods of various nations were popular conceptions of this
order; the gods who directly intervened in battles and enabled their
chosen peoples to smite their enemies hip and thigh so that not one
was left alive. Of this class the “good old German god” of the late
German emperor was, it may be hoped, the last example.
In a less crude form similar hypotheses of direct supernatural
intervention have been seriously maintained in modern times. Thus
the poet Schiller argued as follows—“The individuals of whom a
nation is composed are dominated by egoism, each seeking only his
own good, yet their actions somehow secure the good of the whole;
hence we must believe that the history of a people unrolls itself
beneath the glance of a wisdom that looks on from afar, that knows
how to control the ill-regulated caprices of liberty by the laws of
a directing necessity and to make the particular ends pursued by
individuals subservient to the unconscious realisation of a general
plan.”
In estimating the claims to consideration of a doctrine of this
sort, we must put aside its deleterious moral effects, the fact that
its acceptance would necessarily tend to weaken our sense of responsibility,
to paralyse altruistic effort, and to justify purely
egoistic conduct. We have to consider only its truth or probability
in the light of history. When we do that, it appears merely as a
fictitious solution of the larger problems of social science, a solution
which may relieve us of the necessity of intellectual effort, but which
brings no enlightenment and is supported by no serious argument.
The one argument advanced is a libel on human nature; for it
denies the reality and efficacy of the disinterested social efforts of
the leaders of humanity, to which its progress has been in the main
due; and it ignores the great mass of human activity due to the
group spirit with its fusion of egoistic and altruistic motives. Further,
it ignores the fact that the history of the world is not merely the
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history of the rise of nations, but rather of the perpetual rise and
fall of nations. When we are told that a power of this sort has
constantly intervened in the course of history, and that the rise of
peoples has been due to its guidance, we may fairly ask—Why has
it repeatedly withdrawn its support, just when civilisation has
achieved such a degree of development as might have rendered
possible the flowering of all the finer capacities of human nature and
the alleviation of the hard lot of the great mass of men? If the
contemplation of the course of history compelled us to believe that
such a power intervenes, we should certainly have to regard it as
a malign power that delights in mocking human efforts by first
encouraging and then bringing them to naught.
Very similar is the rôle in history assigned by von Hartmann to
his ‘Unconscious.’ “It carries away the peoples that it dominates,”
says von Hartmann, “with a demoniac power towards unknown
ends; it teaches them the way that they must take; though they
often believe themselves to be marching towards a goal very different
from that to which they are being conducted.”
Others maintain that the great men of a nation, who are the
principal agents in moulding its destiny, are in some mystical sense
the products and expressions of the ‘unconscious soul’ of the people,
that they are the means by which its ideas are realised, through
which they become effective; and they usually make the assertion,
altogether unwarranted by history, that the moment of great need
in the life of a people always produces a great man or hero to lead
the people through the crisis. That is, or may appear to be, true of
those peoples that have survived to pass into history. But what of
those peoples that have gone down, leaving no trace of all their
strivings, beyond some mounds of rubble, some few material monuments,
or some strange marks on brick or stone or rock?
All such assumptions are the very negation of science. We have
no right to appeal to such obscure and mystical powers, until by
prolonged effort we shall have exhausted the possibilities of understanding
and explanation in terms of known forces and conditions[47].
On the other hand, a number of writers have sought to interpret
the course of history and the rise and fall of nations in a more
scientific manner; but most of these have studied some one aspect
of national life, and have professed to find in that one aspect the
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key which shall unlock all doors and solve all problems. Thus
some, adopting the notion of a variety of human races, each endowed
with a certain peculiar and unalterable combination of qualities, seek
to explain all history by the aid of biological laws, especially the
Darwinian principles, as a struggle for survival between individuals
and between races. Others, like Karl Marx and Guizot, see in
economic conditions and the struggles between the social classes
within each nation, the all important factors. Others again, like
Montesquieu and to some extent Buckle and more recently Matteuzzi,
have seen in the influences of physical environment the key to the
understanding of differences of national character and history; while
others profess to have found it in differences of religious system,
or of the forms of government and systems of laws. Others again,
like le Bon[48], in a few dominant ideas which, they say, being possessed
by any nation (or possessing a nation) determine its character and
civilisation. All these are exaggerations of partial truths; and in
opposition to all of them it must be laid down that the understanding
of the mind of a nation is an indispensable foundation for the
interpretation of its history.
Just as there are two kinds of psychology of individuals, so there
are two kinds of psychology of peoples. There is the individual
psychology which is primarily descriptive, which is the biography
of persons, and whose aim is to impart an accurate conception of
the general tendencies of a person and of the course of his development.
And there is the psychology whose aim is to explain in general
terms the conduct of individual men in general by the aid of conceptions
and laws of general validity. The former, of course, was
developed much earlier than the latter, which is in the main of
quite modern growth. As this explanatory psychology develops, its
principles begin to find application in the sphere of biographical or
individual psychology, raising it also to the explanatory plane.
Just so there are two parallel kinds of psychology of peoples.
There is the descriptive psychology of the tendencies of particular
peoples, the biography of nations and peoples, which is what commonly
is meant by ‘history’; and there is the psychology which seeks
to explain in general terms how these tendencies arise, which seeks
the general laws of which these diverse national tendencies are the
outcome.
This last is the modern science which is beginning to take shape
and to undertake the task so inadequately dealt with by the so-called
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Philosophy of History. It is essentially a branch, and by far the most
important part, of Group Psychology[49]. Now individual psychology
tends more and more to be a genetic psychology; because we do not
feel that we really understand the individual mind, until we know
how it has come to be what it is, until we know something of its
development and racial evolution. Just so the explanatory psychology
of peoples must be a genetic psychology. Here it differs
from individual psychology in that the distinction between individual
development and racial evolution disappears. For the national
mind is a continuous growth; it is not embodied in a temporal
succession of individuals, but in a single continuously evolving
organism.
Nevertheless, we may with advantage consider separately (1) the
nature of the general conditions necessary to the existence and
operation of a national mind; (2) the processes of evolution by which
such minds are formed and their peculiarities acquired. I propose
to take up the former problem in the following chapter.
Chapter Vii
THE MIND OF A NATION
We have prepared ourselves for the study of the national mind by
our preliminary examination of the two extreme types of collective
mental life, that of the quite unorganised group, the simple crowd, on
the one hand, that of a very highly organised group, the army, on
the other hand. We have seen that in the former type the collective
actions imply a collective mental life much inferior, both intellectually
and morally, to that of the average component individuals;
and that in the other type they imply a collective mental life and
capacities much superior to those of the average individual.
The mind of any nation occupies some intermediate position in
the scale of which these are the extreme types; and it differs from
both in being immensely more complex, and also in that the influence
of the past dominates and determines to a much greater extent the
mental life of the present.
The study we have already made of collective mental life will
enable us to understand what we mean, or ought to mean, when we
speak of national character. There are two senses in which this
phrase is used, and they are often confused. On the one hand, the
phrase may be used to denote the character of individuals who are
taken to be typical representatives or average specimens of their
nations. On the other hand, it may be taken to mean the character
of the nation as a collective whole or mind. These two things are
by no means the same; they are rather very different. We saw that
this was true in the case of the crowd and also of the army; and it is
true in a still higher degree of the nation than of any other social
aggregate, just because the influence of its past over its present is
greater than in any of the others. It is in the second and preferable
sense that Fouillée uses this expression. He writes—“The
national character is not the simple sum of the individual characters.
In the bosom of a strongly organised nation, there are necessarily
produced reciprocal actions between the individuals which issue in
a general manner of feeling, thinking and willing very different from
that of the individuals existing in isolation, or even from the sum
or resultant of all the mental actions of isolated individuals. The
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national character is not simply the average type which one would
obtain if one could imitate for minds the procedure adopted by Galton
in the case of faces and so obtain a collective or generic image. The
face which the process of compound photography produces exerts
no action and is not a cause; while the national spirit does exert an
effect which is different from all effects of individual minds; it is
capable of exerting a sort of pressure and a constraint upon the
individuals themselves; it is not only an effect, but is also in turn
a cause; it is not only fashioned by individuals, it fashions them
in turn. The average type of the Frenchman existing to-day, for
example, does not adequately represent the French national character,
because each people has a history, and ancient traditions,
and is composed, as it is said, of the dead even more than of the
living. The French national character resumes the physical and
social actions that have been taking place through centuries, independently
of the present generation, and imposes itself upon this
generation through all the national ideas, the national sentiments
and national institutions. It is the weight of the entire history to
which the individual is subjected in his relations with his fellow
citizens. Just, then, as the nation, as a certain social group, has an
existence different from (though not separable from) the existence
of the individuals, so the national character implies that particular
combination of mental forces of which the national life is the external
manifestation[50].” That is a precise and admirable statement of what
we are to understand by national mind and character.
We must now consider in turn the principal conditions of the
existence of highly developed national mind and character, and
first those which, as we have seen, are essential to all collective
mental life.
A certain degree of mental homogeneity of the group, some
similarity of mental constitution of the individuals composing it, is
the prime condition. The homogeneity essential to a nation may be
one of two kinds, native or acquired; both of these are usually
combined, but one of them predominates in some nations, the other
in others.
In considering racial or native homogeneity, we touch upon one
aspect of a much disputed question, the influence of race on national
character and history, in regard to which the greatest diversity of
opinion has prevailed and still prevails. A correct estimate of this
influence is of fundamental importance. I have stated elsewhere
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the view I take[51], but we must consider the question more fully here.
On the one hand are those who would explain all differences of
national character and action, all success and failure of nations, as
arising from racial composition. This view is the basis of much of
the ill-founded national pessimism which, before the Great War,
was widely prevalent among the peoples who speak the Romance
or Latin languages and who are falsely called by these pessimists the
Latin races. It was also the foundation of that overweening national
pride which has corrupted the German people and led them to
disgrace and disaster; for, following Gobineau[52] and a host of his
disciples, among whom H. S. Chamberlain is perhaps the most
notorious, they had come to believe, against the most obvious
and abundant evidence, that they were the purest representatives of a
race from whose blood all great men and all good things have come, a
race fitted by native superiority to rule all the peoples of the earth[53].
On the other hand, popular humanitarianism would regard all
men and all races as alike and equal in respect of native endowment;
and we have seen so distinguished a sociologist as Durkheim denying
any importance or influence to racial composition of a people. Many
others put aside all explanations based on racial differences as cheap
and meretricious means of avoiding difficulties. J. S. Mill, for
example, wrote “Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration
of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind,
the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and
character to inherent natural differences”; and Buckle, in his great
work on the History of Civilisation, quoted this remark with cordial
approval[54].
Both these extreme views are false; the truth lies somewhere
in the midst between them. At the time when Mill and Buckle wrote,
biology and anthropology had not shown, as now they have, the
enormous power of heredity in determining individual character and
the great persistence of innate qualities through numberless generations.
Buckle especially overrated the power of physical environment,
and Mill the power of education and of social environment, to change
the innate qualities of a people; and it was this overestimation that
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led them, and leads others still, to underestimate the importance of
racial composition. There are involved in this dispute two theses
which are often confused together. When people speak of the
influence of ‘race’ on national character and institutions, they may,
and sometimes do, mean by ‘race’ the sum of innate inborn qualities
or tendencies of the people at any given point of history. On the
other hand, by influence of race they may mean the influence of
the prehistoric races which have entered into the social composition
of the nation—that is, those races from which its population is descended.
Some authors mean to deny importance to race in both
these senses; Buckle and Mill and Durkheim meant, I think, to deny
it in both, because they believed that human nature is very plastic
and easily moulded as regards its innate qualities by its environment;
they believed that, if only a system of institutions, especially educational
institutions, adapted to promote the intellectual and moral
development of each generation of a people, can be established
among it, then the influence of such institutions will so vastly
predominate over that of innate qualities that these become a
negligible quantity. From this it would follow that we should expect
to see any two or more populations endowed with similar institutions
form nations of similar character which will continue to develop
along similar lines, except in so far as minor unessential differences
of physical environment produce differences of modes of occupation,
dress, food and so forth.
This view of the insignificance of innate qualities was in harmony
with, and was determined by, the dominant psychological
doctrine of the time; the view which came down from Locke, according
to which the mind of the new-born individual is a tabula
rasa, entirely similar in all men, without specific tendencies and
peculiarities of any importance, on which individual experience
impresses itself, moulding all its development according to the
principle of the association of ideas.
This doctrine, explicitly or implicitly adopted, has played a
great part in determining British policy in its relations with British
dependencies and their populations, notably India. It is a striking
example of the way in which theory affects practice, and of the
danger of our profound indifference to theory; we are influenced by
it though we pretend to ignore it. It is well to make ourselves clear
as to what theories we hold, even if we do not allow our practice to
be governed by them exclusively.
There are commonly confused together, under the head of the
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influence of race on national character, three problems which must
be disentangled.
(1) Are there differences of innate mental constitution between
the various branches of mankind?
(2) If there are such differences, are these important for national
life? Do they in any considerable degree determine national character?
Or are they capable of being swamped and submerged and
altogether over-ridden by the moulding influences brought to bear
by environment on each generation?
(3) If such innate differences exist, what degree of permanence
do they possess? Do they persist through thousands of years, in
spite of vast changes of physical or cultural conditions? Or may
they undergo considerable modification or complete transformation
in the course of a few generations?
These are questions of fundamental importance. And they admit
of no positive clean-cut answers at the present time. They offer vast
fields for research, and only when prolonged research shall have
been directed to them shall we be able to answer them positively.
In the past, since their importance could not be altogether overlooked,
it has been usual to dispose of them by dogmatically asserting
one extreme view and pouring scornful epithets upon the other
extreme view. A principal task for science in its present stage is to
define the questions clearly. It is not possible, perhaps, to keep them
quite separate; for, if there are considerable differences of innate
mental constitution, then their importance for national character
must depend greatly upon their degree of permanence; and, again,
there is the great difficulty of distinguishing between innate and
acquired mental qualities in any individual and still more in groups.
Nevertheless, we may safely say that both extreme views in regard
to race, the positive and the negative, are gross exaggerations,
plausible only while we ignore one part of the evidence; the truth
lies in between somewhere.
There can, I think, be no reasonable doubt that there are great
differences between races, and that these may be, and in many cases
have been, persistent through thousands of generations.
The recognition that the mind of the human infant is not a
tabula rasa, but that its innate constitution comprises a number of
instincts, specifically directed tendencies to thought, feeling, and
action, prepares us to accept this view and gives us some basis for
the definition of these differences. Whether all differences can be
defined in such terms is a further problem. That they cannot be
[Pg 111]
wholly defined in this way seems to be obvious, when we consider
how quite specialised idiosyncrasies are transmitted in families
through several generations, often with a leap across one generation,
peculiarities of taste and feeling, of aesthetic endowment and temperament,
abilities such as the musical, mathematical and artistic.
When we compare widely different peoples such as the Negro,
the White, and the Yellow, the fact of profound differences cannot
be overlooked. These differences cannot be ascribed to the action
of environment upon each generation. Perhaps the only differences
of this kind which at present are accurately measurable are those
of the size and form of the brain. The negro brain is decidedly
smaller than that of the white and yellow races. And there are small
but distinct differences of sensory endowment which are highly
significant. For, if there are racial differences in these most fundamental
and racially oldest endowments, we may expect still greater
differences in the later evolved powers of the mind; although these
are much more difficult to detect and define.
Still, the negro race wherever found does present certain specific
mental peculiarities roughly definable, especially the happy-go-lucky
disposition, the unrestrained emotional violence and responsiveness,
whether its representatives are found in tropic Africa, in the jungles
of Papua, or in the highly civilised conditions of American cities.
The Semitic stock again is one which, though widely scattered,
seems to present certain constant peculiarities. And among closely
allied branches of the white race of similar culture, we can hardly
refuse to recognise innate differences. Differences of temperament
are, perhaps, the clearest and the most generally recognised, even
between peoples of allied stock and similar civilisation. Who can
question that Irishmen in general are very different from Englishmen
in temperament, that they are less phlegmatic, more easily moved
to joy, or sorrow, or enthusiasm, more easily touched by poetry,
have a more varied and lively emotional experience? That this is
an innate racial difference seems clear; for it can be accounted for
in no other way, and it obtains in some degree between all communities
of similar racial stocks, in spite of similarities or differences
of history and of present conditions. For example, similar differences,
roughly definable as the difference between the so-called Celtic
temperament and the Anglo-Saxon, seem evidently to obtain between
the Breton and the Norman, who represent in the main the
same two stocks.
And, even in intellectual quality, there appear to be not only
[Pg 112]
differences of degree, but also differences of kind, inexplicable
save as racial differences. The logical deductive tendencies of
the French intellect and the empirical inductive tendency of the
English, seem to be rooted in race; though here of course tradition
accumulates and accentuates such differences from generation
to generation.
But the best evidence of persistent innate differences is afforded
by differences and similarities expressed in national life which cannot
be accounted for in any other way. The innate differences and
peculiarities of individuals are largely obscured by these national
characteristics. And the more highly organised the collective life of
any people, the more clearly will it express their racial qualities.
The social environment in a developed nation is in harmony with
the individual innate tendencies, because in the main it is the natural
outcome and expression of those tendencies. For, throughout the
history of such a nation, the elements of its social environment—its
customs, beliefs, institutions, language, its culture in general—have
been slowly evolved under the steady pressure of the individual
innate tendencies, which in each succeeding generation are the same.
A part of this culture is of native origin; a part, in every European
nation probably by far the larger part, is of foreign origin, and has
been acquired by the acceptance of ideas and beliefs from without
its borders, by the copying of institutions, customs, arts, from
foreign models. In both cases the idea or custom or other cultural
element only becomes embodied in the national culture through
widespread or general imitation[55].
In the case of elements of native origin, it is by imitation of the
individuals of original powers of thought or feeling that the element
becomes embodied in the national culture; in the case of foreign
elements, by imitation of foreign models, acceptance of foreign ideas,
through literature and personal contacts. In both cases, such general
imitation will only take place when the culture-element in question
is more or less congenial to the innate qualities of the bulk of
individuals. All other novel elements will be ignored, or will
fail to propagate themselves successfully; if they obtain a first
footing, they will fail to pass beyond the stage of fashion into
that of custom. And, when once accepted, the cultural element
will usually undergo modification in the direction of more complete
[Pg 113]
harmony with the innate tendencies; its less congenial features will
be allowed to die out, its more congenial will be accentuated from
generation to generation.
The social environment of any civilised people is, then, very
largely the result of a long continued process of selection, comparable
with the natural selection by which, according to the Darwinian
theory, animal species are evolved; a constant favouring of certain
elements, a constant rejection of others. We may in fact regard
each distinctive type of civilisation as a species, evolved largely by
selection; and the selective agency, which corresponds to and plays
a part analogous to the part of the physical environment of an animal
species, is the innate mental constitution of the people. The sum of
innate qualities is the environment of the culture-species, and it
effects a selection among all culture variations, determining the
survival and further evolution of some, the extermination of others.
And, just as animal species (especially men) modify their physical
environment in course of time, and also devise means of sheltering
themselves from its selective influence, so each national life, each
species of civilisation, modifies very gradually the innate qualities
of the people and builds up institutions which, the more firmly they
are established and the more fully they are elaborated, override and
prevent the more completely the direct influence of innate qualities
on national life.
These principles are illustrated, perhaps, most clearly by the
spread and modification of religious systems among peoples of
different races. Take the case of the Moslem religion, which has
gained acceptance among one-sixth of the population of the world
in historic and in fact recent times, and is still spreading. The leading
feature of this system is its acceptance of all that is and happens
as being the will of God, the act of an entirely arbitrary, inscrutable,
and absolutely powerful individual, before which men must simply
bow without question or criticism; it is characterised by its simplicity
and its fatalism. There seems good reason to believe that
the tendency to unquestioning obedience to authority is a strong
innate tendency of most Asiatics (except perhaps the Chinese and
their relatives), far stronger than in most individuals of European
peoples; for we see it expressed in many ways in their institutions
and history, both of those who are and those who are not Moslems[56];
and Asiatic fatalism has, in fact, become proverbial. With the causes
[Pg 114]
or origin of this innate quality we are not now concerned; but,
accepting it as a fact, we may note that it is among Asiatics that
Mohammedanism has secured the great mass of its converts; and that
in India, in spite of many minor features that are opposed to the
spirit of Hindooism, it continues to spread largely; while Christianity
makes but little progress. Buddhism on the other hand has almost
faded away, after an initial success in the country of its origin, but
has continued to gain adherents and has become the dominant
religion among the yellow peoples further east, in Burma, China,
Thibet, Japan. The Moslem religion, having been thus accepted in
virtue of the fact that its dominant tendency is in harmony with the
strong innate tendency to unquestioning submission to a supreme
will, then accentuates this tendency in all its converts, moulding
their political relations to the same type, so that all recognise one
earthly regent of God; and it has led to the almost complete suppression
of any spark of the spirit of inquiry and scepticism that
might otherwise display itself among these peoples.
Another good illustration of the fact is afforded by the distribution
of the two great divisions of the Christian religion in Western Europe.
Among all the disputes and uncertainties of the ethnographers about
the races of Europe, one fact stands out clearly—namely, that we can
distinguish a race of northerly distribution and origin, characterised
physically by fair colour of hair and skin and eyes, by tall stature
and dolichocephaly (i.e. long shape of head) and mentally by great
independence of character, individual initiative, and tenacity of
will. Many names have been used to denote this type, but the
usefulness of most of them has been spoilt through their application
to denote linguistic groups (e.g. Indo-Germanic, Aryan), and by
the false assumption that linguistic groups are racial groups. Hence
recently the term Homo Europaeus, first applied by Linnaeus to
this type, has come into favour; and perhaps it is the best term to
use, since this type seems to be exclusively European. It is also
called the Nordic type.
The rest of the population of Europe, with the exception of some
peoples in the extreme north and east of partly mongoloid or yellow
racial origin, seems to be chiefly derived from two stocks. Of these,
the one type, which occupies chiefly the central regions, is most
commonly denoted by the name Homo Alpinus; the other, chiefly
in the south, by the name Homo Mediterraneus. Both are of dark
or brunette complexion and the principal physical difference between
them is that the former, H. Alpinus, has a short broad head (i.e.
[Pg 115]
is brachycephalic) and also is of short stature; while the latter,
H. Mediterraneus, is long-headed like the northern type and is
perhaps taller than H. Alpinus. Mentally both these differ from the
northern or European type in having less independence and initiative,
a greater tendency to rely upon and seek guidance from authority[57].
Now we find that the distribution of the Protestant variety of
Christianity coincides very nearly with the regions in which the fair
type predominates; while in all other regions the Roman Catholic
or Greek orthodox churches hold undisputed sway. North and South
Germany illustrate the point. And Motley’s account of the Netherlands
shows how closely the line between Protestant Holland and
Roman Catholic Belgium coincides with the line of racial division.
We may note also that ‘Celts’ of Ireland and Scotland early proved
the superior strength of their religious tendencies by sending missionaries
to England.
It would be absurd to hold that this coincidence is fortuitous.
It is clearly due to the assimilation of the form of the religious and
ecclesiastical system to the innate tendencies of the people. The
northern peoples have given the system a turn compatible with the
independence of spirit which is their leading racial quality; and
among ourselves the tendency is apt to be pushed to an anarchical
extreme in the rise of numerous small peculiar sects; this we must
connect with the fact that the English represent in greatest purity
the most independent branch of the Northern race.
The peoples among whom the other racial elements predominate
have developed and maintained a religion of authority. And it is
clear how, this differentiation having been achieved, either form of
religion favours and accentuates in the peoples among whom it has
become established the innate tendencies that have shaped it. The
religion of authority tends, both by its general teachings and by the
deliberate efforts of its official representatives, to suppress the spirit
of independent thought and inquiry and action; the Protestant
religion, relatively at least, favours the development of the independent
tendencies of individuals. This is not to say that any
individual is a Mohammedan or a Protestant, because he belongs to
this or that race; that would be a parody of my statement. The
form of each man’s religious belief is, in the vast majority of
cases, determined for him by the fact of his growing up within a
community in which that form of belief prevails. My thesis
[Pg 116]
is that in the main the racial qualities of each community have
played a great part in determining which form of belief it shall
accept. If the reader will reflect how, at the time of the Reformation,
various communities hung for a time in the balance, he will see that
the innate differences we have noted may well have played the
determining rôle.
The same facts are illustrated by the political life of the European
peoples. Only those among whom the northern race is predominant
have developed individualistic forms of political and social organisation.
Among the rest there appears clearly the tendency to rely
upon the supreme authority of the state and to look to it for all
initiative and guidance, a tendency to centralised and paternal
administration; and this is the same, whether the external form of
the political organisation be a monarchy or a republic. Thus France,
in becoming a republic, did not overthrow the centralised system
perfected by Henry IV, Louis XIV, Richelieu and Napoleon; for
that system was congenial to the innate qualities of the mass of the
people. It is clear that the centralised and therefore rigid system of
government tends to accentuate, among the people subjected to it,
their tendency to rely on authority and to repress individual
initiative; while the other form, such as obtains in this country and
still more in the United States of America, tends to the development
of the initiative and independence of individuals, giving them free
scope and throwing them upon their own resources. Among any
people, an institution or other cultural element that has had a
history of this kind will, then, cause a great development in
the mass of individuals of just those innate or racial tendencies of
which it is itself the slowly accumulated result or product.
If a nation is composed from stocks not too diverse, or if the
original stocks have fused by intercrossing and have produced a
fairly homogeneous people; and if this nation has enjoyed a long
period of natural evolution undisturbed by violent influences from
outside, conquests or invasions or immigrations on a great scale;
then the social environment will have been brought in the main into
harmony with the innate qualities of the people, and it will mould
the individuals of each generation very strongly, accentuating and
confirming those innate tendencies. This for two reasons. First, the
social environment will be strongly organised and homogeneous;
that is to say, the various elements, the beliefs, customs, institutions,
and arts that go to compose it, will be in harmony with one another
and of strongly marked character; and they will be almost universally
[Pg 117]
accepted by that people as above criticism. Secondly, the institutions
and customs have not to fight against the innate tendencies
of the people in the formation of the adult minds, but co-operate
harmoniously with them.
Now, when authors dispute over the question of the influence of
race in determining the nation, they usually fail to distinguish
clearly between the direct effects and the indirect effects of racial
qualities.
Those who, like Mill, attribute to the social environment unlimited
power of moulding individuals and who regard the influence
of race as insignificant, are misled by the contemplation of such
nations as we have been considering, the class of which our own is
the most notable example, nations in which a strongly organised
social environment makes in the direction of the innate tendencies.
They overlook the fact that in any such nation the social environment,
the body of institutions and traditions, is in the main the
outcome and expression of these innate tendencies; they fail to see
that the racial tendencies exert their strongest influence on national
thought and action by means of the institutions, customs, and
traditions on the growth of which they have exerted a constant
directive pressure throughout many generations. In order to
realise fully the influence of race, we must consider peoples whose
culture and much else that enters into their social environment has
been impressed upon them from without. We then see how
little the social environment can accomplish in the moulding of a
people, when it is not congenial to and in harmony with the racial
tendencies.
The modern world contains certain instructive instances, of
which Hayti is perhaps the most striking. There a circumscribed
population of negro race has had a political and social and religious
organisation and the elements of higher culture impressed upon it
by Europeans, in the belief that it would be possible to construct
a social environment which would mould the people. France, at a
time of revolutionary enthusiasm for liberty, equality, and fraternity,
withdrew from the island and granted the people self-government.
The consequence has been a rapid relapse into barbarism and
savagery of the worst kinds[58].
It was the ignoring of the importance of race and the overestimation
of the moulding influence of culture and institutions,
[Pg 118]
eloquently voiced by Lord Macaulay, that led England eighty years
ago to set out on the task of endowing the millions of India with
British culture and institutions. The task has been pursued in a
half-hearted manner only; but already we see some of the incongruity
of the results of these efforts; and the best observers assure us that,
were the task accomplished and the reins of a representative government
left in native hands, it would be but a few years before the
whole country would be reduced to a chaotic anarchic condition no
better than that in which we found it. Others go further and assert
with some plausibility that Western culture is positively injurious
to the intellect and moral nature of Indians[59].
In the Philippines the Americans seem to have applied similar
mistaken ideas in a reckless fashion in the first years of their administration;
with the result that, according to some accounts, they were
in a fair way to plunge those islands into poverty and debt and
chronic rebellion, while failing to secure affection, trust, or respect
for themselves.
We must conclude, then, that innate mental constitution, and
therefore race, is of fundamental importance in determining national
character, not so much directly as indirectly; for it gives a constant
bias to the evolution of the social environment, and, through it,
moulds the individuals of each generation. It will help to make
clear the influence of innate qualities, if, by an effort of imagination,
we suppose every English child to have been exchanged at
birth for an infant of some other nation (say the French) during
some fifty years. At the end of that period the English nation
would be composed of individuals of purely French origin or blood;
it would have the innate qualities of the present French nation;
and the French nation would be, in the same sense, English.
What would be the effect? Presumably things would go on much
as before for a time. There would be no sudden transformation of
our language, our laws, our religious or political institutions; and
those who make little of the influence of race might point to this
result as a convincing demonstration of the truth of their view.
But gradually, we must suppose, certain changes would appear;
in the course of perhaps a century there would be an appreciable
assimilation of English institutions to those of France at the present
day, for example, the Roman Catholic religion would gain in strength
at the cost of the Protestant.
This view has been challenged and described as an extreme view[60].
But it is not. Both extreme opposite views continue to be maintained
just because the importance of the indirect cumulative effect
of innate qualities on culture is ignored. The innate qualities are of
great importance, but only in the course of centuries can they exert
their full effect on culture.
If then innate qualities have this importance, in what degree
are they permanent? Here again two extreme views remain opposed
to one another. Even as regards physical qualities this is still the
case; and the problem is much more difficult and at the same
time infinitely more important as regards mental qualities. One
reason for the belittling of innate qualities by Mill and Buckle, and
for their overweening confidence in the power of institutions and
environment, was the opinion generally prevailing in their time that,
in so far as racial peculiarities exist, they can be modified and transformed
in a few generations by physical and social environment.
But, when, under the influence of Welshman’s theories, the
majority of biologists came to the conclusion that acquired qualities
are not transmitted, the position of the ‘race theorisers’ was immensely
strengthened. For selection, natural or social or artificial,
remained as the only recognised cause of change of racial qualities;
and, since it is clear that the development of civilisation tends to
bring to an end the operation of natural selection, owing to the more
efficient shielding of the weaker by the stronger members of societies,
and since no other form of selection seems to have operated forcibly
to change race qualities, it was inferred that race qualities endure
throughout long ages with very little change.
Another revolution of opinion has had a similar effect. One of
the old assumptions which seemed to justify the belief in rapid
modifiability of race qualities was that the difference of culture
between ourselves and our savage ancestors corresponds to, and is the
expression of, an almost equally great difference of innate capacities,
intellectual and moral. But this was in the main a misunderstanding.
One well established fact suffices to show its improbability—namely,
the larger size of the brains of Palæolithic men as
compared with our own. Our superiority of civilisation is due to
slow accumulation, each generation adding comparatively little to
the mass of intellectual and moral tradition which it inherits and
passes on to later coming generations. In so far as differences of
cultural level are associated with differences of level of innate
[Pg 120]
intellectual and moral qualities, cultural superiority must be
regarded as the effect, rather than the cause, of innate mental
superiority. There are strong grounds for holding that, in so far as
Europeans are innately superior to negroes, that superiority was
achieved not by means of, and in the process of, the development
of, civilisation; but rather before civilisation began; and that the
principal mental differences of the various human stocks were, like
their principal physical differences, produced in the course of the
immensely long ages of human life that preceded the dawn of civilisation,
or at any rate of history, ages compared with which the
historic period is but a very brief span.
This view—namely, that there has been no great change, and
certainly no great increase, of the mental powers of men during the
historic period—was forcibly maintained by Dr A. R. Wallace[61].
Wallace pointed to the pyramids of Egypt and other great
achievements of earlier civilisations, such as writing, as evidence of
the highly developed intellectual powers of men thousands of years
before the Christian era. He concluded that the men of the early
stone age were probably our equals, intellectually and morally, in
respect to innate qualities.
If, then, so little change of man’s mental constitution has been
produced in the course of many thousand years, even though the
growth of civilisation has so profoundly modified his mode of life
and the nature of his pursuits, that is good evidence of the great
persistency of racial mental qualities. But we have more direct
evidence of their persistence. As Wallace points out, the negro and
the yellow races are scattered over many parts of the earth, and,
though these regions present great diversities of physical environment,
men of either of the two races everywhere present the same
mental peculiarities or strong similarities, for example, the Papuan
and African and American negroes. And the characteristic differences
between the two races are not diminished even where, as
in the islands of the far East, they have been subjected to the same
physical environment and modes of life for long periods of time.
In the eastern Archipelago, Papuans and Malayans occupying the
same or adjoining islands are cited by Wallace as illustrating the
persistence of racial mental differences; and I can bear out his
remarks from my own observations in that region.
But we must beware of excess in the direction of the unalterability
[Pg 121]
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
[Pg 122]
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
[Pg 123]
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
[Pg 124]
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
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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
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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
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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
[Pg 128]
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
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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
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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
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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
[Pg 133]
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
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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
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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;
[Pg 137]
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
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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,
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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
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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
[Pg 141]
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
[Pg 143]
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
[Pg 144]
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
[Pg 145]
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
[Pg 146]
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.
All this serves to illustrate the dangers of analogy. We need no
special cause to account for the fall and the decay of nations, no
obscure principle of senility or decadence; the wonderful thing is
that they exist at all; and what needs explanation is not so much
the decay of some, but rather the long persistence of others.
Let us turn, then, to the analogy between the organisation of
the national collective mind and that of the individual mind, which,
I say, is so much closer and more illuminating than that between
a society and a bodily organisation.
The actions of the individual organism are the expression of its
mental constitution or organisation; in some creatures this organisation
is almost wholly innate—the organisation consists of a number
of reflex and instinctive dispositions each specialised for bringing
about a special kind of behaviour under certain circumstances.
Such old established racial dispositions with their special tendencies
have their place in more complexly developed minds; but in these
their operations are complicated and modified by the life of ideas,
and by a variety of habits developed under the guidance of ideas and
in the light of individual experience.
The enduring reflex and instinctive dispositions of the individual
mind we may liken to the established institutions of a nation, such
as the army and navy, the post office, the judicial and the administrative
systems of officials. These, like the instincts, are specialised
executive organisations working in relative independence of one
another, each discharging some specialised function adapted to
satisfy some constantly recurring need of the whole organism. In
both cases such semi-independent organisations, the instincts or the
institutions, are relatively fixed and stable, and they work, if left to
themselves, quasi-mechanically along old established lines, without
intelligent adaptation to new circumstances; and they are incapable
of self-adaptation. In both cases, the mental organisation is in
part materialised, the instinct in the form of specialised nervous
structure, the institution in the form of the material organisation
essential to its efficient action, the buildings, the printed codes, the
whole material apparatus of complex national administration. In
both cases, the actions in which they play their part are not purely
mechanical but to some extent truly psychical—though of a low
order.
If we accept the view, which is held by many, that instincts and
reflexes are the semi-mechanised results of successive mental adaptations
effected by the mental efforts of successive generations, then
the analogy is still closer; for the permanent national institutions
are also the accumulated semi-mechanised products of the efforts
at adaptation of many generations.
The organisation of some nations resembles that of the minds
of those animals whose behaviour is purely instinctive. Such is a
[Pg 148]
nation whose organisation takes the form of a rigid caste system.
Each caste performs its special functions in the prescribed manner
in relative independence of all the others. And, in both cases, the
organisation of the mind includes no means of bringing the different
fixed tendencies or dispositions into harmonious co-operation in the
face of unusual circumstances. The whole system lacks plasticity
and adaptability; for it is relatively mechanical and of a low degree
of integration. Any true adaptation of the whole organism by mental
effort is impossible in both cases.
The higher type of individual mind is characterised by the
development of the intellectual organisation by means of which the
activities of the various instincts, the executive organisations, may
be brought into co-operation with, or duly subordinated to, one
another; and the activities of each such individual may be further
adapted to meet novel combinations of circumstances not provided
for in the innate organisation; hence, the activities of the whole
organism, instead of being a succession of quasi-mechanical actions,
and of crude conflicts between the impulses or tendencies of the
different instincts, reveal a higher degree of harmony of the parts, a
greater integration of the whole system, and a much greater adaptability
to novel circumstances; while, at the same time, the behaviour
of the whole, in face of any one of the situations provided for by
innate organisation or instinct, is liable to be less sure and perfect
than in the case of the less complex, less highly evolved type of mind.
Exactly the same is true of the more highly evolved type of
national mind. Like the lower type, it has its executive institutions
and hierarchies of officials, organised for the carrying out of specialised
tasks subserving the economy of the whole. But, in addition, it has
a deliberative organisation which renders possible a play of ideas;
and, through this, the operations of the institutions are modified and
controlled in detail and are harmonised in a way which constitutes
a higher integration of the whole.
In both cases ideas and judgments reached by the deliberative
processes can only become effective in the world of things and conduct
by setting to work, or calling into play, one or more of the executive
dispositions or institutions.
In both cases, ideas and the deliberative processes, which to some
extent control the operations of the innate or traditional dispositions,
produce, in so doing, some permanent modification of them in
the direction of adaptation to deal with novel circumstances; so
that the dispositions or institutions grow and change under the
[Pg 149]
guidance of the deliberative processes, slowly becoming better
adapted for the expression of the ruling ideas; they become better
instruments, and more completely at the service of ideas and of
the will.
Just as the animal, on the instinctive plane of mental life, displays
a very efficient activity in the special situation which brings some one
instinct into play, so any one caste of a caste-nation may perform
its function under normal circumstances with great efficiency, the
priestly caste its priestly function, the warrior caste, or the caste of
sweepers, its function; and, in both cases, the development of the
deliberative organisation is apt to interfere to some extent with the
perfect execution of these specialised functions.
Again, in the individual mind, adaptation of conduct to novel
circumstances, or to secure improved action in familiar circumstances,
requires the direction of the attention, that is the concentration
of the whole energy of the mind, upon the task; whereas, when the
new mode of behaviour is often repeated, it becomes more and more
automatic; for, owing to the formation of new nervous organisation,
the attention is set free for other tasks of adaptation. Just in the
same way new modes of national behaviour are only effected when
the attention of the nation’s mind is turned upon the situation;
whereas, with recurrence of the need for any such novel mode of
action, there is formed some special executive organisation, say
a Colonial Office, or an Unemployed Central Committee, or an
Imperial Conference, which deals with it in a more or less routine
fashion, and which, as it becomes perfected, needs less and less
to be controlled and guided by national attention and therefore
operates in the margin of the field of consciousness of the national
mind, while public attention is set free to turn itself to other tasks
of national adaptation.
We may also regard the customs of a nation as analogous with
the habits of the individual, if (for the sake of the analogy) we accept
the view that instincts are habits that have become hereditary; for
custom is an informal mode in which routine behaviour is determined,
and it tends to lead on to, and to become embodied in, formal
institutions; it is like habit, a transition stage between new adaptation
and perfected organisation. Individual adaptation, habit and
instinct are parallel to national adaptation, custom and legal institution.
At the risk of wearying the reader, I will refer to one last point
of the analogy. Individual minds become more completely integrated
[Pg 150]
in proportion as they achieve a full self-consciousness, in
proportion as the idea of the self becomes rich in content and the
nucleus of a strong sentiment generating impulses that control and
override impulses of all other sources. In a similar way, the national
mind becomes more completely integrated in proportion as it
achieves full self-consciousness, that is, in proportion as the idea
of the nation becomes widely diffused among the individual minds,
becomes rich in content and the nucleus of a strong sentiment
that supplies motives capable of overriding and controlling all other
motives.
Consider now in the light of this analogy the principal types of
national organisation. The organisation of some peoples is wholly
the product of the conflicts of blind impulses and purely individual
volitions working through long ages. This is true of many peoples
that have not arrived at a national self-consciousness or, as the French
say, a social consciousness, and are not held in servitude by a despotic
power. It is a natural stage of evolution which corresponds to the
stage of the higher mammals in the scale of evolution of the individual
mind. A nation of this sort has no capacity for collective deliberation
and volitional action. What collective mental life it has is on the
plane of impulse and unregulated desire. Such ideas as are widely
accepted may determine collective action; but such action is not
the result of the weighing of ideas in the light of self-consciousness;
hence they are little adapted to promote the welfare of the nation,
and, because there is no organisation adapted for their expression,
they can be but imperfectly realised.
We may perhaps take China (as she was until recently) as the
highest type of a nation of this sort. Hers was a complex and vast
organisation consisting of very ancient institutions and customs,
slowly evolved by the conflict of impulses and in part imposed by
despotic power and individual wills; not formed by a national will
under the guidance of national self-consciousness[80]. Hence China
was incapable of vigorous national thought or volition, and its
nearest approach to collective action was expressed in such blind
impulsive actions as the Taeping Rebellion or the Boxer Rising.
This last seems to have been prompted by a dawning national self-consciousness
which had not, however, so moulded the national
organisation as to make it an efficient instrument of its will.
Of other nations the organisation is, in part only, a natural growth,
[Pg 151]
having been, in large part, impressed upon it by an external power.
Such is the case in all those many instances in which a foreign power
of higher social organisation has conquered and successfully governed
for a long period a people of lower civilisation. We may see a parallel
to this type in the mind of an individual whose behaviour is in the
main the expression of a number of habits engendered by a severe
discipline which has continued from his earliest years, and which
has never permitted the free development of his natural tendencies
and character. Such was England under the feudal system imposed
upon her by her Norman conquerors. Such also France under
Louis XIV. Such was Russia when the Varegs, the conquering
Northmen, imposed on the almost unorganised mass of Slavs their
rule and a national organisation; and such it remained up to the
outbreak of the Great War, a mass of men in whom the national
consciousness was only just beginning to glimmer here and there,
crudely organised by the bureaucratic power of a few. Even in the
minds of these few the national consciousness and purpose was but
little developed. Individual purposes and individual self-consciousness
predominated. Hence Russia had no capacity for national thought
and action; and when, as recently, ideas stirred the masses to action,
their actions were those of unorganised crowds, impulsive and ineffective;
the ends were but vaguely conceived, the means were not
deliberately chosen, or, if so chosen, found no executive organisation
for the effective expression of the collective purpose.
In such nations the organisation, which has been in the main
created by a small governing class, is adapted only for the execution
of its purposes, and not at all for the formation of a national mind
and the expression of the collective will. The organisation consists
primarily in a system for the collecting of taxes and the compulsory
service of a large army. The revenue is raised for two primary
purposes—the support of the governing class or caste in luxury and
the support of the army; and the end for which the army is maintained
is primarily the gathering of the taxes, and the further
extension of the tax-collecting system over larger areas and populations—a
vicious circle. On the other hand, the conditions which
tend to the formation of national mind and character (which would
have quite other ends than these) are naturally suppressed as completely
as possible by the governing few.
Russian history in modern times exemplifies these principles in
the clearest and most complete manner. The effects of this sort of
organisation were very clearly illustrated by Count Tolstoi’s articles
[Pg 152]
in the Fortnightly Review[81], in which he expressed as his social creed
and ideal a complete anarchy to be achieved by passive resistance;
denied that nations have or can have any existence; and asserted
that the idea of a nation is as fictitious as it is pernicious. He had
in mind only this type of organisation of a people, which hardly
entitles it to be called a nation. And the same considerations explain
the wide prevalence of philosophic anarchy in Russia.
Another type of national organisation results when the natural
evolution of the national mind and character has been artificially
and unhealthily forced by the pressure of the external environment
of a people, when the need of national self-preservation and self-assertion
compels the mass of the people to submit to an organisation
which is neither the product of a natural evolution through the
conflict of individual wills, nor the expression of the general mind
and will, nor is altogether imposed upon it for the individual purposes
of the few, but is a system planned by the few for the good of the
whole, and by them imposed upon the whole. This is the kind of
organisation of which a modern army stands as the extreme type
and which is best represented among modern nations by Germany
as she was before the War.
Under such a system there appears inevitably a tendency
rigorously to subordinate the welfare of individuals to that of the
nation as a whole. And that was just the state of affairs in Germany.
German political philosophy showed the opposite extreme from
Tolstoi’s; the individual existed for the nation only. Hence we find
this condition of affairs justified by such writers as Blüntschli[82],
Treitschke and Bernhardi, who represent the State as having an
existence and a system of rights superior to that of all individuals;
and we see attempts to justify the subordination of individual
interests by means of the doctrine of the ‘collective consciousness[83].’
In such States as that of the foregoing type the one kind of
organisation is alone highly developed, namely the executive organisation;
while the deliberative organisation is very imperfect and is
repressed and discouraged by the governing power. Such a State is
likely to appear very strong in all its relations with other States,
and its material organisation may be developed in an effective and
rapid way, as we have seen in pre-war Germany. But its actions
are not the expression of the national will and are not the outcome
of the general mind. They are designed by the minds of the few for
[Pg 153]
the good not of all, but of the whole, the good, that is, not of individuals
but of the State.
Organisation of this type is not of high stability, in spite of its
appearance of strength and its efficiency for certain limited purposes,
such as industrial organisation and the promotion and diffusion of
material well-being. In a State so organised there inevitably grows
up an antagonism between individual rights and interests and the
rights and interests of the State. It is psychologically unsound. This
fact was revealed in Germany by the tremendous growth of social
democracy, which was the protest against the subordination of
individual welfare to that of the State. The defect of such organisation
was illustrated by the fact that Germany, though its well-governed
population increased rapidly, for many years continued
to lose great numbers of its population to other countries. For
the mass of the people felt itself to be not so much of the State as
under it. And it is, I think, obvious that the advent of a bad and
stupid monarch might easily have brought on a revolution at any
time.
The inherent weakness of the system induced the governing power
to all sorts of extreme measures directed to maintain its equilibrium
and cohesion. Among such State actions the gravest were perhaps
the deliberate falsification of history by the servile historians and
the suppression and distortion of news by the press at the command
and desire of the State. The expropriation of the Polish landowners
and the treatment of Alsace-Lorraine were other striking manifestations
of the imperfect development of the national mind and of the
corresponding practice and philosophy of the State-craft which the
world has learnt to describe as Prussian.
The organisation of pre-war Germany was, then, very similar
to that of an army and was efficient in a similar way, that is to say
for the attainment of particular immediate ends. In a wider view,
such national organisation is of a lower nature than that of England
or France or America; for the ends or purposes of a nation are
remote, they transcend the vision of the present and cannot be
defined in terms of material prosperity or military power; and only
the development of the national mind, as a natural and spontaneous
growth, can give a prospect of continued progress towards those
indefinable ends. Germany was organised from above for the attainment
of a particular end, namely material prosperity and power
among the peoples of the world; and, as the bulk of her population
had been led to accept this narrow national purpose, the organisation
[Pg 154]
of the nation, like that of an army, was extremely effective for the
purpose. It gave her a great advantage as against the other
nations, among whom the lack of any such clear cut purpose in the
minds of all was a principal difficulty in the way of effective national
thought and action. For a like reason the existence of a nation
organised in this way is a constant threat to the nations of higher
type; and, as we have seen, it may compel them at any time to revert
to or adopt, temporarily at least and so far as they are able, an
organisation of the lower and more immediately effective kind. And
this threat was the justification of the nations of the Entente, when
they demanded a radical change in this political organisation of
Germany. In a similar way, in the past, the Huns, the Turks, and the
Arabs, peoples organised primarily for war and conquest, had to be
destroyed as nations if the evolution of nations of higher type was
to go forward.
Chapter Xi
THE WILL OF THE NATION[84]
Rousseau, in his famous treatise, Le Contrat Social, wrote “There is
often a great difference between the will of all and the general will;
the latter looks only to the common interest; the former looks to
private interest, and is nothing but a sum of individual wills; but
take away from these same wills the plus and minus that cancel
one another and there remains, as the sum of the differences, the
general will.” “Sovereignty is only the exercise of the general will.”
That is to say, a certain number of men will the general good, while
most men will only their private good; the latter neutralise one
another, while the former co-operate to form an effective force.
Dr Bosanquet[85], criticising Rousseau’s doctrine, says that the
general will is expressed by the working of the institutions of the
community which embody its dominant ideas; that no one man
really grasps the nature and relations of the whole society and its
tendencies; that the general will is thus unconscious (by which he
seems to mean that the nation is unconscious of itself and of its
ends or purposes); and he goes on to say that the general will is the
product of practical activities making for nearer smaller ends, and
that its harmony depends on the fact that the activities of each
individual are parts of a systematic whole.
Bosanquet’s theory amounts to a justification of the old individualist
laissez faire doctrine—the doctrine that the good of the
whole is best achieved by giving freest possible scope to the play
and conflict of individual purposes and strivings—the philosophic
radicalism of Bentham and Mill, which teaches that, if each man
honestly and efficiently pursues his private ends, the welfare of the
State somehow results. How this systematic whole which is the
State arises he does not explain; and it seems to me that Bosanquet
leaves unsolved that difficulty which, as we saw, led Schiller and
others to postulate an external power guiding each people—the
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difficulty, if we assume that individual wills strive only after private
egoistic ends, of explaining how the good of the whole is nevertheless
achieved.
In all societies many general changes result, and in some nations
no doubt the good of the whole is achieved in a measure by
fortunate accident, in the way Bosanquet describes—namely, by the
interplay of individual wills working for near individual ends. But,
I think, it is improper to say that in such a case any general will
exists. Such a nation, if it displays any collective activity, only does
so in an impulsive blind way which is not true volition, but is
comparable rather with instinctive action; for, as we have seen, self-consciousness
is essential to volition; a truly volitional action is one
which issues from the contemplation of some end represented in
relation to the idea of the self and found to be desirable. And the
changes of a society which result in the way Bosanquet claims as
the expression of the general will are unforeseen and unwilled;
they are no more the expression and effects of a general will than
are the movements of a billiard ball struck simultaneously by two
or more men each of whom aims at a different position.
Bosanquet maintains that the national will is unconscious of its
ends; but that the life of a nation does express a general will, in
virtue of the fact that the individuals, who will private and less
general ends than the ends of the nation, live in a system of relations
that constitutes them an organism; and that it is in virtue of this
organic system of relations that the individual volitions work out
to an unforeseen unpurposed resultant, which he calls the end willed
by the general will. He makes of this organic unity the essential
difference between a mere crowd and a society or nation—defining
an organism or organic unity as a system of parts the capacities and
functions of each of which are determined by the general nature and
principle of the whole group.
That is an excellent definition of an organism; and we have
recognised fully the importance of organisation in national life,
consisting in specialisation of the parts such that each part is adapted
to perform some one function that subserves the life of the whole,
while itself dependent upon the proper functioning of all other parts.
We may admit too that, in proportion as this specialisation of
functions is carried further, organic unity is promoted because
the life of the whole becomes more intimately dependent on the life
of each part, and each part more intimately and completely dependent
on the life of the whole.
But unity of this sort is characteristic of all animal bodies; and,
though the mind has this kind of organic unity, it acquires, in proportion
as self-consciousness develops, over and above this kind of
unity, a unity of an altogether new and unique kind; a unity which
consists in the whole (or the self) being present to consciousness,
whether clearly or obscurely, during almost every moment of thought,
and pervading and playing some part in the determination of the
course of thought and action.
Now, the national mind also has both the lower and the higher
kinds of unity. In both cases—that is, in the development both of
the individual and of the national mind—a certain degree of organic
unity must be achieved, before self-consciousness can develop and
begin to play its part; but in both cases, when once it has begun
to operate, self-consciousness goes on greatly to increase the organic
unity, to increase the specialisation of functions and the systematic
interdependence of the parts.
Consider a single illustration of this parallelism of the individual
with the national mind. Take the aesthetic faculty. In the individual
mind there develops a certain capacity for finding pleasure in certain
objects and impressions, such as young children and even the animals
have; and then, with the growth of self-consciousness, the individual
sets himself deliberately to cultivate this faculty, to specialise it
along particular lines and to exercise it as something apart from his
other mental functions; while, nevertheless, it becomes for him, in
proportion as it is developed and specialised, more and more an
essential part of his total experience. Just so there spontaneously
develop in a people some rudimentary aesthetic practices and traditions
and some class of persons, say the bards, who are more skilled
than other men in ministering to the aesthetic demands of their
fellows. Then, as national self-consciousness develops, the place
and value of these functions in the system of national life becomes
explicitly recognised, and they are deliberately fostered by the
establishment of national institutions, schools of art, academies of
letters and music, the award of public titles and honours and so
forth; whereby the specialisation of these national functions is
increased, their dependence on the life of the whole rendered more
intimate, and, at the same time, the life of the whole rendered more
dependent upon the life of these parts, because the richer aesthetic
development of the parts reacts upon the whole, diffusing itself
through and elevating the life of the whole.
Bosanquet recognises in national life only the lower kind of unity
[Pg 158]
and not the unity of self-consciousness. He seems to reject the
notion of national self-consciousness, on the ground that the life
of a nation is so complex that it cannot be fully and adequately
reflected in the consciousness of any individual; yet in this respect
the difference between the national mind and the individual mind
is one of degree only and not of kind. In the individual mind also,
even the most highly developed and self-conscious, the capacities
and dispositions and tendencies that make up the whole mind are
never fully and adequately present to consciousness; the individual
never knows himself exhaustively, though he may continually progress
towards a more nearly complete self-knowledge. Just so the
national mind may progress towards a more complete self-knowledge,
and, though at the present time no nation has attained more than
a very imperfect self-knowledge, yet the process is accelerating
rapidly among the more advanced nations; and such increasing
self-knowledge promises to become the dominating factor in the
life of nations, as it is in the lives of all men, save the most
primitive.
Suppose that all those conditions making for national unity
which we have considered in the foregoing chapters were realised,
but that nevertheless all men continued to be moved only by self-regarding
motives, or by those which have reference to the welfare
of themselves and their family circle or to any ends less comprehensive
than the welfare of the whole nation. We could not then
properly speak of the tendencies resulting from the interplay and
the conflict of all these individual wills as expressions of the general
will, as Bosanquet and others have done, even though the organic
unity of the whole secured a harmonious resultant national activity,
if such a thing were possible. But there is no reason to suppose that
such a thing is possible.
I think we may say that it is only in so far as the idea of the
people or nation as a whole is present to the consciousness of individuals
and determines their actions that a nation in the proper
sense of the word can exist or ever has existed. Without this factor
any population inhabiting a given territory remains either a mere
horde or a population of slaves under a despotism. Neither
can be called a nation; wherever a nation has appeared in the
history of the world, the consciousness of itself as a nation has
been an essential condition of its existence and still more of its
progress.
We may see this, even more clearly, in the case of the smaller
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aggregations of men, the smaller social units, the family, the clan,
the tribe. The family is a family only so long as it is conscious of
itself as a family, and only in virtue of that self-consciousness and of
the part which this idea and the sentiments gathered about it play
in determining the actions of each member. How carefully such
family consciousness is sometimes fostered and how great a part it
plays in social life is common knowledge. In the early stages of
Greek and Roman history, the family consciousness was the dominant
social force which long succeeded in overriding and preventing the
development of any larger social consciousness. Just as the gens
played this part in early Rome, so the clan has played a similar
part elsewhere, for example in the highlands of Scotland. Such
peoples form the strongest nations.
Just so with the tribe. It exists as a tribe only because, and in
so far as, it is conscious of itself, and in so far as the idea of the
tribe and devotion to its service determines the actions of individuals.
The mere fact of the possession of a tribal name suffices to prove
the existence of this self-consciousness. And, as a matter of fact,
tribal self-consciousness is in many cases extremely strongly developed;
the idea of the tribe, of its rights and powers, of its past
and its future plays a great part among warlike savages; and an
injury done to the tribe, or an insult offered to it, will often be
kept in mind for many years, even for generations, and will be
avenged when an opportunity occurs, even in spite of the certainty
of death to many individuals and the risk of extermination of the
whole tribe.
The federation of Iroquois tribes to form a rudimentary nation
seems to have been due to a self-conscious collective purpose. And,
when other tribes become fused to form nations, the same holds
true. Consider the Hebrew nation, one of the earliest historical
examples of a number of allied tribes becoming fused to a nation.
Surely the idea of the nation as the chosen people of Jehovah played
a vital part in its consolidation, implanted and fostered as it was
by a succession of great teachers, the prophets. Their work was
to implant this idea and this sentiment strongly in the minds of
the people, to create and foster this traditional sentiment by the
aid of supernatural sanctions. The national self-consciousness thus
formed has continued to be not only one factor, but almost the only
factor or condition, of the continued existence of the Jewish people
as a people, or at any rate the one fundamental condition on which
all the others are founded—their exclusive religion, their objection to
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intermarriage with outsiders, their hope of a future restoration of the
fortunes of the nation, and so forth.
And the same is true of every real nation; its existence and its
power are grounded in its consciousness of itself, the idea of the
nation as a dominant factor in the minds of the individuals. The
dominant sentiment which centres about that idea is very different
in the various nations. It may be chiefly pride in the nation’s past
history, as in Spain; or hope for its future, as in Japan; or the need
of self-assertion in the present, as in pre-war Germany.
The political history of Europe in the nineteenth century is
chiefly the history of the national actions that have sprung from
increase of national self-consciousness resulting from the spread of
education, from the improvement of means of communication within
each people and from increase of intercourse between nations. The
opening pages were the wars in which the French people, suddenly
aroused to an intense national consciousness, successfully resisted
and drove back all the other European powers. Of other leading
events the formation of modern Italy and of modern Germany, of
Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, were results of the awakening of national
self-consciousness[86].
The resistance of the Japanese to the Russians and their victory
over them were in the fullest sense the immediate outcome of the
idea of the Japanese nation in the minds of all its people, leading
to a strong collective volition for the greater power, glory, and
advancement of the nation. The recent unrest in China is recognised
on all hands to be the expression of a dawning national self-consciousness.
In Europe, Poland, Finland, Hungary, and Ireland exemplify
its workings very clearly in recent years. The Magyars were not
oppressed by the Austrians. They, economically and individually,
had nothing material to gain by a separation from Austria; and in
separating themselves they would have risked much, their lives, and
their material welfare; yet the idea of the Magyar nation impelled
them to it. The Poles of Germany were not rebellious because they
were ill-treated and their affairs maladministered. If they could and
would have cast out from their minds the idea of the Polish nation,
they might have comfortably shared in the marvellously advancing
material prosperity of Germany. But they were severely treated by the
Germans, because they were moved by this idea and this sentiment;
and the bad treatment it brought upon them did but render the
[Pg 161]
idea more vividly, more universally, present to the consciousness of
all, even of the little children at school, and, by inflaming the
passions which have their root in the national sentiment, strengthened
that sentiment.
But for the idea of the Boer nation and the dawning national
sentiment, the late Boer war would never have occurred; and that
sentiment was, as in the case of the Japanese in their late war, the
principal source of the great energy displayed by the Boers and of
such success as they achieved.
Even in India, the proposal to divide Bengal has suddenly discovered
among the Bengalese, the most submissive part of the
population, the part which has seemed most devoid of national
spirit, the existence and the importance as a political factor of the
idea of the Bengalese as a people and of sentiments centred upon
that idea.
The rapid increase of national self-consciousness among the
peoples of the world and the increasing part everywhere played by
the sentiment for national existence are in short the dominant facts
in the present period of world history; their influence overshadows
all others.
Since, then, any nation exists only in virtue of the existence of
the idea of the nation in the minds of the individuals of whom it
is composed, and in virtue of the influence of this idea upon their
actions, and since this idea plays so great a part in shaping the
history of the world, it is absurd to maintain that the general
will is but the blind resultant of the conflict of individual wills
striving after private ends and unconscious of the ends or purposes
of the nation. In opposition to such a view, we must maintain that a
population seeking only individual ends cannot form or continue to
be a nation, though all the other conditions we have noticed be
present; that a nation is real and vigorous in proportion as its consciousness
of its self is full and clear. In fact national progress and
power and success depend in chief part upon the fulness and the
extension, the depth and width of this self-consciousness—the accuracy
and fulness with which each individual mind reflects the whole;
and upon the strength of the sentiments which are centred upon it
and which lead men to act for the good of the whole, to postpone
private to public ends. And the same holds good of all the many
forms of corporate life within the nation. Each individual’s sense of
duty, in so far as it is a true sense of duty, and not a fictitious sense
due merely to superstitious fear or to habit formed by suggestion
[Pg 162]
and compulsion, is chiefly founded upon the consciousness of
the society of which he forms a part, upon the group spirit that
binds him to his fellows and makes him one with them. And the
nations in which this national self-consciousness is strongest and
most widely diffused will be the successful nations.
Reflect a little on these facts vouched for by General Sir Ian
Hamilton. No soldier of the Japanese army, none even of the coolies,
would accept anything in the shape of a tip even for honest services
rendered, lest the purity of his motives should be sullied; and each
man always went into action not merely prepared to die if necessary,
but actually prepared and expecting to conquer and to die for the
good and glory of his nation. He writes “Japanese officers have
constantly to explain to their men that they must not consider the
main object of the battle is to get killed[87].” And he goes on to show
that they are not fanatics, are not inspired by any idea of the supernatural
or by any hope of rewards after death, as is usually the case
of the Moslem soldier who displays an equal recklessness of life.
Surely, if in any nation the national consciousness could inspire and
maintain all classes of its people in all relations of life to this high
level of strenuous self-sacrifice for the welfare of the nation, that
nation would soon predominate over all others, and be impregnably
strong, no matter what defects of individual and national character
it might display.
The idea of the nation is, then, a bond between its members
over and above all those bonds of custom, of habit, of economic
interdependence, of law and of self-interest, of sympathy, of imitation,
of collective emotion and thought, which inevitably arise among
a homogeneous people occupying any defined area; and it is the
most powerful and essential of them all. As Fouillée put it, the
essential characteristic of human society is that “it is an organism
which realises itself in conceiving and in willing its own existence.
Any collection of men becomes a society in the only true sense of
the word, when all the men conceive more or less clearly the type
of organic whole which they can form by uniting themselves and
when they effectively unite themselves under the determining influence
of this conception. Society is then an organism which exists
because it has been thought and willed, it is an organism born of
an idea[88].” In this sense Society has never yet been perfectly realized,
but it is the ideal towards which social evolution tends.
National group self-consciousness plays, then, an all-important
part in the life of nations, is in fact the actual, the most essential
constitutive factor of every nation; and nationhood or the principal
of nationality is the dominant note of world history in the present
epoch; that is to say, the desire and aspiration to achieve nationhood,
or to strengthen and advance the life of the nation, is the most
powerful motive underlying the collective actions of almost all
civilised and even of semi-civilised mankind; and the consequent
rivalry between nations overshadows every other feature of modern
world history, and is convulsing and threatening to destroy the whole
of modern civilisation. It is surely well worthy of serious study. Yet,
owing to the backward and neglected state of psychology, not only
is this study neglected, but, as we have seen, some of our leading
political philosophers have not yet even realized the essential nature
of the problem; and many of the historians, economists and political
writers are even further from a grasp of its nature. They have been
forced by the prominence and urgency of the facts to recognise what
they call the principle of nationality; and even now the majority
of them are demanding that, in the European settlement and in the
affairs of the world in general, the principle of nationality shall be
given the leading place and the decisive voice. But they do not
recognise that the understanding of this principle, this all-powerful
political factor, is primarily and purely a psychological problem.
We find them, in discussing the nature of nations and the conditions
of nationality, perhaps mentioning the psychological view of
nations as a curious aberration of a few academic cranks, from which
they turn to discover the true secret of nationality in such considerations
as geographical boundaries, race, language, history,
and above all economic factors; they do not see that each and
all of these conditions, real and important though they are and have
been in shaping the history and determining the existence of nations,
only play their parts indirectly by affecting men’s minds, their
beliefs, opinions, and sentiments, especially by favouring or repressing
the development in each people of the idea of the nation.
The all-dominant influence of the idea of the nation, I insist,
is not a theory or a speculative suggestion, it is a literal and obvious
fact. Let every other one of the favouring conditions of nationality,
the geographical, historical, economic be realised by a population;
yet, if that population has no collective self-consciousness, is not
strongly actuated to collective volition by the group spirit, it will
remain not a nation, but a mere aggregate of individuals, having
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more or less organic unity due to the differentiation and interdependence
of its parts, but lacking that higher bond of unity which
alone can ensure its stability and continuity, and which, especially,
can alone enable it to withstand and survive the peaceful pressure
or the warlike impact of true nations.
I am not at present defending nationality; I shall come back to
the question of its value. I am now only concerned with the psychological
problem of the nature and conditions of the development of
national self-consciousness. I have been using the latter phrase and
the phrase ‘the idea of the nation’ as a shorthand expression; but I
must remind the reader that we have to beware of the intellectualist
error of regarding ideas as moving powers; ideas as merely intellectual
representations or conceptions have no motive power, they are in
themselves indifferent. It is only in so far as the object conceived
becomes the object of some sentiment that the conception of it
moves us strongly to feeling and action. I must refer, therefore, to
what I have written on the sentiments and the self-regarding sentiment[89].
Here I would insist on the strictness in this point of our
analogy between the individual and the national mind. I have
pointed out that the individual’s idea of himself only develops
beyond a rudimentary stage in virtue of and in so far as this idea
becomes the nucleus of a strong self-regarding sentiment which gives
him an interest in himself, directs his attention upon his own personality
and its relations, and impels him to strive to know himself.
So that a developed individual self-consciousness never is and never
can be a purely intellectual growth, but always involves a strong
sentiment, a centering of emotional conative tendencies upon this
object, the self. Exactly the same is true of nations.
Hence national self-consciousness can never develop except in
the form of an idea of strong affective tone, that is to say a sentiment.
Hence, whenever we speak of national self-consciousness or
the idea of the nation as a powerful factor in its life, the sentiment
is implied, and I have implied it when using these expressions
hitherto. This national sentiment, which, if we use the word in its
widest sense, may be called patriotism, is, like all the other group
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sentiments, developed by way of extension of the self-regarding
sentiment of the individual to the group, and may be further
complicated and strengthened by the inclusion of other tendencies.
A point of especial importance is that this great group sentiment
can hardly be developed otherwise than by way of extension of
sentiments for smaller included groups, the family especially. For the
idea of the nation is too difficult for the grasp of the child’s mind, and
cannot, therefore, become the object of a sentiment until the intellectual
powers are considerably developed. Hence the development of a
family sentiment, or of one for some other small easily conceived
group, is essential for the development in the child of those modes
of mental action which are involved in all group feeling and action.
For this reason the family is the surest, perhaps essential, foundation
of national life; and national self-consciousness is strongest,
where family life is strongest.
The development of the group spirit in general and of national
self-consciousness in particular is favoured by, and indeed dependent
upon, conditions similar to those which develop the self-consciousness
of individuals. Here is another striking point of the analogy between
the individual and the national mind. Passing over other conditions,
let us notice one, the most important of all. The individual’s
consciousness of self is developed chiefly by intercourse with
other individuals—by imitation, by conflict, by compulsion, and by
co-operation. Without such intercourse it must remain rudimentary.
The individual’s conception of himself is perpetually extended by his
increasing knowledge of other selves; and his knowledge of those
other selves grows in the light of his knowledge of himself. There
is perpetual reciprocal action. The same is true of peoples. A population
living shut off, isolated from the rest of the world, within
which no distinctions of tribe and race existed, would never become
conscious of itself as one people and, therefore, would not become a
nation. Some such conditions obtained for long ages among the
pastoral hordes of the central Eurasian Steppes, which, so long as
they remained there, have never formed a nation; and the same was
true of the tribes of Arabia, until Mahomet impelled them by his
religion of the sword to hurl themselves upon neighbouring peoples.
Of civilised peoples, China has had least intercourse with the
outer world. The Chinese knew too little of other races to imitate
them; they did not come into conflict or co-operation with others,
save in a very partial manner at long intervals of time, or only with
their Mongol conquerors, whom they despised as inferior to them in
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everything but warfare, and whom they abhorred. Hence, in spite of
the homogeneity of the people, of the common culture, and of the
vast influence of great teachers, national consciousness and the group
spirit in all its forms remained at a low level. Hence, a great deficiency
in those virtues which have their root in the social consciousness;
a low standard of public duty, a lack of the sense of
obligation to society. Hence, the corruptness and hollowness
of all official transactions and political life. Want of honesty in
public affairs is not the expression of an inherent defect of the
Chinese character; for in commercial relations with Europeans
the Chinaman has proved himself extremely trustworthy, much
superior indeed in this respect to some other peoples. It is
probable that, if China, like Europe, had long ago been divided into
a number of nations, each of them, through action and reaction
upon the rest, would have developed a much fuller national consciousness
than exists at present and some considerable degree of
public spirit and would consequently have advanced very much
farther in the scale of social evolution, instead of standing still as
the whole people has done for so long.
Everywhere we can see the illustrations of this law. Of all forms
of intercourse, conflict and competition are the most effective in developing
national consciousness and character, because they bring
a common purpose to the minds of all individuals; and that is the
condition of the highest degree and effectiveness of collective mental
action and volition. It is under these conditions that the idea of
the nation and the will to protect it and to forward its interests
become predominant in the minds of individuals; and the more so
the greater the public danger, the greater and the more obvious the
need for the postponement of private ends to the general end.
Already there is beginning to develop a European self-consciousness
and a European purpose, provoked by the demonstration of the
hitherto latent power of Asia; and, if a federation of European
peoples is ever to be realised, it will be the result of their further
development through opposition to a great and threatening Asiatic
power, a revived Moslem empire, or possibly a threatened American
domination[90].
Although war has hitherto been the most important condition of
the development of national consciousness, it is not the only one;
and it remains to be seen whether industrial or other forms of rivalry
can play a similar part. Probably, industrial rivalry cannot; the
[Pg 167]
accumulation of wealth is too largely dependent upon the accidents
of material conditions to become a legitimate source of national
satisfaction; for, unlike the satisfaction arising from successful exertion
of military power, it does not imply intrinsic superiorities. If
the natural conditions of material prosperity could be equalised for
all nations, then the acquisition of superior wealth, implying as it
would superior capacities, might become a sufficiently satisfying
end of national action; just as the equalisation of conditions among
individuals in America has for the present rendered the accumulation
of wealth a sufficient end, because such accumulation implies superior
powers and is the mark of personal superiority.
Other forms of rivalry—rivalry in art, science, letters, in efficiency
of social and political organisation, even in games and sports, all
play some part; and it is possible that together they might suffice
to constitute sufficient stimulus, even though the possibility of war
should be for ever removed[91].
But national self-consciousness is not developed by conflict and
rivalry only. It is refined and enriched by all other forms of intercourse.
In studying other peoples, their organisation and their
history, we become more clearly aware of the defects and the
qualities and potentialities of our own nation. And in this way,
refinement of national consciousness is now going on rapidly in
the European peoples. The latest considerable advance is due to
the observation of Japan; for this has clearly demonstrated the
imperfection of many conceptions that were current among us and
has brought a certain abatement of national complacency and a
greater earnestness of national self-criticism, which is highly favourable
to increase of national self-knowledge[92].
We might place nations in a scale of nationhood. The scale
would correspond roughly to one in which they were arranged according
to the degree to which the public good is the end, and the
desire of it the motive, of men’s actions; this in turn would correspond
to a scale in which they were arranged according to the
degree of development and diffusion of the national consciousness,
of the idea of the nation or society as a whole; and this again to
one in which they were arranged according to the degree of intercourse
they have had with other nations. At the bottom of the
scale would stand the people of Thibet, the most isolated people of
the world; near them the Chinese, who also have until recently
[Pg 168]
been almost entirely excluded from international intercourse.
Such peoples have a national consciousness and sentiment which
is extremely vague and imperfect. They do not realise their weakness,
their strength or their potentialities, but have an unenlightened
pride without aspiration for a higher form of national life.
A little above them would stand Russia, which has remained for so
long outside the area of European international life. While at the top
of the scale would be those nations which have borne their part in all
the strain and stress and friction of European rivalry and intercourse.
These degrees of international intercourse have been very largely
determined by geographical conditions; isolation, and consequent
backwardness in national evolution, being in nearly every case due
to remoteness of position. The most important factor of modern
times making for more rapid social evolution is probably the practical
destruction or overcoming of the barriers between peoples; for thus
all peoples are brought into the international arena, and their national
spirit is developed through international intercourse and rivalry.
It is this increasing contact and intercourse of peoples, brought
about by the increased facilities of communication, which has
quickened the growth of national self-consciousness throughout all
the world and has made the principle of nationality or, more properly,
the desire for nationhood and for national existence and development,
for self-assertion and for international recognition, the
all-important feature of modern times, overshadowing every other
phenomenon that historians have to notice, or statesmen to reckon
with.
The American nation is interesting in this connexion. If we ask—Why
is their public life on a relatively low level, in spite of so many
favouring conditions, including a healthy and strong public opinion?—the
answer is that they have been until recently too much shut off
from collective intercourse with other nations, too far removed from
the region of conflict and rivalry. And judicious well-wishers of the
American nation rejoice that it has recently entered more fully into
the international arena, and has not continued to pursue the policy
of isolation, which was long in favour; because, as is already manifest,
this fuller intercourse and intenser rivalry with other nations must
render fuller and more effective their national spirit, develop the
national will and raise the national life to a higher plane, giving
to individuals higher ends and motives than the mere accumulation
of wealth, and removing that self-complacency as regards their
national existence which hitherto has characterised them in common
with the peoples of Thibet and China.
Chapter Xii
IDEAS IN NATIONAL LIFE
We have seen that the idea of the nation can and does, in virtue of
the formation of the sentiment of devotion to it, lead men to choose
and decide and act for the sake of the nation; they desire the welfare
and the good of the nation as a whole, they value its material
prosperity and its reputation in the eyes of other nations; and, in
so far as the decisions and actions of a nation proceed from this
motive, co-operating with and controlling other motives in the minds
of its members, such decision and action are the expressions of true
collective volition.
It is truly volition because it conforms to the true type of volition.
Individual volition can only be marked off from every impulsive
action and every lower form of effort, by the fact that in true
volition, among all the impulses or motives that may impel a man
to action or decision, the dominant rôle is played by a motive that
springs from his self-regarding sentiment. This motive is a desire to
achieve a particular end, which, viewed as the achievement of the
self, brings him satisfaction, because the thought of himself achieving
this end is in harmony with the ideal of the self which he has
gradually built up and has learnt to desire to realize under the
influence of his social setting. The same is true of national volition.
And it is collective volition in so far as the deliberations by
which the decision of the nation has been reached have been
effected through those formally and informally organised relations
and channels of communication and by means of all the various
modes of interaction of persons by which public opinion is formed
and in which it is guided and controlled by the living traditions of
the nation.
That this is the true nature of national volition may be more
clearly realized on considering some instances of national action which
could not properly be called the expression of the will of the Nation.
A tariff might be adopted because a large number of men desired it,
each in order that he himself might get rich more quickly; and, even
though a large majority, or even all men, desired it, each for his private
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end, it would not be the expression of the national will, it would not
be due to collective volition; it would be the expression of the will
of all. Nor would it be an expression of the national will, even if
each believed that, not only he, but also all his fellows would be
enriched, and if he desired it for that reason also; that would be an
expression of the will of all for the good of all. Only if and in so
far as the decision was reached through the influence of those who
desired it, because it seemed to them to be for the good of the
whole nation, would it be the expression of the will of the nation.
And the difference would be not merely a difference of motive;
the difference might be very important in respect both of the
deliberative processes by which the decision was reached and also
in respect of its ultimate consequences. For the will of all for the
good of all would have reference only to the immediate future;
whereas the truly national will would be influenced not only by
consideration of the good of all existing citizens, but, in an even
greater degree, by the thought of the continued welfare of the whole
nation, in the remote future.
Again, suppose that, on the occasion of an insult or injury to the
nation (I remind the reader of the incident in the North Sea when
the Russian fleet fired on our fishing boats), a wave of anger against
the offending nation sweeps over the whole country and that this
outburst of popular fury plunges the nation into war. That would be
collective mental process, but not volition; it would be action on
the plane of impulse or desire, unregulated by reflection upon the
end proposed in relation to the welfare of the nation and by the
motives to action that are stirred by such reflection.
Again, suppose a nation of which every member was patriotic,
and suppose that some proposed national action were pondered upon
by each man apart in his own chamber, without consultation and
discussion with his fellows in public and private. Then, though the
decision would be true volition, in so far as it was determined by each
man’s desire for the national welfare, it yet would not be collective
or national volition; because not reached by collective deliberation.
We have seen that the idea of the nation, present to the minds
of the mass of its members, is an essential condition of the nation’s
existence in any true sense of the word nation; that the idea alone
as an intellectual apprehension cannot exert any large influence;
that it determines judgment and action only in virtue of the sentiment
which grows up about this object—a sentiment which is
transmitted and fostered from generation to generation, just because
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it renders the nation an object of value. The consideration should be
obvious enough; but it has commonly been ignored by philosophers
of the intellectualist school. They treat the individual mind as a
system of ideas; they ignore the fact that it has a conative side
which has its own organisation, partially distinct from, though not
independent of, the intellectual side; and consequently they ignore
equally the fact that the national mind has its conative organisation.
Imagine a people in whom anti-nationalism (in the form of
cosmopolitanism, syndicalism or philosophic anarchism) had spread,
until this attitude towards the nation-state as such had become
adopted by half its members, while the other half remained patriotic.
Then there would be acute conflict and discussion, and the idea of
the nation would be vividly present to all minds; but the nature of
the sentiment attached to it would be different and opposite in the
two halves; one of attachment and devotion in the one half; of dislike,
aversion, or at least indifference (i.e. lack of sentiment) in the other
half. And the efforts of the one half to maintain the nation as a
unit would be antagonised and perhaps rendered nugatory by the
indifference or opposition of the other half, who would always seek
to break down national boundaries and would refuse co-operation
in any national action, and who would league themselves with bodies
of similar interests and anti-national tendencies in other countries.
Then, even though all might be well-meaning people desiring the
good of mankind, the nation would be very greatly weakened and
probably would soon cease to exist as such.
The illustration shews the importance of the distinction which
Rousseau did not draw in his discussion of the general will—namely,
the distinction between the good of all and the good of the whole,
i.e. of the nation as such. It might be argued that the distinction is
purely verbal; it might be said that, if you secure the good of all,
you thereby ipso facto secure the good of the whole, because the
whole consists of the sum of existing individuals; and that this is
obvious, because, if you take them away, no whole remains. But
to argue thus is to ignore the fact on which we have already insisted—namely,
that the whole is much more than the sum of the
existing units, because it has an indefinitely long future before it
and a part to play, through indefinitely long periods of time, as a
factor in the general welfare and progress of mankind.
So much greater is the whole than the sum of its existing parts,
that it might well seem right to sacrifice the welfare and happiness
of one or two or more generations, and even the lives of the majority
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of the citizens, if that were necessary to the preservation and future
welfare of the whole nation as such. This is no merely theoretical
distinction, it is one of the highest practical importance, which we
may illustrate in two ways.
A whole nation may be confronted with the alternative, may be
forced to choose between the good of all and the good of the
whole. Such a choice was, it may be said without exaggeration,
suddenly presented to the Belgian people, and only less acutely to
ourselves and to Italy, by the recent European conflagration; and
in each case the good of the whole has been preferred. Is it not
probable and obvious that, if each or all of these peoples had consented
to the domination of Germany, the material welfare of all
their existing citizens might well have been increased, rather than
diminished, and that their choice has involved not only the loss of
life of large numbers of their citizens and great sufferings for nearly
all the others, but also enormous sacrifice of material prosperity, in
order that the whole may survive and eventually prosper as a nation
working out its national destiny free from external domination?
There are, or were, those who say that they would just as soon live
under German rule, because they would be governed at least as well
and perhaps better than by their own government hitherto; and
there is perhaps nothing intrinsically bad or wrong in this attitude;
the question of its rightness or wrongness turns wholly on the valuation
of nationality. It is easier to appreciate this plea on behalf of
another people than our own. One may hear it said even now that,
after all, it would have been better for Belgium that she should have
entered into the group of Germanic powers in some sort of federal
system or Customs union; that, in general, it is ridiculous that the
small states should claim sovereign powers and pretend to have
their own foreign policy and so forth; that they are struggling
against the inevitable, against a universal and necessary tendency
for the absorption of the smaller states by the larger.
We may illustrate the difference between regard for the good of
all members of the nation and of the nation itself in another
way—namely, by reference to socialism, the principle which would
abolish inequalities of wealth and opportunity, as far as possible,
by abolishing or greatly restricting the rights of private property
and capital, especially the right of inheritance. There can, I think,
be little doubt that the adoption of socialism in this sense by
almost any modern nation would increase the well being and
happiness of its members very decidedly on the whole for the
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present generation and possibly for some generations to come. It
is in respect of the continued welfare of the whole and of its perpetuation
as an evolving and progressing organism that the effects
seem likely to be decidedly bad. The socialists are in the main
those who fix their desire and attention on the good of all; hence
they are for the most part inclined to set a low value on nationality,
even while they demand a vast extension of the functions of the
State, conceived as an organised system of administration. Those,
on the other hand, who repudiate socialism, not merely because they
belong to the class of ‘Haves,’ must seek their justification in the
consideration of the probable effects of such a change on the welfare
of the nation conceived as an organism whose value far transcends
the lives of the present generation.
When, then, we attribute to the idea of the nation or to the
national consciousness this all-important creative, constitutive, and
conservative function, we must be clear that the idea is not an
intellectual conception merely, but implies an enduring emotional
conative attitude which is the sentiment of devotion to the nation;
and, further, we must remember that the nation means not simply all
existing individuals, the mere momentary embodiment of the nation,
but something that is far greater, because it includes all the potentialities
embodied in the existing persons and organisation.
It is the presence and operation in the national mind of the idea
of the nation in the extended sense just indicated that gives to
national decisions and actions the character of truly collective volitions;
they approach this type more nearly, the more the idea is
rich in meaning and adequate or true, and the more widely it is
spread, and the more powerful and widely spread is the sentiment
which attaches value to the nation and sways men to decision
and action for the sake of the whole, determining the issue among
all other conflicting motives.
And it is the working of the national spirit and the acceptance
of and devotion to the national organisation which render the
submission of the minority to the means chosen by the majority
a voluntary submission; for it is of the essence of that organisation
that, while all accept and will the same most general end, namely
the welfare of the whole, the choice of means must be determined
by the judgment of the majority, formed and expressed as a collective
judgment and opinion by way of all the many channels of
reciprocal influence that the national organisation, both formal
and informal, provides. In so far as each man holds this attitude,
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esteeming the nation and accepting loyally its constitution or
organisation, the decision determined by even a bare majority vote
of parliament becomes the expression of the national will; and
the co-operation in carrying it out of those who did not judge the
method to be wise, and who therefore voted against it, yet becomes a
truly voluntary co-operation, in so far as they accept the established
organisation.
The point may be illustrated by the instance of a nation going to
war. A large minority may be against war, for reasons which to them
may seem to be of the highest kind; it may be that they judge the
nation to be morally in the wrong in the matter in dispute, or very
questionably in the right, as many Englishmen did during the Boer
War; and yet, if, by the accepted organised channels of national
deliberation and decision, war has been declared, then, although it
was their duty to do what they could to make their opinion prevail
before the decision was reached, there is no moral inconsistency in
their supporting the war measures with all their strength. It is in
fact implied in their loyalty, if they are loyal and patriotic, that
they shall yield their individual opinion to the expression of the
national will and shall accept the means chosen to the common end.
That is the truth implied in the phrase—My country right or wrong.
Of course, this phrase may be taken in a reprehensible sense, as
meaning that any opportunity of forwarding the immediate interests
of one’s country must be taken, regardless of the interests of other
communities and of the obligations of common honesty and humanity
upon which all human welfare depends.
In the same way, a man might disapprove of a particular tax,
say on liquor, or of obligatory military service; and yet he may
accept the national will and serve faithfully as a soldier, without
inconsistency, and without ceasing to be a free agent truly willing
the acts imposed by his position in the whole organisation; just as
during the late war many priests served as soldiers in the French
army. Or, to take an extreme instance, a man who has broken the law
and even incurred the death penalty may be truly said to undergo
his punishment of imprisonment or death as a morally free agent,
if he is loyal to his country and its institutions, accepting the penalty,
while yet believing his action to be right. Such perfect loyalty to
the nation is of course rare; and in all actual nations men have
progressed towards it in very different degrees. Most existing nations
have emerged from preceding despotisms by the repeated widening
of the sphere of freedom, as the growth of loyalty in strength and
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extension rendered such freedom consistent with the survival of the
State and its administrative functions.
Thus a people progresses from the status of an organism, in which
the parts are subordinated to the whole without choice or free
volition on their part, or even against their wills, towards the ideal
of a Nation-state, an organic whole which is founded wholly upon
voluntary contract between each member and the whole, and in
which the distinction between the State and the nation becomes
gradually overcome and replaced by identity. For, as national self-consciousness
develops and each man conceives more fully and clearly
the whole nation and his place and function in it, and grows in
loyalty to the nation, he ceases to obey the laws merely because he
is constrained by the authority and force of the State. An increasing
proportion of citizens obey the law and render due services
voluntarily, because they perceive that, in so doing, they are contributing
towards the good of the whole which they value highly;
in so far as they act in this spirit, the actions and restraints prescribed
by law become their voluntary actions and restraints.
Thus the theory that society is founded upon a Social Contract,
which, if taken as a description of the historical process of genesis,
is false, is true, if accepted as the constitutive principle of the ideal
State towards which progressive nations are tending.
And, as the organisation of a nation becomes less dependent
upon outer authority and upon mere custom and the unreasoning
acceptance of tradition, and more and more upon free consent and
voluntary contract, the nation does not cease to be an organism;
it retains that formal and informal organisation which has developed
in large part without the deliberate guidance of the collective
will and which is essential to its collective life; the national mind,
as it grows in force and extension and understanding of its own
organisation, accepts those features which it finds good, and
gradually modifies those which appear less good in the light of its
increasing self knowledge; and so it tends more and more to become
a contractual organism, which, as Fouillée has insisted, is the highest
type of society.
It should be noticed that this ideal of the contractual organism
synthesises the two great doctrines or theories of society which have
generally been regarded as irreconcilable alternatives: the doctrine
of society as an organism, and that of society as founded upon reason
and free will. They have been treated as opposed and irreconcilable
doctrines, because those who regarded society as an organism, taking
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the standpoint of natural science, have laid stress upon its evolution
by biological accidents and by the interaction and conflict of many
blind impulses and purely individual volitions, in which collective
volition, governed by an ideal of the form to be achieved, had no
part. While, on the other hand, the idealist philosophers, describing
society or the nation as wholly the work of reason and free will,
have been guilty of the intellectualist fallacy of regarding man as
a purely rational being; they have ignored the fact that all men,
even the most intellectual, are largely swayed and moulded by
processes of suggestion, imitation, sympathy, and instinctive impulse,
in quite non-rational ways; and they have ignored still more completely
the fact that the operation of these non-rational processes
continues to be not only of immense influence but also inevitable
and necessary to the maintenance of that organic unity of society
upon which as a basis the contract-unity is superimposed as a bond
of a higher, more rational and more spiritual quality.
The former doctrine logically tends to the paralysis of social
effort and to the adoption of extreme individualism, to the doctrine
of each man for himself, and of laissez faire, doctrines such as those
of Herbert Spencer. The other, the idealist theory of the state as
being founded and formed by reason, tends equally logically towards
extreme State socialism; because its overweening belief in reason
leads it to ignore the large and necessary basis of subrational organisation
and operation.
Only a synthesis of the two in the doctrine of the contractual
organism can reconcile them and give us the ideal of a nation in
which the maximum and perfection of organisation shall be combined
with the maximum of liberty, because in it each individual will be
aware of the whole and his place and functions in it, and will voluntarily
accept that place and perform those functions.
The highest, most perfectly organised and effective nation is,
then, not that in which the individuals are disposed of, their actions
completely controlled, and their wills suppressed by the power of
the State. It is, rather, one in which the self-consciousness and
initiative and volition of individuals, personality in short, is developed
to the highest degree, and in which the minds and wills of the
members work harmoniously together under the guidance and
pressure of the idea of the nation, rendered in the highest degree
explicit and full and accurate.
The Value Of Nationality
At the present time, while the mass of men continue to accept
the duty of patriotism unquestioningly, and historians for the most
part are content to describe with some astonishment the immense
development of nationalism in the past century, many voices are
loudly raised for and against nationality. The great mass of men no
doubt are swept away in the flood of patriotic feeling. But the war
has also intensified the antipathy, and given increased force to the
arguments, of those who decry nationality and deprecate patriotism—for
these are but two different modes of expressing the same
attitude.
There are two principal classes of the anti-nationalists. First,
the philosophic anarchists, who would abolish all states and governments,
as unnecessary evils, men like Kropotkin and Tolstoi. Secondly,
the cosmopolitans, who, while believing in the necessity of
government and even demanding more centralised administration,
would yet abolish all national boundaries as far as possible, boundaries
of geography, of language, race and sentiment, and all national
governments, and would aim at the establishment of one great
world state.
Though the aims of these two parties are so widely different, they
use much the same arguments against nationalism. According to the
anti-nationalist view, nationalism and the patriotism in which it is
founded are a kind of disease of human nature, which, owing to the
unfortunate fact that mankind has retained the gregarious instinct
of his animal ancestors, inevitably breaks out as soon as any community
begins to come into free contact and rivalry with other
communities, and which tends to grow in force in a purely instinctive
and irrational manner the more these contacts and rivalries increase.
The liability to patriotism is thus regarded as closely comparable
with mankind’s unfortunate liability to drunkenness, to feel the fascination
of strong liquor—as merely a natural and inevitable result
or by-product of an unfortunate flaw in human nature—a tendency
which will have to be sternly repressed and, if possible, eradicated,
before men can hope to live in peace and tolerable security and to
develop their higher capacities.
The fact that patriotism of some degree and form is universally
displayed, and that it breaks out everywhere into heat and
flame when certain conditions are realized, does not for them in
any degree justify it; and it should not, they hold, reconcile us to
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its continued existence; they draw an indictment not merely
against a whole people, but against the whole human race. They
attack nationalism, firstly, by describing what in their opinion patriotism
is and whence it comes; secondly, by describing what they
believe to be the natural consequences and effects of nationalism.
The most common mode of attack is to identify patriotism with
jingoism; they speak of “jelly-bellied flag-flappers” of flag-wagging
and mafficking; they assert that the essence of patriotism
is hatred and all uncharitableness towards other countries and
their citizens.[93]
Less virulent is the criticism of those who, looking coldly
upon patriotism, describe it as the mere blind expression of the
working of the gregarious instinct among us, and as something
therefore quite irrational, which must and will tend to disappear,
as men become more enlightened and are guided more by reason
and less by instinct.[94]
Again, it is said that patriotism is a form of selfishness and
therefore bad; that it is a limitation of our sympathies, a principle
of injustice; that it stands in the way of the realisation of
universal justice, of the universal brotherhood of man, which is
the ideal we obviously must accept and aim at. Or in other
words, and this is the main indictment, it is alleged that patriotism
and nationalism inevitably tend to produce war, that
they keep the rival nations perpetually arming for possible wars
and actually in commercial and economic war, if not at real war.
And of course the evils of warfare and of such perpetual preparation
for war are great and obvious enough in modern Europe.
In support of this indictment, they point to the golden age of the
Roman Empire, when the inhabitants of all its parts were content
to sink their differences of race and country and were proud to
proclaim themselves citizens of the Roman Empire; and they say
that in consequence the civilised world attained then a pitch of
prosperity and contentment never known before or since over
any large area of the earth.
This is a formidable indictment, to which the exponents and
advocates of patriotism have for the most part been content to
reply by renewed exhortations to patriotism, by emotional
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appeals, by rhetoric, by the quotation of patriotic verses, the
citation of the glorious deeds of our armies and soldiers now and
in past times, by all the arts of persuasion and suggestion. As a
fine example of this method one may cite Mr Stratford Wingfield’s
History of British Patriotism, in which he not only confines himself
to these methods, but shows a positive dislike and contempt for
all attempts to apply reason and scientific method to the study
of human affairs.[95] In maintaining this attitude, the advocates of
patriotism give some colour to the claim of their opponents that
patriotism or nationalism is essentially irrational, in the sense
that it is incapable of justification by reason.
The politicians and historians, on the other hand, who are so
generally demanding that the European settlement after the war
must accept nationality as its fundamental principle, are commonly
content to note the strength and the wide distribution of the
patriotic sentiment, without enquiring into its origin, nature, or
value.
Let us examine the arguments against patriotism and then see
what reason can advance in its defence. For, though a rational
defence of patriotism will have little direct effect in making patriots,
we may be sure that, if such defence cannot be maintained,
patriotism will have to fight a losing battle.
In disparaging patriotism by describing it as the work of an
instinct, the gregarious or the pugnacious or other instinct, or of
several instincts, its critics are guilty of two psychological errors
and a popular fallacy. The last is the fallacy that the worth of any
thing is to be judged by the course from which it springs. Even if
patriotism were nothing more than the direct expression of the
gregarious instinct which we possess in common with many of
the higher animals, that would not in itself condemn it. But this
description of it, as a product of instinct as opposed to the principles
we attain by reason, involves that false disjunction and opposition
of reason to instinct which is traditional and which the intellectualist
philosophers commonly adopt, when they condescend to
recognise in any way the presence of instinctive tendencies in
human nature.
The other psychological error is the failure to recognize that
patriotism although, like all other great mental forces, it is rooted
in instinct, is not itself an instinct or the direct expression of any
instinct or group of instincts, but is rather an extremely complicated
sentiment, which has a long and complex history in each individual
mind in which it manifests itself; that it is, therefore, capable of
infinite variety and of an indefinite degree of intellectualisation and
refinement; that the cult of patriotism is, therefore, a field for
educational effort of the highest order, and that in this field moral
and intellectual education may achieve their noblest and most far-reaching
effects.
The psychological justification of patriotism has already been
indicated, but may be concisely stated here. The moral value of the
group spirit was considered in an earlier chapter; we saw how it,
and it alone, raises the conduct of the mass of men above the plane
of simple egoism or family selfishness. The sentiment of devotion or
loyalty to any group has this virtue in some degree; but loyalty to
the nation is capable of exalting character and conduct in a higher
degree than any other form of the group spirit. For the nation alone
has continuity of existence in the highest degree; a long past which
gives a large perspective of past history, involving the history of
long series of self-sacrificing efforts and many heroic actions; and the
prospect of an indefinitely prolonged future, with the possibility of continued
progress and development of every kind, and therefore some
security for the perpetuation of the results achieved by individual
efforts[96].
Further, the nation alone, is a self-contained and complete
organism; other groups within it do but minister to the life of
the whole; their value is relative to that of the whole; the continuance
of results achieved on their behalf is dependent upon the
continued welfare of the whole (for example, the welfare of any class
or profession—a fact too easily overlooked by those in whom class
spirit grows strong). Hence, the nation, as an object of sentiment,
includes all smaller groups within it; and, when the nation is regarded
from an enlightened point of view, the sentiment for it naturally
comes to include in one great system all minor group sentiments
and to be strengthened by their incorporation.
It is important to notice also that, just as the minor group
sentiments are not incompatible with, but rather may strengthen,
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the national sentiment, when subordinated to and incorporated in
it, so the national sentiment is not incompatible with still more
widely inclusive group sentiments—for example, that for a European
system of nations, for the ‘League of Nations’ or for Western Civilisation
in general. And, while loyalty to humanity as a whole is a
noble ideal, it is one which can only be realized through a further
step of that process of extension of the object of the group sentiment,
of which extension patriotism itself is the culmination at present
for the great mass of civilised mankind. The attempt to achieve it
by any other road is bound to fail because psychologically unsound[97].
Let us note in passing that neglect of this truth gives rise to two
of the extreme forms of political doctrine or ideal, current at the
present day; first, the ideal of the brotherhood of man in a nationless
world; secondly, the extreme form of democratic individualism which
assumes that the good of society is best promoted by the freest
possible pursuit by individuals of their private ends, which believes
that each man must have an equal voice in the government of his
country, because that is the only way in which his interests and those
of his class can be protected and forwarded; a doctrine which regards
public life as a mere strife of private and class interests. Both ideals
fly in the face of psychological facts; and, though they are in appearance
extreme opposites, they are apt to be found associated in
the same minds.
At the other end of the scale, we have the philosophical conservatism
of such a thinker as Edmund Burke, which is keenly aware
of the organic unity of society and looks constantly to the good of
the whole, deriving from that consideration its leading motives and
principles, and which trusts principally to the growth of the group
spirit for the holding of the balance between conflicting interests
and for the promotion of the public welfare.
Having seen the importance for national life of the idea of the
nation, the diffusion of which through the minds of the people constitutes
national self-consciousness, let us glance for a moment at the
way other ideas may play leading rôles in national life. Such are
ideas which became national ideals, that is to say, ideas of some
end to be realised by the nation which became widely entertained
and the objects of strong sentiments and of collective emotion and
desire and which, therefore, determine collective action.
I shall not attempt to deal separately with various classes of
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such ideas, or ideals—the political, the religious, the economic; but
shall only note the fact that they have played and may yet play
great parts in the history of the world.
Men are not swayed exclusively by considerations of material self-interest,
as the older school of economists generally assumed; nor
even by spiritual self-interest, as too much of the religious teaching
of the past has assumed; nor even by consideration of the welfare
of the social groups of which they are members. Many of the
great events of history have been determined by ideas that
have had no relation to individual welfare, but have inspired a
collective enthusiasm for collective action, for national effort, of
a disinterested kind; and the lives of some nations have been
dominated by some one or two such ideas. These ideas are first
conceived and taught by some great man, or by a few men who
have acquired prestige and influence; they then become generally
accepted by suggestion and imitation, accepted more or less uncritically
and established beyond the reach of argument and
reasoning.
No matter what the character of the idea, its collective acceptance
by a people enhances for the time the homogeneity of mind among
them, renders the people more intimately a unity, and serves also
to mark it off more sharply from other peoples among whom other
ideas prevail.
But, besides thus binding together at any period of its history the
people that entertains it the generally accepted idea, if it endures,
may produce further effects by becoming incorporated in the national
organisation; in so far as it determines the form of activity of the
people, it moulds their institutions and customs into harmony with
itself, until they become in some measure its embodiment and expression;
and in any vigorous nation there are usually one or two
dominant ideas at work in this way.
It is a favourite dogma with some writers (for example M. le Bon)
that ideas, before they can exert great effects in the life of a nation,
must first become unconscious ideas, incorporated as they say in
the unconscious soul of a people. This is an obscure confused
doctrine, which, if it is meant to be taken literally, we can
only reject. If it is to have any real meaning, it must be taken
in the sense that the long prevalence of the ideal moulds the institutions
and customs and the executive organisation of a people, so
that national action towards the ideal end becomes more or less
automatic or routine.
If the ideal so accepted and incorporated in the organised
structure of the national mind, is one that makes for strength and
at the same time permits of progress, it lives on; in other cases it
may destroy the nation, or petrify it, arresting all progress.
Consider one or two examples of ideas that have played dominant
rôles in the lives of nations. They are mostly political, or religious,
or, most powerful of all, politico-religious. The idea of world-conquest
has dominated and has destroyed several great nations, of which
the latest example is the German Empire. The idea of conversion
by the sword, accepted with enthusiasm by the Arab nation, gave
it for a time tremendous energy, but contained no potency of
permanent power or of progress. The idea of immortality, or desire
of continued existence after death, seems to have dominated the
minds of the ancient Egyptian people; the idea of escape from the
evils of this world, those who have fully accepted Buddhism, like
the Burmans[98]. The idea of caste as an eternal and impassable
barrier has largely determined the history of India.
All these are ideas which have proved ineffective to sustain
national vigour or to promote social evolution. It would not be
strictly true to say that the fall, or the unprogressive condition, of
the peoples that have entertained these ideas is the result of those
ideas; because the general acceptance of them proves that they
were in harmony with the type of mind of the people. Yet the
formulation of the ideas by the leading minds who impressed them
on the peoples must have accentuated those tendencies with which
they harmonised; and in each case, if the idea had never been
formulated, or if others had been effectively impressed on the mind
of the people, the course of its history would have been changed.
Of ideas less adverse to national life take the idea of ancestor
worship, and the idea of personal loyalty to the ruler, ideas which
commonly go together and have played an immense part in the life
of some peoples, notably in Japan; they have served as effective
national bonds in periods of transition through which despotically
ruled populations have progressed to true nationhood. The idea of
the divine right of kings played for a time a similar rôle in
Europe.
A good example of the operation of an ideal in a modern nation
is that of the ideal of a great colonial empire in the French nation.
No doubt, hopes of economic advantages may have played some
part in this case; but the growth of the immense oversea empire
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of modern France, as well as of the great extra-European conquests
which France has made in the past but has ceased to control,
seems to have been due in the main to the operation of this ideal in
the national mind. France has no surplus population, and no
Frenchman desires to leave his beautiful France; everyone regards
himself as cruelly exiled if compelled to live for a time in
any of the oversea possessions; and most of these, notably the
Indo-Chinese Empire are very expensive, costing the nation far
more in administrative expenses than any profits derived from them,
and involving constant risks of international complications and war,
as in Morocco in recent years. Nevertheless, the ideal still holds
sway and, under its driving power, the oversea territories of France,
especially in Africa, have grown enormously. And this ideal has
inevitably incorporated itself in the organisation of the nation, in
a colonial office and a foreign legion, and all the administrative
machinery necessarily set up for securing the ends prescribed by
the ideal.
In modern times the most striking illustration of the power of
ideas on national life is afforded by the influence of the ideals of
liberty and equality. It was the effective teaching of these ideals of
liberty and equality, primarily by Rousseau, to a people prepared
by circumstances to receive them, which produced the French Revolution;
and all through the nineteenth century they have continued
to determine great changes of political and social organisation in
many countries of Europe and in America.
In England the idea of liberty has long been current and long
ago had become incorporated and expressed in the national organisation;
but its application received a vast extension when in 1834
England insisted on the liberation of all British-owned slaves and
paid twenty million sterling in compensation. That the idea still
lives on among us, with this extended application, seems to have
been proved by the results of recent elections which were influenced
largely by the force of the no-slavery cry in relation to coloured
labour. It is an excellent example of an established collective ideal
against which reason is of no avail.
The ideal of liberty never entered the minds of the most advanced
peoples of antiquity; their most enlightened political thinkers could
not imagine a State which was not founded upon slavery. Yet it has
become collectively accepted by all the leading nations, and the
ordinary man has so entirely accepted it that he cannot be brought
to reason about it. Facts and arguments tending to show that the
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greater part of the population of the world might be happier
without liberty and under some form of slavery cannot touch or
enter his mind at all.
The ideal of political equality is of still later growth, and is in
a sense derivative from that of liberty; it was in the main accepted
as a means to liberty, but has become an end in itself. It is
moulding national organisation everywhere; through its influence
parliamentary government and universal suffrage are becoming the
almost universal rule, and, through leading to their adoption, this
ideal is in a fair way to wreck certain of the less firmly organised
nations, and possibly our own also.
But the ideal which, beyond all others, characterises the present
age of almost all the nations of the world is the ideal of progress.
Hardly anyone has any clear notion what he means by progress, or
could explicate the idea; but the sentiment is very strong, though
the idea is very vague. This idea also was unknown to the leading
thinkers of antiquity and is of recent growth; yet it is so almost
universally accepted, and it so permeates the mental atmosphere in
every direction, that it is hard for us to realise how new a thing in
the history of the world is the existence, and still more the effective
dominance, of the idea. It is perhaps in America that its rule is
most absolute; there the severest condemnation that can be passed
by the average man upon any people or institution is to say that
it is fifty years behind the time. The popular enthusiasm for flying-machines,
which threatens to make life almost unlivable, is one of
the striking illustrations of the force of this ideal.
More recent still, and perhaps equally important, is the idea of
the solidarity of the human race and of the responsibility of each
nation towards the rest, especially towards the weaker and more
backward peoples. We no longer cheerfully and openly exterminate
an inferior people; and, when we do so, it is with some expressions
of regret and even of indignation.
But this moral idea is still in process of finding acceptance and
illustrates well that process. It has been taught by a few superior
minds and none dares openly repudiate it; hence, it gains ground
and is now commonly accepted, verbally at least, and is just beginning
to affect national action.
The four ideas, liberty, equality, progress, and human solidarity
or universal responsibility, seem to be the leading ideas of the present
era, the ideas which, in conjunction with national sentiments, are
more than any other, fashioning the future of the world.
The last two illustrate exceptionally well the capacity of nations
to be moved by abstract ideas not directly related to the welfare
of the individuals whose actions they determine; they show once
more how false is the doctrine that national life is but the conflict
of individual wills striving after individual goods. They show that,
through his life in and mental interaction with organised society,
man is raised morally and intellectually high above the level he
could individually achieve.
Chapter Xiii
NATIONS OF THE HIGHER TYPE
Let us consider now the type of nation which from our present point
of view is the most interesting, the type which approximates most
nearly to a solution of the problem of civilisation, to the reconciliation
of individuality with collectivity, to the synthesis of individualist
and collectivist ideals; that in which the rights and wills of individuals
are not forcibly subordinated to those of the State by the power of
a governing class, and in which the deliberative side of the national
mind is well developed and effective.
Such are in a certain degree the French, but still more the British
and the American nations. In the two latter countries the rights
of the individual are made supreme over all other considerations, the
welfare of the whole is only to be advanced by measures which do
not override individual wills and rights; or, at least, the only power
which is admitted to have the right in any degree to override individual
wills is the will of the majority. In such a nation the greatest
efforts are concentrated on the perfection of the deliberative organisation,
by means of which the general mind may arrive at collective
judgment and choice of means and may express its will. A vast amount
of time and energy is devoted to this deliberative work; while the
executive organisation, by which its decisions have to be carried
into effect, is apt to be comparatively neglected and hence imperfect.
These two complementary features of such states we see well
exemplified here and in America[99]; where the amount of time, money,
and effort spent upon the deliberative processes and the elaboration
of the organisation through which they are effected is enormously
greater than in other nations. And, in spite of the energy expended
on deliberative processes and on the elaboration of their organisation,
the interests of the nation as a whole are not at present forwarded
in a manner at all comparable with those of such a State as Germany.
Nevertheless, such national actions as we do achieve are far more
truly the expression of the national will; and, if the national mind
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is to be developed to a high level, this vast expenditure of energy,
which to some impatient spirits seems wasteful and useless, must
go on.
As was said in a former chapter, such collective deliberation of
modern nations is only rendered possible by the great facilities of
communication we enjoy; telegraph, post, and railway, and especially
the press. The ancients saw truly enough that, with their limited
means of communication, the higher form of state-organisation must
be restricted to a small population of some thousands only—the
City-State.
It is important to note that not only do modern facilities of
communication render possible a truly collective mental life for the
large Nation-States of the present age; but that these modern conditions
actually carry with them certain great advantages, which
tend to raise the collective mental life of modern nations to a higher
level than was possible for the ancient City-State, even though its
members were of high average capacity and many of them of very
great mental power, as in Athens.
The assembly of citizens in one place for national deliberation
rendered them much more susceptible to those less desirable peculiarities
of collective mental life which characterise simple crowds;
particularly, the excess of emotional excitement, increased suggestibility,
and, hence, the ease with which the whole mass could be swayed
unduly by the skilful orator. In the modern nation, on the other
hand, the transmission of news by the press secures a certain delay,
and a lack of synchronism, in its reception by different groups and
individuals; and it secures also a certain delay in the action and
reaction of mind on mind, which gives opportunity for individual
deliberation. Also the sympathetic action of the mass mind on the
individual mind is in large part indirect, rather than direct, representative
rather than perceptual, and therefore less overwhelming
in its effects. These conditions greatly temper the violence of
the emotional reactions and permit of a diversity of feeling
and opinion; an opposed minority has time to form itself and
to express an opinion, and so may temper the hasty and emotional
reaction of the majority in a way that is impossible in a general
assembly.
A further advantage of the large size of nations may arise
from the fact that actual decision as to choice of means for effecting
national action has to be achieved by means of representatives who
come together in one place. Representative government is not
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merely an inferior substitute for government by general assembly;
it is superior in many respects. If each representative were a mere
delegate, an average specimen of the group he represents, chosen
by lot and merely charged to express their will, this feature would
modify the crude collective mental processes in one important
respect only; namely, it would counteract to some extent that
weakening of individual responsibility which is characteristic of
collective mental action. But, in addition to this, internal organisation,
in the form of tradition and custom, comes in to modify very
greatly the collective process.
We see such modifying influence very clearly in the election of
the English House of Commons and in the methods of its operations.
Owing partly to a natural tendency, partly to a fortunate tradition,
the people do not elect just any one of themselves to serve as a
delegate or average sample of the mass; but as a rule they choose,
or try to choose, some man who displays special capacity and special
qualifications for taking part in the national deliberations. In so
far as they are successful in this, their representatives are able men
and men to whose minds the social consciousness, the consciousness
of the whole people, of its needs and tendencies and aspirations, is
more fully and clearly present than to the average mind. They are
also in the main men of more than average public spirit. Hence it
is not unknown that a purely working class constituency, being
offered liberal, conservative, and labour candidates, instead of
choosing the labour man, one of themselves, gives him only a small
fraction of the total votes. Then, within the body of representatives,
this process, by which greater influence is given to the abler men,
to those whose minds reflect most fully the whole people, is carried
further still. A small group of these men exerts a predominant
influence in all deliberations; and not only are they in the main
the best qualified (for they only attain their leading positions by
success in an intense and long continued competition) but they
are put in a position in which they can hardly fail to feel a great
responsibility resting upon them; and in which they feel the full
force of political traditions. The deliberative organisation of the
American nation illustrates, when compared with our own, the
importance of these traditions; for its lesser efficiency is largely due
to the absence of such traditions, and to the fact that their system
banishes from the House of Representatives its natural leaders and
those on whom responsibility falls most heavily.
Lastly, the existence of two traditionally opposed parties ensures
[Pg 190]
that every important step shall be fully discussed. The traditional
division into two parties, which from one point of view seems so
irrational, nevertheless exerts very important and valuable influences,
of which the chief is that it prevents the assembly of legislators
becoming a mere psychological crowd easily swayed to a decision
by collective emotion and skilful suggestion; for each suggestion
coming from the one party acts by contra-suggestion upon the other
and provokes an opposition that necessitates discussion[100].
In these two ways, then;—first, through the culmination of
national deliberation among a selected group of representatives,
among whom again custom and tradition accord precedence and
prestige to the natural leaders, the most able and those in whose
consciousness the nation, in the past, present and future is most
adequately reflected; secondly, by means of the party system,
which ensures vigorous criticism and full discussion of all proposals,
under a system of traditional conventions evolved for the regulation
of such discussions;—in these two ways the principal vices of collective
deliberation are corrected, and the formal deliberations and decisions
of the nation are raised to a higher plane than the collective
deliberations of any assembly of men lacking such traditional organisation
could possibly attain. The part played by unwritten tradition
in the working of the British constitution is of course immense, as
for example, the existence and enormous prestige of the cabinet,
and the tradition that a party coming into power must respect the
legislation of the party previously in power. Without this last,
representative government, or at any rate the party system, would
be impossible. The smooth working of the system depends entirely
upon the influence of these and similar traditions which exist only
in the minds of men. Or, take as another example, the tradition of
absolute impartiality on the part of the Speaker and of loyal acceptance
of his rulings by every member of the House; or the tradition
which distinguishes sharply between political and private relations,
in virtue of which the parties to a most bitter political strife may and
very generally do remain in perfectly friendly private relations.
These and other such traditions, which secure the efficient working
of the organisation for national deliberation, all rest in turn upon a
traditional and tacit assumption—namely, the assumption that both
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parties are working for the good of the nation as they conceive and
understand it, that both parties have this common end and differ only
in their judgment as to the means by which it can best be achieved.
They rest also on the traditional and tacit admission that one’s
own judgment, and that of one’s party, may be mistaken, and that
in the long run the legislation which any party can effect is an
expression of the organised national mind and is therefore to be
respected. It is this acquiescence in accomplished legislation in
virtue of this tacit assumption which gives to the decisions of
Parliament the status, not merely of the expression of the will of a
bare majority, but of the expression of the will of practically the
whole nation. Underlying the stability of the whole system, again,
is the tradition, sedulously fostered and observed by the best and
leading minds, that the raison d’être and purpose of the representative
parliament is to organise, and to give the most complete possible
expression to, the national mind and will; and that no constitutional
change or change of procedure is justifiable unless it tends to the
more complete realisation of these objects.
In virtue of these traditions our Parliament and Press constitute
undoubtedly the best means for effecting organisation of the national
mind in its deliberative aspect that has yet been evolved; and we
should remember this when we feel inclined to gird at the ‘great
talking shop,’ at the slowness of its procedure and at the logical
absurdities of the two-party system; and, above all, we should realize
how valuable and worthy of conservation are these scarcely formulated
traditions, for they are absolutely essential to its efficiency. It
is just because the efficiency of the deliberative organisation of a
nation depends upon the force of such traditions, that, though it is
possible to take the system of parliamentary representation and
establish it by decree or plebiscite in a nation which has hitherto
had no such deliberative organisation, it is not possible to make it
work smoothly and efficiently amongst such a people. Hence, although
almost every civilised nation has done its best to imitate the British
system of parliamentary government, hardly any one has made a
success of it; and, in nearly all, it is in constant danger of being
superseded by some more primitive form of government—one need
only mention Mexico, Portugal, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary.
In all these countries, and even in America, there seems to be
already a not very remote possibility of the supersession of parliamentary
government by a dictatorship—a process which has actually
occurred in many of the municipal governments of America, and the
[Pg 192]
fear of which has constantly checked the smooth working of the
parliamentary system in France.
As a single illustration of the way in which the conditions we
have been considering affect the collective acts of the nation, consider
what happened at the time of the Russian outrage in the North
Sea during the Russo-Japanese war. When a Russian fleet fired upon
our fishing boats doing considerable damage to them, the means of
communication were sufficiently developed among us to allow of the
action and reaction of all on each which produces the characteristic
results of collective mental action, the exaltation of emotion, the
suggestibility, the sense of irresponsible power; and, in the absence
of the deliberative organisation which, by concentrating influence
and responsibility in the hands of a few of the best men, controlled
and modified this collective action, we should have rushed upon the
Russian fleet and probably have brought on a general European
war. The control and counteraction of this kind of outburst of collective
emotion and impulsive action is one of the heaviest responsibilities
of those to whom predominant influence is accorded.
It is only in virtue of the strong organisation of the national
mind resting upon these long traditions of parliamentary government,
that at such a time control of the popular emotion and impulse is
possible. And the weaker and less efficient is such traditional
organisation, the more does any such incident tend to provoke a
collective manifestation which approximates in its uncontrollable
violence and unconsidered impulsiveness to the behaviour of an
unorganised crowd. Hence governments, where the democratic
principle is acknowledged but the traditional organisation is less
strong, are constantly in danger of having their hands forced by
some outburst of popular passion—as in France.
It is worth noting that, when Aristotle inveighed against democracy
as an evil form of government, the only form of democratic government
he had in mind was government by the voices of a mob gathered
together in one place and lacking all the safeguards which, as we
have seen, render our British national deliberations so much superior
to those of a mere crowd of persons of equally good average capacity
and character.
But it is not only in the formal deliberations of the nation that
internal organisation, resting on tradition, secures the predominance
of the influence of the best and ablest minds. The same is true of
all national thought and feeling. There exists in every great nation
the vague influence we call public opinion, which is the great upholder
[Pg 193]
of right and justice, which rewards virtue and condemns
vice and selfishness. Public opinion exists only in the minds of
individuals (for we have rejected, provisionally at least, the conception
of a collective consciousness); yet it is a product not of
individual, but of collective, mental life. And it has in any healthy
nation far higher standards of right and justice and tolerance than
the majority of individuals could form or maintain; that is to say,
it is in these respects far superior to an opinion which would be the
mere resultant or algebraic sum of the opinions of all the living
individuals. In reference to any particular matter its judgment is
far superior to that of the average of individuals, and superior
probably in many cases to that which even the best individuals
could form for themselves.
How does public opinion come to be superior to individual and
to average opinion? There seems to be something paradoxical in
the statement.
The fact is of the utmost importance; for public opinion is
the ultimate source of sanctions of all public acts, the highest court
of appeal before which every executive act performed in the name
of the nation must justify itself. If public opinion were merely
the immediate expression of the collective feelings and judgments
of an unorganised mass of men, its verdicts would be (as we have
seen) inferior to those of the average individuals, whereas, as a
matter of fact, its expressions are much superior to those of the
average individuals.
The influence of public opinion is especially clear and interesting
in its relations to law. In this country it is not made by law, but
makes law. Where law is imposed and long maintained by the
authority of despotic power, it will of course mould public opinion;
but, in any progressive highly organised nation, law and the lawyers
are always one or two or more generations behind public opinion.
The most progressive body of law formally embodies the public
opinion of past generations rather than of the generation living at
the time.
The fact of the superiority of public opinion is generally admitted
and various explanations are current, for the most part very
vague and incomplete. There is the mystical explanation embodied
in the dictum that the voice of the people is the voice of God.
A rather less vague explanation is that adopted by Mr Beattie
Crozier[101] (among others). It is said that the average man carries
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within him a germ of an ideal of justice and right, and that he
applies this to the criticism or approval of the actions of other men;
though he often fails to apply it to his own actions, because, where
his own interests are concerned, he is apt to be the sport of purely
egoistic impulses.
But this explanation is only partially true. It represents the
average man as more hypocritical than he really is, and as falling
farther below the standards he acknowledges than he actually does
fall. It leaves unexplained the fact that he has this sentiment
for an ideal of justice and right; and it proceeds on a false
assumption as to the nature of the problem, in assuming that
men judge the actions of other men by higher standards than
those which they apply to their own conduct; whereas this is by
no means generally true.
Is it, then, that superior abilities, which enable a man to gain
prestige and to impress his ideas and sentiments upon his fellow men
and so to influence public opinion, are commonly combined with
a natural superiority of moral sentiment, with a love of right and
a hatred of injustice? There may be some degree of such natural
correlation of superior abilities with superior moral qualities, but
the supposition seems very doubtful; and certainly, if it exists, it
is not sufficient to account for the elevation of public opinion.
We frequently see consummate ability combined with most questionable
moral sentiments, as in Napoleon and many other historic
personages.
The true explanation is, I submit, to be found in the basal fact
that the moral sentiments are essentially altruistic, while the immoral
and non-moral sentiments are in the main self-regarding[102].
Hence, the person who has great abilities but is lacking in moral
sentiments and altruism applies his abilities to secure his personal
satisfactions and aggrandisement; and, in so far as he aims at affecting
the minds of others, he tries only to secure their obedience to his
commands and suggestions, to inspire them with deference, admiration,
fear and awe, and to evoke an outward display of these
feelings. But, as to the ideas and sentiments of the people in general,
save in so far as they affect his own gratification, he cares nothing.
Accordingly we never find great abilities deliberately, consistently
and directly applied to the degradation of public opinion and morals,
save occasionally in relation to some particular end. And we find
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few or no great works of literature and art deliberately aiming at
such degradation.
But with those persons in whom great abilities are naturally
combined with moral disposition the case is very different. The
moral disposition is essentially altruistic; it is concerned for the
welfare of others, of men in general. Hence such a man deliberately
applies his abilities to influence the minds of others. The
exertion of such influence is for him an end in itself. He seeks and
finds his chief satisfaction in exerting an influence, as wide and deep
as possible, over the minds of men; not merely in evoking fear or
admiration of himself, but in inspiring in them the same elevated
sentiments and sympathies which he finds within himself.
For this reason such men as G. F. Watts, Carlyle and Ruskin exert
a much greater and more widespread and lasting influence over the
minds of men than do equally able men who are devoid of moral
disposition; for the former make the exertion of this influence their
chief end, while the others care not at all about the state of public
opinion and the minds of the mass. Still less does the non-moral
man of great ability strive with all his powers to make others act
upon base motives like his own and to degrade their sentiments;
rather, he sees that he can better accomplish his selfish ends if other
men are unlike himself and are governed by altruistic sentiments;
and he sees also that he can better attain his ends if he does lip-service
to altruistic ideals; and he is, therefore, apt to exert whatever
direct influence he has over the sentiments of men in the same
direction as the moral leaders, praising the same actions, upholding
in words the same ideals. In this way the men of great abilities,
but of immoral or non-moral character, actually aid the moral leaders
to some extent in their work; whereas under no conditions is the
relation reversed; the moral leaders never praise or acquiesce in
bad actions, but always denounce them and use their influence
against them.
It follows that, in a well organised nation, public opinion, which
is formed and maintained so largely by the influence of leading
personalities, will usually be more in conformity with the sentiments
of the best men than of the average man, will be above rather than
below private opinion. For, if the bad and the good men of exceptional
powers were equal in numbers and capacity, the sum of their
influences tending directly to exalt public opinion would be enormously
greater than the sum of their influences tending to degrade
it; and, as a matter of fact, the influence for good of a few
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altruistic leaders is able to outweigh the degrading influences of a
much larger number of purely selfish men of equally great capacities,
and is able to maintain a high standard of public opinion.
We have distinguished a formal and an informal organisation of
the national deliberative processes, the latter expressing itself as
public opinion. These two organisations co-exist and are, of course,
not altogether independent of one another; yet they may be to
a considerable extent independent; though the more intimate the
functional relations and the greater the harmony between them, the
healthier will be the national life.
We may note in passing an interesting difference in respect to
organisation of the national mind between the English and the
American peoples, a difference which illustrates this relative independence
of the formal and informal organisations.
In England both the formal and informal organisations have
achieved a pretty good level; in both cases the best minds are
enabled to exert and have long exerted a dominant influence; and
the interaction between the two organisations is very intimate. But
in America, while the informal organisation expressed in public
opinion seems to be very highly developed, the formal organisation
is much inferior; it has not yet such traditions as give the greatest
influence to the best minds and embody the effects of their influence.
And the better Americans tend to value lightly the formal organisation,
to take no part in the working of it, deliberately to ignore it,
and to rely rather upon public opinion to repress any evils when
they are in danger of reaching an intolerable development.
Both in the formal organisation of the national mind, which is
the parliamentary or other national assembly, and in the informal
organisation which is public opinion, we see, then, that (in the nation
of higher civilisation at least) organisation results in a raising of
the collective mental process above the level of the average minds,
because it gives a predominant influence to the best minds who form
and maintain the traditions, especially the moral traditions; and these
press upon the minds of all members of the community from their
earliest years, moulding them more or less into conformity with themselves,
fostering the better, repressing the purely egoistic, tendencies.
And the ideal organisation after which we ought to strive, is that
which would give the greatest possible influence of this sort to the
best minds, an influence which consists not in merely organising and
directing the energies of the people in the manner most effective
for material or even scientific progress, as in modern Germany; but
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one which, by moulding the sentiments and guiding the reasoning
of the people in all matters, public and private alike, secures their
consent and agreement and the co-operation of their wills in all
affairs of national importance.
When such organisation is in any degree attained and a more
or less consistent system of national traditions is embodied in the
political, religious, literary, and scientific culture, which moulds in
some degree the minds of all men, the national mind clearly becomes,
as we said in an earlier chapter, a system of interacting mental forces
which are not merely tendencies of the living members of the nation,
but are also, in an even greater degree, the ideas and tendencies of
the dead; and we see also that in such a people the national consciousness
is most truly embodied, not in the minds of the average
men, but in the minds of the best men of the time.
The term ‘public opinion’ is sometimes, perhaps generally, used
in a looser and wider sense than the meaning implied in the foregoing
pages. It is used in the looser sense by President Lowell in his
Public Opinion and Popular Government. By ‘public opinion’ he
seems to mean simply the algebraic sum or balance of individual
opinions; he writes “the opinion of the whole people is only the
collected opinions of all the persons therein[103].” In accordance with
this view, he regards representative institutions as merely one means
by which this sum of opinions may be collected and recorded. And
he seems to be prepared to regard the ‘referendum’ or the ‘initiative’
in any of their forms, or other methods of direct legislation, as
equally good methods, if only all individuals would take the trouble
to register their votes upon every question proposed to them. He is
aware, of course, that this can hardly be expected of persons who have
other interests and occupations than the purely political, and that
the direct methods are therefore impracticable as general methods
of legislation. If it were true that representative institutions do and
should merely collect and record the individual opinions of all
members of the public, then it is obvious that each representative
should be merely a delegate sent to record the votes of the majority
of his constituents. Whereas, if representative institutions should,
and in various degrees do, constitute the formal deliberative organisation
of the national mind, through which national deliberation and
judgment are raised to a higher plane than that of a mere crowd,
it follows that the representative should exert his own powers
of reasoning and judgment, aided by his special knowledge and
[Pg 198]
equipment, by the special sources of information that he enjoys,
in the light of the discussions in which he takes part, and influenced
by all those political traditions whose force he experiences in exceptional
fulness by reason of his priviledged position. President Lowell,
in discussing the functions of the representative, does not decide in
favour of the former view, as consistency should perhaps lead him
to do; thereby showing that he is not wholly committed to the
individualist view. He discusses the question whether the member
of Parliament or Congress should regard himself as representing the
interests of his constituents alone, or as concerned primarily and
chiefly with the interests of the whole people; and he rightly inclines
to the latter view. This is not quite the same distinction as that
which is insisted upon in these pages. Even if each representative
were concerned only for the welfare of the nation as a whole, yet
so long as he regarded it as his sole function to vote as he believes
the majority of the citizens would vote in any process of direct
legislation, he would fall short of the highest duty which is laid
upon him by his position—namely, not merely that of recording the
opinion of the majority, but that of taking part in the organised
deliberative activities of the national mind by which it arrives at
judgments and decisions of a higher order than any purely individual,
or algebraic sum of individual, judgments and decisions[104].
Public opinion, in the sense in which I have used the words in
this chapter (which seems to me the only proper use of them) is,
then, not a mere sum of individual opinions upon any particular
question; it is rather the expression of that tone or attitude of mind
which prevails throughout the nation and owes its quality far more
to the influence of the dead than of the living, being the expression
of the moral sentiments that are firmly and traditionally established
in the mind of the people, and established more effectively and in
more refined forms in the minds of the leaders of public opinion than
in the average citizen. This tone of the national mind enables it to
arrive at just judgments on questions of right and wrong, of duty
and honour and public desert; though it may have little bearing
upon such practical questions as bimetallism, tariff reform, or railway
legislation. The current use of the term, in this country at least, does,
I think, recognise that public opinion properly applies only to the
sphere of moral judgments and can and should have no bearing upon
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the practical details of legislation. Public opinion is, both in its
development and in its operations, essentially collective; it is
essentially the work of the group mind. Its accepted standards of
value are slowly built up under the influence of the moral leaders
of past ages; and, in the application of those standards to any particular
question, the influence of the moral leaders of the time makes
itself felt. I have kept in mind in the foregoing pages the public
opinion of the nation; but every community, every association,
every enduring group has its own public opinion, which, though it
is influenced by, and indeed is, as it were, a branch of, the main stem
of national public opinion and is therefore of the same fibre and
texture, has nevertheless its own peculiar tone and quality, especially
in regard to the moral questions with which each group is specially
concerned.
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