We need not blame the statesmen and writers of Boyle's time for failing
to recognize the inward significance of national and racial
manifestations any more than we condemn his contemporary physicians for
failing to separate from the mass of disease such conditions as are
known to modern medical men as appendicitis and typhoid fever. Typhoid
fever and appendicitis existed in Boyle's time just as did national
disturbances and racial antipathies, but their nature and significance
passed undiagnosed. It was not until England had laid siege, by means
of armies of colonists, to lands inhabited by native races, or had come
to guide the destinies of great tropical empires by handfuls of civil
servants, that she realized that racial contact gives rise to live and
burning antagonisms. Nor are national problems new to England; they have
always dogged the footsteps of her statesmen. In Boyle's time a people
could make its national spirit heard and felt only by resorting to brute
force. In our times there are other means; a people mobilizes its
national spirit by means of the daily press; the promulgation of
national propaganda has become a fine art; modern statesmen have learned
that national feelings, rightly directed, have the force of an
avalanche. The problems of Race and of Nationality, then, are by no
means new, but in their modern form they are new. The far-flung lines of
the British Empire and the mobilization of the popular spirit by means
of the press and propaganda have compelled our statesmen, historians,
publicists, psychologists, and anthropologists to re-examine the nature
of the forces which lie behind racial movements and national agitations.
Of the importance of a right understanding of the nature of these forces
for the future maintenance and development of the British Empire there
cannot be any question. In the guiding of its destinies Oxford men will,
in the future as in the past, take a leading part, and much of their
success will depend on how far they have grasped the nature of the
inward forces which group mankind into races and nations. That is my
reason for making the problems of Race and Nationality the subject of
this lecture in memory of Robert Boyle.