We have only to watch our commoner actions and predilections to see that
in our modern States the spirit of nationality has only absorbed a
fraction of our tribal instincts. Every one of you regards your own
college and all the men belonging to it with pride; other colleges and
other men you view with a critical eye. You cheer your own crews and
teams; you want to see them beat all their rivals; you take sides. In
all of these actions and prejudices you manifest the elementary basis of
a tribal spirit. Every week we see hundreds of thousands attend football
or other competitive games, not so much to see an exhibition of skill as
to see their own side win. The spectators, as they cheer, are moved by a
tribal spirit. If we do not belong to a cricketing county we may go so
far as to adopt one as a foster-parent in order that we may exercise our
tribal instincts in being elated by its success or cast down by its
failure. Local national politics give us many opportunities of
exercising our tribal instincts. In politics we have to take sides; a
political party is a tribal organization, using ancient means for
compelling a unity of sentiment amongst its members. The church, too,
provides modern tribesmen with occasions for exercising their inherited
impulses; a heresy hunt finds its counterpart in the most ancient of
tribal communities. Women even more than men are slaves of their tribal
instincts; they are as susceptible to the dictates of fashion as their
ancient sisters were impressionable to the movings of the tribal spirit.
The local spirit which is so inherent a trait of the countryman,
particularly in the case of the Scotsman, Irishman, and Welshman, is
another, and often a very powerful, manifestation of the tribal spirit.
Men from the same locality or district, when they go to live in foreign
communities, are drawn together by a clannish sentiment--a manifestation
of their inherited tribal instincts. Turn in what direction you will,
you will find amongst modern peoples innumerable tribal manifestations
which find no room for display in the more intellectual exhibitions of a
national spirit.
In present-day politics we see the tribal spirit striving to work out
certain novel effects. Although in ancient times a tribal frontier
usually corresponded to a territorial frontier, such was not always the
case. The tribal spirit is strong enough to hold a people together even
when there is no territorial boundary. In modern massed populations, as
in the organization of both ancient and modern India, the tribal spirit
works so as to produce frontiers between classes of citizens; trades
unions are in essence artificial tribal organizations. Except for the
existence of tribal instincts within the inherited mental organization
of the manual workers, such unions were impossible. Many writers believe
that class or sectional tribal organizations can actually be made to cut
across national and even racial frontiers. We have seen, however, that
at the declaration of war, all such sectional bonds snap, for war is the
match which fires the tribal spirit, exalts it to a national flame, and
destroys intertribal schisms. All the petty manifestations of the tribal
spirit are changed by war; the impulses which moved men and women in
peace time to games and sports, to party politics, to heresy
hunting--even to displays of fashion--are turned to patriotic desires
and deeds.