Several modern statesmen have grasped the important part played by the
tribal spirit in unifying the action of modern nations. I shall cite
only three examples to illustrate this form of political
insight--Bismarck, Lincoln, and Lloyd George. Bismarck employed war to
rouse and unify the German peoples; three campaigns were sufficient to
raise an unbounded feeling of tribal confidence and superiority. He gave
the German Empire a sharply demarcated tribal frontier; he purposely
surrounded his country with a ring of animosity, true to his tribal
instincts. Abraham Lincoln's tribal problem was of another kind. The
conditions which led up to the Civil War concerned the freeing of
slaves; but Lincoln made the war, when it became inevitable, an
intratribal quarrel. He realized that the danger to the United States
was disintegration, one which must continually threaten all
nationalities compounded out of great massed populations. Lincoln
therefore made the main issue of the war the right of a single state or
a confederation of states to secede from the main tribe or union. The
Civil War determined the issue in favour of the North: the natural
process of tribal disruption was declared illegal. Lloyd George's task
was of a different nature. He touched and wakened Britain's sleeping
tribal instincts with the insight of genius. War gave him his
opportunity, but had he not known that tribal instincts lie deeply
buried in man's emotional nature and are intertwined with his most
primitive feeling he could not have known how to touch the ancient
strings. Intellectual appeals had failed to stir the primitive and basal
tribal impulses of the people.