FREEDOM OF COMMUNICATION AS A CONDITION OF NATIONAL LIFE
Let us consider now very briefly in relation to the life of a nation a
second essential condition of all collective mental life—namely, that
the individuals shall be in free communication with one another. This is
obviously necessary to the formation of national mind and character. It
is only through an immense development of the means of communication,
especially the printing press, the railway and the telegraph, that the
modern Nation-State has become possible, and has become the dominant
type of political organism. So familiar are we with this type, that we
are apt to identify the Nation and the State and to regard the large
Nation-State as the normal type of State and of Nation, forgetting that
its evolution was not possible before the modern period.
In the ancient world the City-State was the dominant type of political
organism; and to Plato and Aristotle any other type seemed undesirable,
if not impossible. For they recognised that collective deliberation and
volition are essential to the true State. Aristotle, trying to imagine a
vast city, remarks—“But a city, having such vast circuit, would contain
a nation rather than a state, like Babylon.” The translator there uses
the word ‘nation,’ not in the modern sense, but rather as we use
‘people’ to denote a population of common stock not organised to form a
nation. The limits of the political organism capable of a collective
mental life were rightly held to be set by the number of citizens who
could live so close together as to meet in one place to discuss all
public affairs by word of mouth.
The great empires of antiquity were not nations; they had no collective
mental life. Although the Roman Empire, in the course of its long and
marvellous history, did succeed in generating in almost all its subject
peoples a certain sentiment of pride in and attachment to the Empire, it
cannot be said to have welded them into one nation; for, in spite of the
splendid system of roads and of posting, communication between the parts
was too difficult and slow to permit the reciprocal influences essential
to collective life. As in all the ancient empires, the parts were held
together only by a centralised despotic executive organisation; there
was no possibility of collective deliberation and volition[67].
All through history there has obviously been some correlation between
the size of political organisms and the degree of development of means
of communication. At the present time those means have become so highly
developed that the widest spaces of land and sea no longer present any
insuperable limits to the size of nations; and the natural tendency for
the growth of the larger states at the expense of the smaller, by the
absorption of the latter, seems to be increasingly strong. It seems not
unlikely that almost the whole population of the world will shortly be
included in five immense States—the Russian or Slav, the Central
European, the British, the American, and the Yellow or East Asiatic
State. The freedom of communication between the countries of Europe is
now certainly sufficient to allow of their forming a single nation, if
other conditions, such as diversities of racial type and of historical
sentiments, would permit it.
Although, then, the platform and the orator and the assembly remain
important influences in modern times, it is primarily the telegraph,
wireless telegraphy, the printing press, and the steam engine, that have
rendered possible the large modern nations; for these have facilitated
the dissemination of news and the expression of feeling and opinion on a
large scale, and the free circulation of persons[68].
Without this freedom of communication the various parts of the nation
cannot become adequately conscious of one another; and the idea of the
whole must remain very rudimentary in the minds of individuals; each
part of the whole remains ignorant of many other parts, and there can be
no vivid consciousness of a common welfare and a common purpose. But,
more important still, there can be none of that massive influence of the
whole upon each of the units which is of the essence of collective
mental life. Of these means of reciprocal influence the press is the
most important; though, of course, its great influence is only rendered
possible by the railway and the telegraph.
Hence we find that it is as regards the press that Great Britain and
America differ most markedly from such states as Germany, and still more
Russia. To an Englishman or American the meagre news-sheets which in
Germany take the place of our daily and weekly press bring a shock of
astonishment when he first discovers them; and that astonishment is not
diminished when he finds that the best people hardly trouble to look at
them occasionally[69].
It is interesting to note how the general election of January, 1910
illustrated the importance of improved means of communication. It was
found that the number of citizens voting at the polls was a far larger
proportion of those on the register than at any previous election; and,
in this respect, the election was a more complete expression of the will
of the people than any preceding one. This seems to have been due to the
use of the motor-car, at that time the latest great addition to our
means of communication.
The modern improvements of means of communication tend strongly to
diminish the importance of the geographical factors we considered in the
foregoing chapter; for they practically abolish what in earlier ages
were physical barriers to intercourse; they render capital and labour
more mobile; and they make many forms of industry less dependent upon
local physical conditions and, therefore, less strictly confined by
geographical factors. As instances of important developments of this
order in the recent past or near future, the reader may be reminded of
the railway over the Andes between Chile and Argentina, the tunnels
through the Alps, the Channel tunnel, the Siberian railway, the Suez and
Panama canals, the Cape to Cairo railway, and, above all, aerial
transport. All these make for free intercourse between peoples.
Easy means of communication promote development in the direction of the
organic unity of a nation in another way—namely, they promote
specialisation of the functions of different regions; they thus render
local groups incapable of living as relatively independent closed
communities; for they make each local group more dependent upon others,
each upon all and the whole upon each; hence they develop the common
interest of each part in the good of the whole.
This influence already extends beyond national groups and it had been
hoped that its further growth was about to render war between nations
impossible[70]. To-day England is contemplating a task never before
attempted, the fusing into one nation of the peoples of the
mother-country and her distant colonies. Whether or no she will succeed
depends upon whether the enormously increased facilities of
communication can overcome the principal effects of physical barriers
that we have noted—namely, lack of intermarriage and divergence of
occupations, with the consequent divergence of mental type and
interests. The task is infinitely more difficult than the establishment
of such an Empire as the Roman; not because the distances are greater,
but because the union must take the form of nationhood, because it must
take the form of a collective mind and not that of a merely executive
organisation. But, in the considerations which have shown us that
membership in and devotion to a smaller group is by no means adverse to
membership in and devotion to a larger group, we have ground for
believing that the task is not impossible of achievement.
The slow rate of progress towards nationhood of such peoples as the
Russian and the Chinese has been largely due to lack of means of free
communication between the parts of these countries. On the introduction
of improved communications, we may expect to see rapid progress of this
kind; for many of the other essential conditions are already present in
both countries.
The fact that in the Nation-State the communications between individuals
and between the parts of the whole are in the main indirect, mediated by
the press, the telegraph, and the printed word in general, rather than
by voice and gesture and the other direct bodily expressions of thought
and emotion, modifies the primary manifestations of group life in
important ways which we must notice in a later chapter.