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 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; 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 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, 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 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 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.