OTHER CONDITIONS OF NATIONAL LIFE
In the two foregoing chapters, we have considered in relation to the
life of nations three principal conditions essential to all collective
mental life and action, even that of the unorganised crowd—namely,
homogeneity, free communications and leadership. We have now to consider
other conditions which may render the collective mental processes of
nations very different from, and superior to, those of a mere crowd.
In considering a patriot army as exemplifying collective life of a
relatively high level, we distinguished five principal conditions that
raise it above the level of the mental life of the crowd, in addition to
one which is present in some crowds. This last was a common well-defined
purpose present to, and dominant in, the minds of all individuals. It is
this condition mainly that renders the collective mental life of such an
army so simple, so relatively easy to understand, and so extremely
effective.
This condition—a clearly defined common purpose dominant in the minds of
the great mass of the constituent units—is for the most part lacking in
the life of nations; its absence is one of the principal reasons for the
ineffectiveness and bewildering complexity of their mental life. It is,
however, occasionally realised in national life, and then we see how
immense is its influence. Such an occasion is a war for national
existence. Consider how, when the excesses of the French Revolution
excited all the monarchies of Europe to attack France, the French
nation, becoming animated with the one strong purpose of asserting its
right to exist and to choose its own form of government, successfully
drove back all its enemies and rose to a height of power and glory
greater than at any other period; and how, at the same time, its parts
were welded more firmly together, so that it displayed a high degree of
unity as well as of efficiency. Having achieved this high degree of
unity and efficiency, the French nation, led on by the ambitions of
Napoleon, became aggressive. And we are told by the historians that the
attacks of Napoleon upon the various European peoples, which threatened
to destroy whatever degree of national life those peoples had attained,
were like the blows of a smith’s hammer and resulted in welding together
and hardening into nations the loosely aggregated races ruled over by
the various monarchs; and that in this way these attacks initiated the
modern period of Nation-States[75].
War for national existence unifies nations. So long as the nation is not
utterly shattered and crushed, such war greatly develops the national
mind; because it makes one common purpose dominate the minds of all the
citizens.
We are told that it is a practical maxim of cynical rulers to plunge
their people into war when they are faced by dangerous internal
discontents; and the reason usually given is that war diverts the
attention of the people from their domestic grievances. But if it is a
national war, a war in which the national existence is at stake, it does
far more than merely divert attention; it binds the nation into a
harmonious efficient whole by creating a common purpose; whereas, if the
war is not of this order and is waged in some distant country and merely
for some territorial aggrandisement, it has little or no such effect.
Thus the recent Russo-Japanese war did little or nothing at the time to
raise the Russian people in the scale of nationhood; it was followed by
a period of national weakness; the national existence was not
endangered, the objects of the war were too remote from the interests of
the mass of the people to appeal to them strongly. Whereas the same war
and the years of preparation for it, following upon the previous
Chino-Japanese war, have made the Japanese one of the most efficient and
harmonious nations of the world.
Another striking example of the same principle was the formation of
modern Bulgaria as a strong Nation-State out of a population of quiet
peasant proprietors united only by spatial proximity and by their racial
distinctness from the surrounding populations. This creation of a strong
nation out of a mere population of peasants was in the main the work of
the war of 1885, by which the unprovoked attack of Servia was
triumphantly repelled[76].
The unity and nationhood of modern Germany is largely due to similar
causes; and the war of 1871 may fairly be said to have led to a further
integration of the national life of the French people, in spite of their
defeat. America owes something of the same kind to the Spanish war; and
the entry of that nation into the Great War, long delayed as it was,
will probably be found to have had a similar effect. The French and
Italian nations have undoubtedly been welded more firmly by the Great
War; while England and her sister and daughter nations (with the one sad
exception of the Irish) have been united, by their co-operation in the
one great purpose, to a degree which no other conceivable event could
have achieved and which many generations of peaceful industry and
enlightened political efforts might have failed to approach.
History offers no parallel to these effects of war; and it is difficult
or impossible to imagine any other common purpose which could exert this
binding influence in a similar degree. But it is worth while to notice
that other and minor forms of international rivalry have corresponding
effects. The international rivalry in aeronautics affords a contemporary
illustration. Perhaps every one in this country has felt some degree of
interest and satisfaction in the achievements of the adventurous spirits
of our nation who have traversed the Atlantic by air. And it is probably
largely owing to the prevalence of this national pride and purpose that,
at a time demanding strict national economy, no voice has been raised
against the enormous current expenditure of the government upon
aeronautics.
Another and more important effect of the same kind is produced by the
assumption of great national responsibilities in the way of
administration in respect of backward peoples and undeveloped
territories. The greatest example in history is the responsibility of
Great Britain for the administration of India, gradually and only
half-consciously assumed, but now keenly felt as at once a legitimate
ground of national pride and a moral responsibility that cannot be laid
aside. It is like the responsibility of the father of a family in its
semi-instinctive origin and in its effects in steadying and
strengthening character, for it imposes a responsibility which the
nation, like the individual, cannot discharge indifferently without
seriously damaging its reputation and prestige in the eyes of the world.
Holland owes some of the strength of her nationhood to such influences;
and the assumption by the American nation of responsibility for the
peoples of Cuba and of the Phillipine islands cannot fail to bring them
in some degree similar moral benefits[77].
Of the five other conditions of the higher development of a collective
mind, let us notice, first and very briefly, continuity of existence,
material and formal. Of course every nation has this in some degree, but
some have it in much higher degree than others. The English nation is
fortunate in this respect also. It has preserved both its formal and
its material continuity in very high degree throughout many centuries,
in fact ever since the Norman Conquest. No European nation can compare
with it in this respect; it is only surpassed by China and perhaps
Japan. The French nation has preserved its material continuity, its
population and territory, in high degree. But the Great Revolution cut
across and destroyed to a great extent its formal continuity, so that,
as is sometimes said, the French nation has cut itself off from its past
and made a new start; although, in doing so, it did not get rid of its
highly centralised system of administration. The modern Italian and
German nations are quite recent growths, their formal continuity having
been subject to many interruptions. Spain, with her almost insular
position, might have had continuity; but it was greatly disturbed by the
imperial ambitions of her rulers in the sixteenth century and by the
expulsion of the Moors. Greece is a striking example of loss of both
material and formal continuity. The population of ancient Greece, which
put her in the van of civilisation, has been largely abolished and
supplanted by a different race; and her formal continuity also has
suffered a number of complete ruptures.
Now material and formal continuity is, as we said, the essential
presupposition of all the other main conditions of development of the
collective mind. On it depends the strength of custom and tradition and,
to a very great extent, the strength of national sentiment. It is,
therefore, a principal condition of national stability; from it arise
all the great conservative tendencies of the nation, all the forces that
resist change; accordingly, the more complete and long enduring such
continuity has been in the past, the greater is the prospect of its
prolongation in the future. It is owing to the unbroken continuity of
the English nation through so long a period that its organisation is so
stable, its unwritten constitution so effective, at once stable and
plastic, its national sentiment so strong, its complex uncoded system of
judge-made law so nearly in harmony with popular feeling and therefore
so respected. National organisation resting upon this basis of custom
and traditional sentiment is the only kind that is really stable, that
is not liable to be suddenly overthrown by internal upheavals or impacts
from without. For it alone is rooted in the minds of all citizens in the
forms of habit and sentiment. All other organisation is imposed by
authority.
In this respect modern England and Germany offer a striking contrast
that forces itself upon the most casual observation. As regards the mass
of the people, the position of each individual in the organism of the
German nation is officially determined by the written and codified law
of the State; all personal status and relations are formally determined
by official positions in this recently created system. Almost every
individual carries about some badge or uniform indicating his position
within the system. In England, the status and relations of individuals
are determined by factors a thousand times more subtle and complex,
involving many vaguely conceived and undefined traditions and
sentiments. In Germany, it is almost true to say, if a man has no
official position he has no position at all. In England, the
comparatively few persons who have official positions have also their
social positions by which their private relations are determined. They
are officials only in their offices; whereas the German official is an
official everywhere.
Other important topics we have to consider are (1) the organisation of
the national mind; (2) the national self-consciousness; (3) the
interaction of the nation as a whole with other nations. All these we
may advantageously consider in the light of an analogy, the analogy
between the individual mind and the collective mind of the nation. This
is a much closer and more illuminating analogy than that between the
nation, or society, and the material organism. The latter analogy has
been developed in detail by H. Spencer, Schäffle[78] and others; it has
now fallen into some disrepute. It has no doubt a certain value, but it
is popularly used in a way that leads to quite unjustifiable
conclusions. Of these fallacies by far the most commonly accepted is
that which asserts that, just as every animal organism inevitably grows
old and dies, so too must nations.
This is one of the most popular dogmas of amateur philosophers, and so
distinguished a statesman as the late Lord Salisbury gave it
countenance; while Mr A. J. Balfour in his recent Sidgwick Memorial
Lecture[79] courageously breaks away and proposes to substitute for
senility as the cause of decay the word _decadence_—a proposal which
merely implies that he trusts less to the analogical argument from the
material organism and more to empirical induction, to the observation of
the fact that so many nations have decayed.
All this serves to illustrate the dangers of analogy. We need no special
cause to account for the fall and the decay of nations, no obscure
principle of senility or decadence; the wonderful thing is that they
exist at all; and what needs explanation is not so much the decay of
some, but rather the long persistence of others.
Let us turn, then, to the analogy between the organisation of the
national collective mind and that of the individual mind, which, I say,
is so much closer and more illuminating than that between a society and
a bodily organisation.
The actions of the individual organism are the expression of its mental
constitution or organisation; in some creatures this organisation is
almost wholly innate—the organisation consists of a number of reflex and
instinctive dispositions each specialised for bringing about a special
kind of behaviour under certain circumstances. Such old established
racial dispositions with their special tendencies have their place in
more complexly developed minds; but in these their operations are
complicated and modified by the life of ideas, and by a variety of
habits developed under the guidance of ideas and in the light of
individual experience.
The enduring reflex and instinctive dispositions of the individual mind
we may liken to the established institutions of a nation, such as the
army and navy, the post office, the judicial and the administrative
systems of officials. These, like the instincts, are specialised
executive organisations working in relative independence of one another,
each discharging some specialised function adapted to satisfy some
constantly recurring need of the whole organism. In both cases such
semi-independent organisations, the instincts or the institutions, are
relatively fixed and stable, and they work, if left to themselves,
quasi-mechanically along old established lines, without intelligent
adaptation to new circumstances; and they are incapable of
self-adaptation. In both cases, the mental organisation is in part
materialised, the instinct in the form of specialised nervous structure,
the institution in the form of the material organisation essential to
its efficient action, the buildings, the printed codes, the whole
material apparatus of complex national administration. In both cases,
the actions in which they play their part are not purely mechanical but
to some extent truly psychical—though of a low order.
If we accept the view, which is held by many, that instincts and
reflexes are the semi-mechanised results of successive mental
adaptations effected by the mental efforts of successive generations,
then the analogy is still closer; for the permanent national
institutions are also the accumulated semi-mechanised products of the
efforts at adaptation of many generations.
The organisation of some nations resembles that of the minds of those
animals whose behaviour is purely instinctive. Such is a nation whose
organisation takes the form of a rigid caste system. Each caste performs
its special functions in the prescribed manner in relative independence
of all the others. And, in both cases, the organisation of the mind
includes no means of bringing the different fixed tendencies or
dispositions into harmonious co-operation in the face of unusual
circumstances. The whole system lacks plasticity and adaptability; for
it is relatively mechanical and of a low degree of integration. Any true
adaptation of the whole organism by mental effort is impossible in both
cases.
The higher type of individual mind is characterised by the development
of the intellectual organisation by means of which the activities of the
various instincts, the executive organisations, may be brought into
co-operation with, or duly subordinated to, one another; and the
activities of each such individual may be further adapted to meet novel
combinations of circumstances not provided for in the innate
organisation; hence, the activities of the whole organism, instead of
being a succession of quasi-mechanical actions, and of crude conflicts
between the impulses or tendencies of the different instincts, reveal a
higher degree of harmony of the parts, a greater integration of the
whole system, and a much greater adaptability to novel circumstances;
while, at the same time, the behaviour of the whole, in face of any one
of the situations provided for by innate organisation or instinct, is
liable to be less sure and perfect than in the case of the less complex,
less highly evolved type of mind.
Exactly the same is true of the more highly evolved type of national
mind. Like the lower type, it has its executive institutions and
hierarchies of officials, organised for the carrying out of specialised
tasks subserving the economy of the whole. But, in addition, it has a
deliberative organisation which renders possible a play of ideas; and,
through this, the operations of the institutions are modified and
controlled in detail and are harmonised in a way which constitutes a
higher integration of the whole.
In both cases ideas and judgments reached by the deliberative processes
can only become effective in the world of things and conduct by setting
to work, or calling into play, one or more of the executive dispositions
or institutions.
In both cases, ideas and the deliberative processes, which to some
extent control the operations of the innate or traditional dispositions,
produce, in so doing, some permanent modification of them in the
direction of adaptation to deal with novel circumstances; so that the
dispositions or institutions grow and change under the guidance of the
deliberative processes, slowly becoming better adapted for the
expression of the ruling ideas; they become better instruments, and more
completely at the service of ideas and of the will.
Just as the animal, on the instinctive plane of mental life, displays a
very efficient activity in the special situation which brings some one
instinct into play, so any one caste of a caste-nation may perform its
function under normal circumstances with great efficiency, the priestly
caste its priestly function, the warrior caste, or the caste of
sweepers, its function; and, in both cases, the development of the
deliberative organisation is apt to interfere to some extent with the
perfect execution of these specialised functions.
Again, in the individual mind, adaptation of conduct to novel
circumstances, or to secure improved action in familiar circumstances,
requires the direction of the attention, that is the concentration of
the whole energy of the mind, upon the task; whereas, when the new mode
of behaviour is often repeated, it becomes more and more automatic; for,
owing to the formation of new nervous organisation, the attention is set
free for other tasks of adaptation. Just in the same way new modes of
national behaviour are only effected when the attention of the nation’s
mind is turned upon the situation; whereas, with recurrence of the need
for any such novel mode of action, there is formed some special
executive organisation, say a Colonial Office, or an Unemployed Central
Committee, or an Imperial Conference, which deals with it in a more or
less routine fashion, and which, as it becomes perfected, needs less and
less to be controlled and guided by national attention and therefore
operates in the margin of the field of consciousness of the national
mind, while public attention is set free to turn itself to other tasks
of national adaptation.
We may also regard the customs of a nation as analogous with the habits
of the individual, if (for the sake of the analogy) we accept the view
that instincts are habits that have become hereditary; for custom is an
informal mode in which routine behaviour is determined, and it tends to
lead on to, and to become embodied in, formal institutions; it is like
habit, a transition stage between new adaptation and perfected
organisation. Individual adaptation, habit and instinct are parallel to
national adaptation, custom and legal institution.
At the risk of wearying the reader, I will refer to one last point of
the analogy. Individual minds become more completely integrated in
proportion as they achieve a full self-consciousness, in proportion as
the idea of the self becomes rich in content and the nucleus of a strong
sentiment generating impulses that control and override impulses of all
other sources. In a similar way, the national mind becomes more
completely integrated in proportion as it achieves full
self-consciousness, that is, in proportion as the idea of the nation
becomes widely diffused among the individual minds, becomes rich in
content and the nucleus of a strong sentiment that supplies motives
capable of overriding and controlling all other motives.
Consider now in the light of this analogy the principal types of
national organisation. The organisation of some peoples is wholly the
product of the conflicts of blind impulses and purely individual
volitions working through long ages. This is true of many peoples that
have not arrived at a national self-consciousness or, as the French say,
a social consciousness, and are not held in servitude by a despotic
power. It is a natural stage of evolution which corresponds to the stage
of the higher mammals in the scale of evolution of the individual mind.
A nation of this sort has no capacity for collective deliberation and
volitional action. What collective mental life it has is on the plane of
impulse and unregulated desire. Such ideas as are widely accepted may
determine collective action; but such action is not the result of the
weighing of ideas in the light of self-consciousness; hence they are
little adapted to promote the welfare of the nation, and, because there
is no organisation adapted for their expression, they can be but
imperfectly realised.
We may perhaps take China (as she was until recently) as the highest
type of a nation of this sort. Hers was a complex and vast organisation
consisting of very ancient institutions and customs, slowly evolved by
the conflict of impulses and in part imposed by despotic power and
individual wills; not formed by a national will under the guidance of
national self-consciousness[80]. Hence China was incapable of vigorous
national thought or volition, and its nearest approach to collective
action was expressed in such blind impulsive actions as the Taeping
Rebellion or the Boxer Rising. This last seems to have been prompted by
a dawning national self-consciousness which had not, however, so moulded
the national organisation as to make it an efficient instrument of its
will.
Of other nations the organisation is, in part only, a natural growth,
having been, in large part, impressed upon it by an external power.
Such is the case in all those many instances in which a foreign power of
higher social organisation has conquered and successfully governed for a
long period a people of lower civilisation. We may see a parallel to
this type in the mind of an individual whose behaviour is in the main
the expression of a number of habits engendered by a severe discipline
which has continued from his earliest years, and which has never
permitted the free development of his natural tendencies and character.
Such was England under the feudal system imposed upon her by her Norman
conquerors. Such also France under Louis XIV. Such was Russia when the
Varegs, the conquering Northmen, imposed on the almost unorganised mass
of Slavs their rule and a national organisation; and such it remained up
to the outbreak of the Great War, a mass of men in whom the national
consciousness was only just beginning to glimmer here and there, crudely
organised by the bureaucratic power of a few. Even in the minds of these
few the national consciousness and purpose was but little developed.
Individual purposes and individual self-consciousness predominated.
Hence Russia had no capacity for national thought and action; and when,
as recently, ideas stirred the masses to action, their actions were
those of unorganised crowds, impulsive and ineffective; the ends were
but vaguely conceived, the means were not deliberately chosen, or, if so
chosen, found no executive organisation for the effective expression of
the collective purpose.
In such nations the organisation, which has been in the main created by
a small governing class, is adapted only for the execution of its
purposes, and not at all for the formation of a national mind and the
expression of the collective will. The organisation consists primarily
in a system for the collecting of taxes and the compulsory service of a
large army. The revenue is raised for two primary purposes—the support
of the governing class or caste in luxury and the support of the army;
and the end for which the army is maintained is primarily the gathering
of the taxes, and the further extension of the tax-collecting system
over larger areas and populations—a vicious circle. On the other hand,
the conditions which tend to the formation of national mind and
character (which would have quite other ends than these) are naturally
suppressed as completely as possible by the governing few.
Russian history in modern times exemplifies these principles in the
clearest and most complete manner. The effects of this sort of
organisation were very clearly illustrated by Count Tolstoi’s articles
in the _Fortnightly Review_[81], in which he expressed as his social
creed and ideal a complete anarchy to be achieved by passive resistance;
denied that nations have or can have any existence; and asserted that
the idea of a nation is as fictitious as it is pernicious. He had in
mind only this type of organisation of a people, which hardly entitles
it to be called a nation. And the same considerations explain the wide
prevalence of philosophic anarchy in Russia.
Another type of national organisation results when the natural evolution
of the national mind and character has been artificially and unhealthily
forced by the pressure of the external environment of a people, when the
need of national self-preservation and self-assertion compels the mass
of the people to submit to an organisation which is neither the product
of a natural evolution through the conflict of individual wills, nor the
expression of the general mind and will, nor is altogether imposed upon
it for the individual purposes of the few, but is a system planned by
the few for the good of the whole, and by them imposed upon the whole.
This is the kind of organisation of which a modern army stands as the
extreme type and which is best represented among modern nations by
Germany as she was before the War.
Under such a system there appears inevitably a tendency rigorously to
subordinate the welfare of individuals to that of the nation as a whole.
And that was just the state of affairs in Germany. German political
philosophy showed the opposite extreme from Tolstoi’s; the individual
existed for the nation only. Hence we find this condition of affairs
justified by such writers as Blüntschli[82], Treitschke and Bernhardi,
who represent the State as having an existence and a system of rights
superior to that of all individuals; and we see attempts to justify the
subordination of individual interests by means of the doctrine of the
‘collective consciousness[83].’
In such States as that of the foregoing type the one kind of
organisation is alone highly developed, namely the executive
organisation; while the deliberative organisation is very imperfect and
is repressed and discouraged by the governing power. Such a State is
likely to appear very strong in all its relations with other States, and
its material organisation may be developed in an effective and rapid
way, as we have seen in pre-war Germany. But its actions are not the
expression of the national will and are not the outcome of the general
mind. They are designed by the minds of the few for the good not of
all, but of the whole, the good, that is, not of individuals but of the
State.
Organisation of this type is not of high stability, in spite of its
appearance of strength and its efficiency for certain limited purposes,
such as industrial organisation and the promotion and diffusion of
material well-being. In a State so organised there inevitably grows up
an antagonism between individual rights and interests and the rights and
interests of the State. It is psychologically unsound. This fact was
revealed in Germany by the tremendous growth of social democracy, which
was the protest against the subordination of individual welfare to that
of the State. The defect of such organisation was illustrated by the
fact that Germany, though its well-governed population increased
rapidly, for many years continued to lose great numbers of its
population to other countries. For the mass of the people felt itself to
be not so much of the State as under it. And it is, I think, obvious
that the advent of a bad and stupid monarch might easily have brought on
a revolution at any time.
The inherent weakness of the system induced the governing power to all
sorts of extreme measures directed to maintain its equilibrium and
cohesion. Among such State actions the gravest were perhaps the
deliberate falsification of history by the servile historians and the
suppression and distortion of news by the press at the command and
desire of the State. The expropriation of the Polish landowners and the
treatment of Alsace-Lorraine were other striking manifestations of the
imperfect development of the national mind and of the corresponding
practice and philosophy of the State-craft which the world has learnt to
describe as Prussian.
The organisation of pre-war Germany was, then, very similar to that of
an army and was efficient in a similar way, that is to say for the
attainment of particular immediate ends. In a wider view, such national
organisation is of a lower nature than that of England or France or
America; for the ends or purposes of a nation are remote, they transcend
the vision of the present and cannot be defined in terms of material
prosperity or military power; and only the development of the national
mind, as a natural and spontaneous growth, can give a prospect of
continued progress towards those indefinable ends. Germany was organised
from above for the attainment of a particular end, namely material
prosperity and power among the peoples of the world; and, as the bulk of
her population had been led to accept this narrow national purpose, the
organisation of the nation, like that of an army, was extremely
effective for the purpose. It gave her a great advantage as against the
other nations, among whom the lack of any such clear cut purpose in the
minds of all was a principal difficulty in the way of effective national
thought and action. For a like reason the existence of a nation
organised in this way is a constant threat to the nations of higher
type; and, as we have seen, it may compel them at any time to revert to
or adopt, temporarily at least and so far as they are able, an
organisation of the lower and more immediately effective kind. And this
threat was the justification of the nations of the Entente, when they
demanded a radical change in this political organisation of Germany. In
a similar way, in the past, the Huns, the Turks, and the Arabs, peoples
organised primarily for war and conquest, had to be destroyed as nations
if the evolution of nations of higher type was to go forward.