NATIONS OF THE HIGHER TYPE
Let us consider now the type of nation which from our present point of
view is the most interesting, the type which approximates most nearly to
a solution of the problem of civilisation, to the reconciliation of
individuality with collectivity, to the synthesis of individualist and
collectivist ideals; that in which the rights and wills of individuals
are not forcibly subordinated to those of the State by the power of a
governing class, and in which the deliberative side of the national mind
is well developed and effective.
Such are in a certain degree the French, but still more the British and
the American nations. In the two latter countries the rights of the
individual are made supreme over all other considerations, the welfare
of the whole is only to be advanced by measures which do not override
individual wills and rights; or, at least, the only power which is
admitted to have the right in any degree to override individual wills is
the will of the majority. In such a nation the greatest efforts are
concentrated on the perfection of the deliberative organisation, by
means of which the general mind may arrive at collective judgment and
choice of means and may express its will. A vast amount of time and
energy is devoted to this deliberative work; while the executive
organisation, by which its decisions have to be carried into effect, is
apt to be comparatively neglected and hence imperfect.
These two complementary features of such states we see well exemplified
here and in America[99]; where the amount of time, money, and effort
spent upon the deliberative processes and the elaboration of the
organisation through which they are effected is enormously greater than
in other nations. And, in spite of the energy expended on deliberative
processes and on the elaboration of their organisation, the interests of
the nation as a whole are not at present forwarded in a manner at all
comparable with those of such a State as Germany. Nevertheless, such
national actions as we do achieve are far more truly the expression of
the national will; and, if the national mind is to be developed to a
high level, this vast expenditure of energy, which to some impatient
spirits seems wasteful and useless, must go on.
As was said in a former chapter, such collective deliberation of modern
nations is only rendered possible by the great facilities of
communication we enjoy; telegraph, post, and railway, and especially the
press. The ancients saw truly enough that, with their limited means of
communication, the higher form of state-organisation must be restricted
to a small population of some thousands only—the City-State.
It is important to note that not only do modern facilities of
communication render possible a truly collective mental life for the
large Nation-States of the present age; but that these modern conditions
actually carry with them certain great advantages, which tend to raise
the collective mental life of modern nations to a higher level than was
possible for the ancient City-State, even though its members were of
high average capacity and many of them of very great mental power, as in
Athens.
The assembly of citizens in one place for national deliberation rendered
them much more susceptible to those less desirable peculiarities of
collective mental life which characterise simple crowds; particularly,
the excess of emotional excitement, increased suggestibility, and,
hence, the ease with which the whole mass could be swayed unduly by the
skilful orator. In the modern nation, on the other hand, the
transmission of news by the press secures a certain delay, and a lack of
synchronism, in its reception by different groups and individuals; and
it secures also a certain delay in the action and reaction of mind on
mind, which gives opportunity for individual deliberation. Also the
sympathetic action of the mass mind on the individual mind is in large
part indirect, rather than direct, representative rather than
perceptual, and therefore less overwhelming in its effects. These
conditions greatly temper the violence of the emotional reactions and
permit of a diversity of feeling and opinion; an opposed minority has
time to form itself and to express an opinion, and so may temper the
hasty and emotional reaction of the majority in a way that is impossible
in a general assembly.
A further advantage of the large size of nations may arise from the fact
that actual decision as to choice of means for effecting national action
has to be achieved by means of representatives who come together in one
place. Representative government is not merely an inferior substitute
for government by general assembly; it is superior in many respects. If
each representative were a mere delegate, an average specimen of the
group he represents, chosen by lot and merely charged to express their
will, this feature would modify the crude collective mental processes in
one important respect only; namely, it would counteract to some extent
that weakening of individual responsibility which is characteristic of
collective mental action. But, in addition to this, internal
organisation, in the form of tradition and custom, comes in to modify
very greatly the collective process.
We see such modifying influence very clearly in the election of the
English House of Commons and in the methods of its operations. Owing
partly to a natural tendency, partly to a fortunate tradition, the
people do not elect just any one of themselves to serve as a delegate or
average sample of the mass; but as a rule they choose, or try to choose,
some man who displays special capacity and special qualifications for
taking part in the national deliberations. In so far as they are
successful in this, their representatives are able men and men to whose
minds the social consciousness, the consciousness of the whole people,
of its needs and tendencies and aspirations, is more fully and clearly
present than to the average mind. They are also in the main men of more
than average public spirit. Hence it is not unknown that a purely
working class constituency, being offered liberal, conservative, and
labour candidates, instead of choosing the labour man, one of
themselves, gives him only a small fraction of the total votes. Then,
within the body of representatives, this process, by which greater
influence is given to the abler men, to those whose minds reflect most
fully the whole people, is carried further still. A small group of these
men exerts a predominant influence in all deliberations; and not only
are they in the main the best qualified (for they only attain their
leading positions by success in an intense and long continued
competition) but they are put in a position in which they can hardly
fail to feel a great responsibility resting upon them; and in which they
feel the full force of political traditions. The deliberative
organisation of the American nation illustrates, when compared with our
own, the importance of these traditions; for its lesser efficiency is
largely due to the absence of such traditions, and to the fact that
their system banishes from the House of Representatives its natural
leaders and those on whom responsibility falls most heavily.
Lastly, the existence of two traditionally opposed parties ensures that
every important step shall be fully discussed. The traditional division
into two parties, which from one point of view seems so irrational,
nevertheless exerts very important and valuable influences, of which the
chief is that it prevents the assembly of legislators becoming a mere
psychological crowd easily swayed to a decision by collective emotion
and skilful suggestion; for each suggestion coming from the one party
acts by contra-suggestion upon the other and provokes an opposition that
necessitates discussion[100].
In these two ways, then;—first, through the culmination of national
deliberation among a selected group of representatives, among whom again
custom and tradition accord precedence and prestige to the natural
leaders, the most able and those in whose consciousness the nation, in
the past, present and future is most adequately reflected; secondly, by
means of the party system, which ensures vigorous criticism and full
discussion of all proposals, under a system of traditional conventions
evolved for the regulation of such discussions;—in these two ways the
principal vices of collective deliberation are corrected, and the formal
deliberations and decisions of the nation are raised to a higher plane
than the collective deliberations of any assembly of men lacking such
traditional organisation could possibly attain. The part played by
unwritten tradition in the working of the British constitution is of
course immense, as for example, the existence and enormous prestige of
the cabinet, and the tradition that a party coming into power must
respect the legislation of the party previously in power. Without this
last, representative government, or at any rate the party system, would
be impossible. The smooth working of the system depends entirely upon
the influence of these and similar traditions which exist only in the
minds of men. Or, take as another example, the tradition of absolute
impartiality on the part of the Speaker and of loyal acceptance of his
rulings by every member of the House; or the tradition which
distinguishes sharply between political and private relations, in virtue
of which the parties to a most bitter political strife may and very
generally do remain in perfectly friendly private relations.
These and other such traditions, which secure the efficient working of
the organisation for national deliberation, all rest in turn upon a
traditional and tacit assumption—namely, the assumption that both
parties are working for the good of the nation as they conceive and
understand it, that both parties have this common end and differ only in
their judgment as to the means by which it can best be achieved. They
rest also on the traditional and tacit admission that one’s own
judgment, and that of one’s party, may be mistaken, and that in the long
run the legislation which any party can effect is an expression of the
organised national mind and is therefore to be respected. It is this
acquiescence in accomplished legislation in virtue of this tacit
assumption which gives to the decisions of Parliament the status, not
merely of the expression of the will of a bare majority, but of the
expression of the will of practically the whole nation. Underlying the
stability of the whole system, again, is the tradition, sedulously
fostered and observed by the best and leading minds, that the _raison
d’être_ and purpose of the representative parliament is to organise, and
to give the most complete possible expression to, the national mind and
will; and that no constitutional change or change of procedure is
justifiable unless it tends to the more complete realisation of these
objects.
In virtue of these traditions our Parliament and Press constitute
undoubtedly the best means for effecting organisation of the national
mind in its deliberative aspect that has yet been evolved; and we should
remember this when we feel inclined to gird at the ‘great talking shop,’
at the slowness of its procedure and at the logical absurdities of the
two-party system; and, above all, we should realize how valuable and
worthy of conservation are these scarcely formulated traditions, for
they are absolutely essential to its efficiency. It is just because the
efficiency of the deliberative organisation of a nation depends upon the
force of such traditions, that, though it is possible to take the system
of parliamentary representation and establish it by decree or plebiscite
in a nation which has hitherto had no such deliberative organisation, it
is not possible to make it work smoothly and efficiently amongst such a
people. Hence, although almost every civilised nation has done its best
to imitate the British system of parliamentary government, hardly any
one has made a success of it; and, in nearly all, it is in constant
danger of being superseded by some more primitive form of government—one
need only mention Mexico, Portugal, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary. In
all these countries, and even in America, there seems to be already a
not very remote possibility of the supersession of parliamentary
government by a dictatorship—a process which has actually occurred in
many of the municipal governments of America, and the fear of which has
constantly checked the smooth working of the parliamentary system in
France.
As a single illustration of the way in which the conditions we have been
considering affect the collective acts of the nation, consider what
happened at the time of the Russian outrage in the North Sea during the
Russo-Japanese war. When a Russian fleet fired upon our fishing boats
doing considerable damage to them, the means of communication were
sufficiently developed among us to allow of the action and reaction of
all on each which produces the characteristic results of collective
mental action, the exaltation of emotion, the suggestibility, the sense
of irresponsible power; and, in the absence of the deliberative
organisation which, by concentrating influence and responsibility in the
hands of a few of the best men, controlled and modified this collective
action, we should have rushed upon the Russian fleet and probably have
brought on a general European war. The control and counteraction of this
kind of outburst of collective emotion and impulsive action is one of
the heaviest responsibilities of those to whom predominant influence is
accorded.
It is only in virtue of the strong organisation of the national mind
resting upon these long traditions of parliamentary government, that at
such a time control of the popular emotion and impulse is possible. And
the weaker and less efficient is such traditional organisation, the more
does any such incident tend to provoke a collective manifestation which
approximates in its uncontrollable violence and unconsidered
impulsiveness to the behaviour of an unorganised crowd. Hence
governments, where the democratic principle is acknowledged but the
traditional organisation is less strong, are constantly in danger of
having their hands forced by some outburst of popular passion—as in
France.
It is worth noting that, when Aristotle inveighed against democracy as
an evil form of government, the only form of democratic government he
had in mind was government by the voices of a mob gathered together in
one place and lacking all the safeguards which, as we have seen, render
our British national deliberations so much superior to those of a mere
crowd of persons of equally good average capacity and character.
But it is not only in the formal deliberations of the nation that
internal organisation, resting on tradition, secures the predominance of
the influence of the best and ablest minds. The same is true of all
national thought and feeling. There exists in every great nation the
vague influence we call public opinion, which is the great upholder of
right and justice, which rewards virtue and condemns vice and
selfishness. Public opinion exists only in the minds of individuals (for
we have rejected, provisionally at least, the conception of a collective
consciousness); yet it is a product not of individual, but of
collective, mental life. And it has in any healthy nation far higher
standards of right and justice and tolerance than the majority of
individuals could form or maintain; that is to say, it is in these
respects far superior to an opinion which would be the mere resultant or
algebraic sum of the opinions of all the living individuals. In
reference to any particular matter its judgment is far superior to that
of the average of individuals, and superior probably in many cases to
that which even the best individuals could form for themselves.
How does public opinion come to be superior to individual and to average
opinion? There seems to be something paradoxical in the statement.
The fact is of the utmost importance; for public opinion is the ultimate
source of sanctions of all public acts, the highest court of appeal
before which every executive act performed in the name of the nation
must justify itself. If public opinion were merely the immediate
expression of the collective feelings and judgments of an unorganised
mass of men, its verdicts would be (as we have seen) inferior to those
of the average individuals, whereas, as a matter of fact, its
expressions are much superior to those of the average individuals.
The influence of public opinion is especially clear and interesting in
its relations to law. In this country it is not made by law, but makes
law. Where law is imposed and long maintained by the authority of
despotic power, it will of course mould public opinion; but, in any
progressive highly organised nation, law and the lawyers are always one
or two or more generations behind public opinion. The most progressive
body of law formally embodies the public opinion of past generations
rather than of the generation living at the time.
The fact of the superiority of public opinion is generally admitted and
various explanations are current, for the most part very vague and
incomplete. There is the mystical explanation embodied in the dictum
that the voice of the people is the voice of God. A rather less vague
explanation is that adopted by Mr Beattie Crozier[101] (among others).
It is said that the average man carries within him a germ of an ideal
of justice and right, and that he applies this to the criticism or
approval of the actions of other men; though he often fails to apply it
to his own actions, because, where his own interests are concerned, he
is apt to be the sport of purely egoistic impulses.
But this explanation is only partially true. It represents the average
man as more hypocritical than he really is, and as falling farther below
the standards he acknowledges than he actually does fall. It leaves
unexplained the fact that he has this sentiment for an ideal of justice
and right; and it proceeds on a false assumption as to the nature of the
problem, in assuming that men judge the actions of other men by higher
standards than those which they apply to their own conduct; whereas this
is by no means generally true.
Is it, then, that superior abilities, which enable a man to gain
prestige and to impress his ideas and sentiments upon his fellow men and
so to influence public opinion, are commonly combined with a natural
superiority of moral sentiment, with a love of right and a hatred of
injustice? There may be some degree of such natural correlation of
superior abilities with superior moral qualities, but the supposition
seems very doubtful; and certainly, if it exists, it is not sufficient
to account for the elevation of public opinion. We frequently see
consummate ability combined with most questionable moral sentiments, as
in Napoleon and many other historic personages.
The true explanation is, I submit, to be found in the basal fact that
the moral sentiments are essentially altruistic, while the immoral and
non-moral sentiments are in the main self-regarding[102]. Hence, the
person who has great abilities but is lacking in moral sentiments and
altruism applies his abilities to secure his personal satisfactions and
aggrandisement; and, in so far as he aims at affecting the minds of
others, he tries only to secure their obedience to his commands and
suggestions, to inspire them with deference, admiration, fear and awe,
and to evoke an outward display of these feelings. But, as to the ideas
and sentiments of the people in general, save in so far as they affect
his own gratification, he cares nothing. Accordingly we never find great
abilities deliberately, consistently and directly applied to the
degradation of public opinion and morals, save occasionally in relation
to some particular end. And we find few or no great works of literature
and art deliberately aiming at such degradation.
But with those persons in whom great abilities are naturally combined
with moral disposition the case is very different. The moral disposition
is essentially altruistic; it is concerned for the welfare of others, of
men in general. Hence such a man deliberately applies his abilities to
influence the minds of others. The exertion of such influence is for him
an end in itself. He seeks and finds his chief satisfaction in exerting
an influence, as wide and deep as possible, over the minds of men; not
merely in evoking fear or admiration of himself, but in inspiring in
them the same elevated sentiments and sympathies which he finds within
himself.
For this reason such men as G. F. Watts, Carlyle and Ruskin exert a much
greater and more widespread and lasting influence over the minds of men
than do equally able men who are devoid of moral disposition; for the
former make the exertion of this influence their chief end, while the
others care not at all about the state of public opinion and the minds
of the mass. Still less does the non-moral man of great ability strive
with all his powers to make others act upon base motives like his own
and to degrade their sentiments; rather, he sees that he can better
accomplish his selfish ends if other men are unlike himself and are
governed by altruistic sentiments; and he sees also that he can better
attain his ends if he does lip-service to altruistic ideals; and he is,
therefore, apt to exert whatever direct influence he has over the
sentiments of men in the same direction as the moral leaders, praising
the same actions, upholding in words the same ideals. In this way the
men of great abilities, but of immoral or non-moral character, actually
aid the moral leaders to some extent in their work; whereas under no
conditions is the relation reversed; the moral leaders never praise or
acquiesce in bad actions, but always denounce them and use their
influence against them.
It follows that, in a well organised nation, public opinion, which is
formed and maintained so largely by the influence of leading
personalities, will usually be more in conformity with the sentiments of
the best men than of the average man, will be above rather than below
private opinion. For, if the bad and the good men of exceptional powers
were equal in numbers and capacity, the sum of their influences tending
directly to exalt public opinion would be enormously greater than the
sum of their influences tending to degrade it; and, as a matter of fact,
the influence for good of a few altruistic leaders is able to outweigh
the degrading influences of a much larger number of purely selfish men
of equally great capacities, and is able to maintain a high standard of
public opinion.
We have distinguished a formal and an informal organisation of the
national deliberative processes, the latter expressing itself as public
opinion. These two organisations co-exist and are, of course, not
altogether independent of one another; yet they may be to a considerable
extent independent; though the more intimate the functional relations
and the greater the harmony between them, the healthier will be the
national life.
We may note in passing an interesting difference in respect to
organisation of the national mind between the English and the American
peoples, a difference which illustrates this relative independence of
the formal and informal organisations.
In England both the formal and informal organisations have achieved a
pretty good level; in both cases the best minds are enabled to exert and
have long exerted a dominant influence; and the interaction between the
two organisations is very intimate. But in America, while the informal
organisation expressed in public opinion seems to be very highly
developed, the formal organisation is much inferior; it has not yet such
traditions as give the greatest influence to the best minds and embody
the effects of their influence. And the better Americans tend to value
lightly the formal organisation, to take no part in the working of it,
deliberately to ignore it, and to rely rather upon public opinion to
repress any evils when they are in danger of reaching an intolerable
development.
Both in the formal organisation of the national mind, which is the
parliamentary or other national assembly, and in the informal
organisation which is public opinion, we see, then, that (in the nation
of higher civilisation at least) organisation results in a raising of
the collective mental process above the level of the average minds,
because it gives a predominant influence to the best minds who form and
maintain the traditions, especially the moral traditions; and these
press upon the minds of all members of the community from their earliest
years, moulding them more or less into conformity with themselves,
fostering the better, repressing the purely egoistic, tendencies.
And the ideal organisation after which we ought to strive, is that which
would give the greatest possible influence of this sort to the best
minds, an influence which consists not in merely organising and
directing the energies of the people in the manner most effective for
material or even scientific progress, as in modern Germany; but one
which, by moulding the sentiments and guiding the reasoning of the
people in all matters, public and private alike, secures their consent
and agreement and the co-operation of their wills in all affairs of
national importance.
When such organisation is in any degree attained and a more or less
consistent system of national traditions is embodied in the political,
religious, literary, and scientific culture, which moulds in some degree
the minds of all men, the national mind clearly becomes, as we said in
an earlier chapter, a system of interacting mental forces which are not
merely tendencies of the living members of the nation, but are also, in
an even greater degree, the ideas and tendencies of the dead; and we see
also that in such a people the national consciousness is most truly
embodied, not in the minds of the average men, but in the minds of the
best men of the time.
The term ‘public opinion’ is sometimes, perhaps generally, used in a
looser and wider sense than the meaning implied in the foregoing pages.
It is used in the looser sense by President Lowell in his _Public
Opinion and Popular Government_. By ‘public opinion’ he seems to mean
simply the algebraic sum or balance of individual opinions; he writes
“the opinion of the whole people is only the collected opinions of all
the persons therein[103].” In accordance with this view, he regards
representative institutions as merely one means by which this sum of
opinions may be collected and recorded. And he seems to be prepared to
regard the ‘referendum’ or the ‘initiative’ in any of their forms, or
other methods of direct legislation, as equally good methods, if only
all individuals would take the trouble to register their votes upon
every question proposed to them. He is aware, of course, that this can
hardly be expected of persons who have other interests and occupations
than the purely political, and that the direct methods are therefore
impracticable as general methods of legislation. If it were true that
representative institutions do and should merely collect and record the
individual opinions of all members of the public, then it is obvious
that each representative should be merely a delegate sent to record the
votes of the majority of his constituents. Whereas, if representative
institutions should, and in various degrees do, constitute the formal
deliberative organisation of the national mind, through which national
deliberation and judgment are raised to a higher plane than that of a
mere crowd, it follows that the representative should exert his own
powers of reasoning and judgment, aided by his special knowledge and
equipment, by the special sources of information that he enjoys, in the
light of the discussions in which he takes part, and influenced by all
those political traditions whose force he experiences in exceptional
fulness by reason of his priviledged position. President Lowell, in
discussing the functions of the representative, does not decide in
favour of the former view, as consistency should perhaps lead him to do;
thereby showing that he is not wholly committed to the individualist
view. He discusses the question whether the member of Parliament or
Congress should regard himself as representing the interests of his
constituents alone, or as concerned primarily and chiefly with the
interests of the whole people; and he rightly inclines to the latter
view. This is not quite the same distinction as that which is insisted
upon in these pages. Even if each representative were concerned only for
the welfare of the nation as a whole, yet so long as he regarded it as
his sole function to vote as he believes the majority of the citizens
would vote in any process of direct legislation, he would fall short of
the highest duty which is laid upon him by his position—namely, not
merely that of recording the opinion of the majority, but that of taking
part in the organised deliberative activities of the national mind by
which it arrives at judgments and decisions of a higher order than any
purely individual, or algebraic sum of individual, judgments and
decisions[104].
Public opinion, in the sense in which I have used the words in this
chapter (which seems to me the only proper use of them) is, then, not a
mere sum of individual opinions upon any particular question; it is
rather the expression of that tone or attitude of mind which prevails
throughout the nation and owes its quality far more to the influence of
the dead than of the living, being the expression of the moral
sentiments that are firmly and traditionally established in the mind of
the people, and established more effectively and in more refined forms
in the minds of the leaders of public opinion than in the average
citizen. This tone of the national mind enables it to arrive at just
judgments on questions of right and wrong, of duty and honour and public
desert; though it may have little bearing upon such practical questions
as bimetallism, tariff reform, or railway legislation. The current use
of the term, in this country at least, does, I think, recognise that
public opinion properly applies only to the sphere of moral judgments
and can and should have no bearing upon the practical details of
legislation. Public opinion is, both in its development and in its
operations, essentially collective; it is essentially the work of the
group mind. Its accepted standards of value are slowly built up under
the influence of the moral leaders of past ages; and, in the application
of those standards to any particular question, the influence of the
moral leaders of the time makes itself felt. I have kept in mind in the
foregoing pages the public opinion of the nation; but every community,
every association, every enduring group has its own public opinion,
which, though it is influenced by, and indeed is, as it were, a branch
of, the main stem of national public opinion and is therefore of the
same fibre and texture, has nevertheless its own peculiar tone and
quality, especially in regard to the moral questions with which each
group is specially concerned.
PART III
THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONAL MIND AND CHARACTER
CHAPTER XIV
INTRODUCTORY
In the first Part of this book we have reviewed the most general
principles of collective mental life, beginning with the unorganised
crowd as affording the simplest example, considering then an army as the
simplest example of the profound modifications of collective mental life
effected by organisation of the group. In the second Part we passed on
to apply these principles to the understanding of the mind of the nation
as the most important, complex, and interesting of all types of the
group mind.
In the third Part I take up the consideration in a general way of the
processes by which national mind and character are gradually built up
and shaped in the long course of ages. For, just as we cannot understand
individual minds, their peculiarities and differences, without studying
their development, so we cannot hope to understand national mind and
character and the peculiarities and differences of nations, without
studying the slow processes through which they have been built up in the
course of centuries.
In an earlier chapter, in connexion with the question of the importance
of homogeneity of mental qualities as a condition of the existence of
the national mind, I argued that race has really considerable influence
in moulding the type of national mind. I recognized that differences of
innate qualities between races, at any rate between allied subraces, are
not great, and that they can be, and generally are, almost completely
over-ridden and obscured in each individual by the moulding power of the
social environment in which he grows up; but I urged that these racial
qualities are very persistent, and that they exert a slight but constant
pressure or bias upon the development of all that constitutes social
environment, upon the forms of institutions, customs, traditions, and
beliefs of every kind, so that the effect of such slight but constant
bias accumulates from generation to generation, and in the long run
exerts an immense influence.
One way of treating the part played by the racial mental qualities in
the development of the national mind would be to attempt to define the
racial or innate peculiarities of the peoples existing at the present
time, and to assume that these peculiarities were produced in the remote
past, before the formation of nations began, and that they have
persisted unchanged throughout the period of the development of nations.
Something of this sort was proposed by Walter Bagehot in his _Physics
and Politics_. He distinguished in the development of peoples two great
periods—on the one hand the race-making period, which roughly
corresponds to the whole prehistoric period, and on the other hand the
nation-making period, which roughly corresponds to the historic period.
This distinction has undoubtedly a certain validity.
It seems probable that man was evolved from his prehuman ancestry as a
single stock, probably a stock somewhat widely distributed in the heart
of the Eurasian continent, or possibly in Africa according to the recent
view of some authors, or in the area which is now the Indian Ocean. If
this be true, it follows that the differentiation of the mental and
physical qualities of the principal human races, the differentiation of
the white and black and yellow and brown races, as well as of the chief
subraces, such as the Semitic, the races of Europe—the _Homo Europaeus_,
_Alpinus_ and _Mediterraneus_—was the work of the immensely prolonged
prehistoric period. For these races and subraces, as we now know them,
seem to have been in existence and to have had recognisably and
substantially the same leading qualities, both mental and physical, that
they now have, before the beginning of the historic period.
The racial differentiation during the prehistoric period must have been
much greater than during the historic period; and this was not only
because the former period was immensely longer, but also because, in all
probability, the rate of racial change has been on the whole slower in
the historic period.
The differentiation of racial types in the prehistoric period must have
been in the main the work of differences of physical environment,
operating directly by way of selection, by way of the adaptation of each
race to its environment through the extermination of the strains least
suited to exist under those physical conditions. But this process, this
direct moulding of racial types by physical environment, must have been
well nigh arrested as soon as nations began to form. For the formation
of nations implies the beginning of civilisation; and civilisation very
largely consists in the capacity of a people to subdue their physical
environment, or at least to adapt the physical environment to men’s
needs to a degree that renders them far less the sport of it than was
primitive man; it consists, in short, in replacing man’s natural
environment by an artificial environment largely of his own choice and
creation.
In a second and perhaps even more important way, the formation of
nations with the development of civilisation modified and weakened the
moulding influence of the physical environment; namely, it introduced
social co-operation in an ever increasing degree, so that the perpetual
struggle of individuals and of small family groups with one another and
with nature was replaced by a co-operative struggle of large communities
against the physical environment and with one another. And in this
process those members of each community who, by reason of weakness,
general incapacity, or other peculiarity, would have been liable to be
eliminated under primitive conditions became shielded in an ever
increasing degree by the powers of the stronger and more capable against
the selective power of nature and against individual human forces. And,
although within the community the rivalry of individuals and families
still went on, it was no longer so much a direct struggle for existence,
but rather became more and more a struggle for position in the social
scale; and failure in the struggle no longer necessarily meant death, or
even incapacity to leave an average number of descendants. That is to
say, primitive man’s struggle for existence against the forces of nature
and against his fellow men, which made for racial evolution and
differentiation through survival of those fittest to cope with various
environments, tended to be replaced by a struggle which no longer made
for racial evolution towards a higher type, and which may even have made
for race-deterioration, at the same time that civilisation and national
organisation continued to progress.
We may, then, recognise a certain truth in Bagehot’s distinction of two
great periods, the race-making and the nation-making periods.
Nevertheless, it would not be satisfactory to follow the course
suggested above and simply assume certain racial characters as given
fixed data without further consideration. For, firstly, it is
interesting and perhaps not altogether unprofitable to indulge in
speculations on the race-making processes of the prehistoric period.
Secondly, although it seems likely that racial changes have been in the
main slower and on the whole relatively slight in the historic period,
yet they have not been altogether lacking; and, in proportion to their
magnitude, such changes as have occurred have been of great importance
for national life; and changes of this kind are still playing their part
in shaping the destinies of nations. Possible racial changes of mental
qualities must therefore be considered, when we seek to give a general
account of the conditions of the development of nations.
On the other hand, we must reject root and branch the crude idea, which
has a certain popular currency, that the development of civilisation and
of nations implies a parallel evolution of individual minds. That idea
we have already touched upon and rejected in a previous chapter, where
we arrived at the conclusion that there is no reason to suppose the
present civilised peoples to be on the whole innately superior to their
barbaric ancestors.
If we use the word ‘tradition’ in the widest possible sense to denote
all the intellectual and moral gains of past generations, in so far as
they are not innate but are handed on from one generation to another by
the personal intercourse of the younger with the older generation, and
if we allow the notion of tradition to include all the institutions and
customs that are passed on from generation to generation, then we may
class all the changes of a people that constitute the evolution of a
national character under the two heads: _evolution of innate qualities_
and _evolution of traditions_. Using the word ‘tradition’ in the wide
sense just now indicated, the traditions of a people may be said to
include the recognised social organisation of the whole people into
classes, castes, clans, phratries, or groups of any kind, whose
relations to one another and whose place in the national system are
determined by law, custom and conventions of various kinds. This part of
the total tradition is relatively independent of the rest, and we may
usefully distinguish the development of such social organisation as
social evolution—giving to the term this restricted and definite
meaning—and we may set it alongside the other two conceptions as of
co-ordinate value.
If we thus set apart for consideration under a distinct head the
evolution of social organisation, the rest of the body of national
traditions may be said to constitute the civilisation of a people. For
the civilisation of a people at any time is essentially the sum of the
moral and intellectual traditions that are living and operative among
them at that particular time. We are apt in a loose way to consider the
civilisation of a people to consist in its material evidences; but it is
only in so far as these material evidences, the buildings, industries,
arts, products, machinery, and so forth, are the expression and outcome
of its mental state that they are in any degree a measure of its
civilisation. We may realize this most clearly by considering the case
of a people on which the material products of civilisation have been
impressed from without. Thus the peasants of India live amongst, and
make use of, and benefit materially by, the railways and irrigation
works created by their British rulers, and are protected from invasion
and from internal anarchy by the British military organisation and
equipment; and they play a subordinate though essential part in the
creation and maintenance of all these material evidences of
civilisation. But these material evidences are not the expression of the
mental state of the peoples of India, and form no true part of their
civilisation; and, in fact, they affect their civilisation astonishingly
little; although if these products of a higher civilisation should be
maintained for a long period of time they would, no doubt, produce
changes of their civilisation, probably tending in some degree to
assimilate their mental state to that of Western Europe.
We may, then, with advantage distinguish between the social organisation
and the civilisation of a people. In doing so we are of course making an
effort of abstraction, which, though it results in an artificial
separation of things intimately related, is nevertheless useful and
therefore justifiable. In a similar way the progress of civilisation may
be distinguished from social evolution. Social evolution is profoundly
affected by the progress of civilisation, and in turn reacts powerfully
upon it; for any given social organisation may greatly favour or
obstruct the further progress of civilisation. There could have been no
considerable advance of civilisation without the evolution of some
social organisation; but that the two things are distinct is clear, when
we reflect that there may be a very complex social organisation,
implying a long course of social evolution, among a people that has
hardly the rudiments of civilisation. Extreme instances of social
organisation in the absence of civilisation are afforded by some animal
societies—for example, societies of ants, bees, and wasps. Among
peoples, the native tribes of Australia illustrate the fact most
forcibly. They are at the very bottom of the scale of civilisation; yet
it has been discovered that they have a complex and well-defined social
organisation, which can only have been achieved by a long course of
social evolution. These people are divided into totem clans, which
clans are grouped in phratries, each individual being born, according to
well recognised rules, into a clan of which he remains a life-long
member; and his membership in the clan and phratry involves certain
well-defined rights and obligations, and well-defined relations to other
persons, especially as regards marriage; and these rights, obligations
and relations are recognised and rigidly maintained throughout immense
areas.
On the other hand, although no people has attained any considerable
degree of civilisation without considerable social organisation,
nevertheless we can at least imagine a people continuing to enjoy a high
civilisation, practising and enjoying much of the arts, sciences,
philosophy, and literature, which we regard as the essentials of
civilisation, yet retaining a bare minimum of social organisation. And
this state of affairs is not only conceivable, but is held up as a
practicable ideal by philosophical anarchists such as Tolstoi and
Kropotkin; and it is, I think, true to say that the American nation
presents an approximation to this condition.
Again, a very high state of civilisation may co-exist with a relatively
primitive social organisation. Thus the civilisation of Athens in the
classical age was equal to, or even superior to, our own in many
respects; yet the social organisation was very much less highly evolved.
It had hardly emerged from the barbaric patriarchal condition, and had
at its foundation a cruel system of slavery[105]; and it had also
another great point of inferiority—namely, the very restricted number of
persons included in the social system. These deficiencies, this
rudimentary character, of its social organisation was the principal
cause of the instability and brief endurance of that brilliant
civilisation.
We have so far distinguished three principal factors or groups of
factors in the evolution of national mind and character: (1) Evolution
of innate or racial qualities: (2) Development of civilisation: (3)
Social evolution, or the development of social organisation.
Now the first two of these we may with advantage divide under two
parallel heads, the heads of intellectual and moral development. No
doubt, the intellectual and the moral endowment of a people continually
react on each other; and many of the manifestations of the national mind
are jointly determined by the intelligence and the morality of a people;
especially perhaps is this true of their religion and their art.
Nevertheless, it is clear that we can distinguish pretty sharply
between the intellectual and the moral traditions of a people; and that
these may vary independently of one another to a great extent. A rich
and full intellectual tradition may go with a moral tradition of very
low level, as in the Italian civilisation of the renascence; and a very
high moral tradition with a relative poverty of the intellectual, as in
the early days of the puritan settlements of New England.
The same distinction between the intellectual and the moral level is
harder to draw in the case of the racial qualities of a people, but it
undoubtedly exists and is valid in principle, no matter how difficult in
practice to deal with.
We have, then, to distinguish five classes of factors, five heads under
which all the factors which determine the evolution of national
character may be distributed. They are
(1) Innate moral disposition } racial qualities.
(2) Innate intellectual capacities }
(3) Moral tradition } national civilisation.
(4) Intellectual tradition }
(5) Social organisation.
Every nation that has advanced from a low level to a higher level of
national life has done so in virtue of development or progress in one or
more of these respects. And a principal part of our task, in considering
the evolution of national mind and character, is to assign to each of
these its due importance and its proper place in the whole complex
development.
The distinction between the racial and the traditional level of a people
is too often ignored; chiefly, perhaps, for the reason that it has
usually been assumed that whatever is traditional becomes innate and
racial through use. Since in recent years it has been shown that this
assumption is very questionable, a number of authors have recognised the
importance of the distinction as regards the intellectual qualities of a
people; but, as regards the moral qualities, the distinction is still
very generally overlooked.
The neglect of these distinctions between the innate and the traditional
has in great measure vitiated much of the keen dispute that has been
waged over the question whether the progress of civilisation depends
primarily on intellectual or on moral advance. For example, T. H. Buckle
and Benjamin Kidd agreed in recognising clearly the distinction between
the innate and the traditional intellectual status of a people; and they
agreed in maintaining that we have no reason to believe that in the
historic period any people has made any considerable advance in innate
intellectual capacity; and that any such advance, if there has been any,
has not been a principal factor in the progress of civilisation. But
they differed extremely in that Buckle maintained that the primary cause
of all progress of national life is the improvement of its intellectual
tradition, that is, increase in the quantity and the worth of its stock
of knowledge and accepted beliefs, and improvements in methods of
intellectual operation; and he held that improvements of morals and of
social organisation have been secondary results of these intellectual
gains. Kidd, on the other hand[106], maintained that the progress of
European civilisation has been primarily due to an improvement of the
morality of peoples; that this has led to improvement of social
organisation; and that this in turn has been the essential condition of
the progress of the intellectual tradition, because it has secured a
stable social environment, a security of life, a free field for the
exercise of intellectual powers; in the absence of which conditions the
intellectual powers of a nation cannot effectively organise themselves
and apply themselves to the understanding of man and nature, or to
securing the traditional perpetuation of the gains which they may
sporadically achieve. We have to examine these views and try to
determine what truth they contain, and to show that they are not wholly
opposed but can in some measure be combined.
I propose to make first a very brief critical survey of some of the most
notable attempts that have been made to account for racial qualities,
and I shall try to supplement and harmonise these as far as possible. We
may with advantage consider at the outset the race-making period, and
afterwards go on to consider changes of racial qualities in the historic
period. This Part of the book is necessarily somewhat speculative, but
its interest and importance for our main topic may justify its
inclusion.
CHAPTER XV
THE RACE-MAKING PERIOD
Let us now see what can be said about the process of racial
differentiation which, as we saw in the foregoing chapter, was in its
main features accomplished in the prehistoric or race-making period. We
cannot hope to reach many positive conclusions, but rather merely to
discuss certain possibilities and probabilities in regard to the main
factors of the differentiation of racial mental types.
I would point out at once that the answer to be given to the
question—Are acquired qualities transmitted? Are the effects of use
inherited? is all important for our topic. I do not propose to discuss
that difficult question now. I will merely say that the present state of
biological science makes it seem doubtful whether such inheritance takes
place, and that, although the question remains open, we are not
justified in assuming an affirmative answer; that, therefore, we must
not be satisfied with any explanation of racial and national
characteristics based upon this assumption; and in the following
discussion I shall provisionally assume the truth of the Neo-Darwinian
principle that acquired modifications are not transmitted.
Assuming, as we must, that all peoples are descended from some one
original stock, the problem is—Can anything be said of the conditions
which have determined the differentiation of races of different mental
constitutions, of the development of racial qualities which, having
become relatively fixed, have led to the evolution of different types of
national organisation and culture? And especially we have to consider
the conditions which have produced, and may still produce in the future,
the qualities that make for the progress of nations.
We must suppose a certain social organisation to have obtained among
that primitive human stock from which all races have been evolved,
probably an organisation in small groups based on the family under the
rule and leadership of a patriarch.
It is possible that considerable divergences of social organisation may
have taken place, without any advance towards civilisation; such
divergences of social organisation must have tended to divert the
course of mental evolution along various lines; but they must themselves
have had their causes; they cannot in themselves be the ultimate causes
of divergence of racial mental types.
Such ultimate causes of the differentiation of mental qualities must
have been of two orders only, so far as I can see: (1) differences of
physical environment; (2) spontaneous variations in different directions
of the innate mental qualities of individuals, especially of the more
gifted and energetic individuals of each people.
In the mental evolution of animals these two factors are not
distinguishable. We may say that the main and perhaps the sole condition
of their evolution is the selection by the physical environment of
spontaneous favourable variations and mutations of innate mental
qualities; if we include under the term physical environment of the
species all the other animal and vegetable species of its habitat. For
it is only by its selective influence upon individual variations that
physical environment can determine differentiation of races.
But with man the case is different; spontaneous variation not only
provides the new qualities which, by determining the survival of the
individual in his struggle for existence with the physical environment,
secure their own perpetuation by transmission to the after coming
generations. The new qualities determine mental evolution in another
manner, by a mode of operation which is almost completely absent in
animal evolution; namely, the spontaneous variations create a social
environment which profoundly modifies the influence of the physical
environment, and itself becomes a principal factor in the determination
of the trend of racial evolution.
Man is distinguished from the animals above all things by his power of
learning. Whereas the behaviour of animals, even of the higher ones,
consists almost entirely of purely instinctive actions, innate modes of
response to a limited number of situations; man has an indefinitely
great capacity for acquiring new modes of response, and so of adapting
himself in new and more complex ways to an almost indefinite variety of
situations. And his new mental acquisitions are not made only by the
slow process of adaptation in the light of his own individual experience
of the consequences of behaviour of this and that kind; as are most of
the few acquisitions of the animals. By far the greater part of the
mental stock-in-trade by which his behaviour is guided is acquired from
his fellow men; it represents the accumulated experience of all the
foregoing generations of his race and nation. Man’s life in society,
together with the great plasticity of his mind, its great capacity for
new adaptations, secures him this enormous advantage; the two things are
necessarily correlated. Without the plasticity of mind, his life in
society would benefit him relatively little. Many animals that lead a
social life in large herds or flocks are not superior, but rather
inferior, in mental power to animals that lead a more solitary life; and
indeed this seems to be generally true, as we see on comparing generally
the herbivorous gregarious animals with the solitary carnivores that
prey upon them. The social life of such animals, rendering individual
intelligence less necessary for protection and escape from danger, tends
actually against mental development.
On the other hand, man’s great plastic brain would be of comparatively
little use to him if he lived a solitary unsocial life. His great brain
is there to enable him to assimilate and make use of the accumulated
experience, the sum of knowledge and morality, which is traditional in
the society into which he is born a member; that is to say, the
development of social life, which depended so much upon language and for
the forwarding of which language came into existence, must have gone
hand in hand with the development of the great brain, which enables full
advantage to be secured from social co-operation and which, especially,
renders possible the accumulation of knowledge, belief, and traditional
sentiment.
Now this traditional stock of knowledge and morality has been very
slowly accumulated, bit by bit; and every bit, every least new addition
to it, has been a difficult acquisition, due in the first instance to
some spontaneous variation of some individual’s mental structure from
the ancestral type of mental structure. That is to say, throughout the
evolution of civilisation, progress of every kind, increase of knowledge
or improvement of morality, has been due to the birth of more or less
exceptional individuals, individuals varying ever so slightly from the
ancestral type and capable, owing to this variation, of making some new
and original adaptation of action, or of perceiving some previously
undiscovered relation between things.
These new acquisitions, first made by individuals, are, if true or
useful, sooner or later imitated or accepted by the society of which the
original-minded individual is a member, and then, becoming incorporated
in the traditional stock of knowledge and morality, are thereby placed
at the service of all members of that society.
Thus favourable spontaneous variations do not, as with the animals,
render possible mental evolution merely by conducing to the survival
of, and the perpetuation of the qualities of, those individuals in whom
the variations occur. They may do this, or they may not; but, in
addition and more importantly, they contribute to the stock of
traditional knowledge and morality, and so raise the social group as a
whole in the scale of civilisation; they render it more capable of
successfully contending against other groups and against the adverse
influence of the physical environment; and they promote the solidarity
of the group by adding to its stock of common tradition; thus the
acquisitions of each member benefit the group as a whole and all its
members, quite apart from any philanthropic purpose or intention of
producing such a result.
The achievement of this unconscious undesigned solidarity of human
societies is one of two great steps in the evolution of the human race
by which the process is rendered very different from, and is raised to a
higher plane than, the mental evolution of the animal world. The second
and still more important step is one which is only just beginning to be
achieved in the present age; I shall have to touch on it in a later
chapter.
The original or primary divergence of mental type between any two
peoples must, then, have been due to these fundamental causes—namely,
differences of physical environment and spontaneous variations of mental
structure, the latter adding to the traditional stock of knowledge and
belief, of moral precepts and sentiments.
Intellectual or moral divergence produced by these two primary causes
would tend to determine the course of social evolution along different
lines and so to produce different types of social organisation. And
different social organisations thus produced would then react upon the
moral and intellectual life of the people to produce further divergence;
for example, one type of social organisation determined by physical
environment, say a well developed patriarchal system, may have made for
progress of intellect and morals; another, say a matriarchal
organisation, or one based on communal marriage, may have tended to
produce stagnation.
As social evolution proceeded and brought about more extensive and more
complex forms of social organisation, which included, within any one
society or group, larger numbers of individuals in more effective forms
of association, social organisation must have assumed a constantly
increasing importance as a condition of mental evolution relatively to
all other factors, especially as compared with the influence of physical
environment; until, in the complex societies of the present time, it has
an altogether predominant importance. This truth is concisely stated in
the old dictum that “in the infancy of nations men shape the State; in
their maturity the State shapes the men.” Accordingly, in considering
the mental evolution of peoples we must never lose sight of the
influence of social organisation. It follows that the conditions of the
mental evolution of man are immensely more complex than those of the
mental evolution of animals.
We must recognise not only the selection, through survival in the
struggle for existence, of new mental qualities arising as spontaneous
variations of individual mental structure. This, which is the only, or
almost the only, process at work in the mental evolution of animals, is
immensely complicated and overshadowed in importance by two processes.
The first is the accumulation of knowledge and morality in traditional
forms. The traditional accumulation, which so far outweighs the mental
equipment possible to any individual isolated from an old society, not
only constitutes in itself a most important evolutionary product, but it
modifies profoundly the conditions of evolution of the individual innate
qualities of mind; for example, the greater and more valuable the stock
of traditional knowledge and morality becomes, the more does fitness to
survive consist in the capacity to assimilate this knowledge and to
conform to these higher moral precepts, the less does it consist in the
purely individualistic qualities, such as quickness of eye and ear,
fleetness of foot, or strength and skill of hand. Secondly, the
processes of natural selection are complicated by the social evolution,
which tends progressively to abolish the struggle for existence between
individuals, and to replace it by a struggle between groups; in which
struggle success is determined not only by the qualities of individuals,
but also very largely by the social organisation and by the traditional
knowledge and morality of the groups.
Each variety of the human species, each race considered as a succession
of individuals having certain innate mental qualities, has been evolved,
then, not merely under the influence of the physical environment, like
the animal species, but also and to an ever increasing extent under the
influence of the social environment. The social environment we regard as
consisting of two parts; namely, the social organisation and the body of
social tradition; for these, though interdependent and constantly
interacting, may yet with advantage be kept apart in thought. We must,
then, bear constantly in mind the fact that man creates for himself an
environment which becomes ever more complex and influential,
overshadowing more and more in importance the physical environment.
Here I would revert to some points of the analogy, drawn in Chapter X,
between the mind of a nation and that of an individual. The mind of an
individual human being develops by accumulating the results of his
experience; and so does that of a people. In this respect the analogy
holds good. But the development possible to an individual is strictly
limited in two ways. First, by the short duration of the material basis
of his mental life; secondly by the extent of his innate capacities.
Neither of these limitations applies to the national mind. Its material
basis is in principle immortal, because its individual components may be
incessantly renewed; and its development has no limit set to it by its
innate capacities, because these may be indefinitely extended and
improved. In these respects the national mind resembles the species
rather than the individual.
The development of the national mind, and of the minds of those who
share in the mental life of the nation, thus combines the methods and
advantages of the development of individuals and of species, methods
which are essentially different. The result is that the mental
development of man, since his social life began, has been radically
different from that of the animals; it has been a social process; it has
been the evolution of peoples rather than of individuals. The evolution
of man as an individual has been wholly subordinated to that of peoples;
and it is incapable of being understood or profitably considered apart
from the development of the group mind.
Assuming, as we must, that all the races of men are derived from a
common stock, it is obvious, I think, that the first differentiation of
racial types was determined almost exclusively by differences of
physical environment, and that the other conditions only very slowly
developed and did not assume their predominant importance until the time
which may be roughly defined as the beginning of the historic or
nation-making period.
Physical environment affects the mental qualities of a people in three
ways: firstly, it directly influences the minds of each generation;
secondly, it moulds the mental constitution by natural selection,
adapting the race to itself; thirdly, it exerts indirect influence by
determining the occupations and modes of life and, through these, the
social organisation of a people. We may consider these three modes of
influence in turn.
There has been much speculation on the direct influence of the physical
environment in moulding the mental type of a people, but little or
nothing can be said to be established.
There is a fair concensus of opinion to the effect that what we may
call climate exerts an important influence. In climate the two factors
recognised as of chief importance are temperature and moisture. High
temperature combined with moisture certainly tends to depress the vital
activity of Europeans and to render them indolent, indisposed to
exertion of any kind. On the other hand, high temperature combined with
dryness of the atmosphere seems to have the effect of rendering men but
little disposed to continuous activity, and yet capable of great
efforts; it tends to produce a violent spasmodic activity. A cold
climate seems to dispose towards sustained activity and, when combined
with much moisture, to a certain slowness.
These effects, which we ourselves experience and which we see produced
upon other individuals on passing from one climate to another, we seem
to see impressed upon many of the races which have long been subjected
to these climates; for example, the slow and lazy Malays have long
occupied the hottest moistest region of the earth. The Arabs and the
fiery Sikhs may be held to illustrate the effect of dry heat. The
Englishman and the Dutchman seem to show the effects of a moist cool
climate, a certain sluggishness embodied with great energy and
perseverance.
In these and other cases, in which the innate temperament of a people
corresponds to the effects directly induced by their climate, it seems
natural to suppose that the innate temperament has been produced by the
transmission and accumulation from generation to generation of the
direct effects of the climate. The assumption is so natural that it has
been made by almost every writer who has dealt with the question. And
these instances of conformity of the temperament of peoples to the
direct effects of climate are sometimes offered as being among the most
striking evidences of the reality of hereditary transmission of acquired
qualities; and the argument is reinforced by instances of what seem to
be similar results produced by climate on physical types. Thus, it is
said that in North America a race characterised by a new specific
combination of mental and physical qualities is being rapidly formed;
and it seems to be well established that long slender hands are among
these features; for in Paris a specially long slender glove is made
every year in large quantities for the American market. Again, we see
apparently a change of physical type in the white inhabitants of
Australia. They seem to be becoming taller and more slender
‘cornstalks’; and this is commonly regarded as the direct effect of
climate.
Now, that a new race or subrace with a specific combination of qualities
should be forming in America is certainly to be expected from the fact
that the intimate blending of a number of European stocks has been going
on for some generations. But what gives special support to the
assumption that these new qualities are the direct effects of climate is
that these qualities, the physical at least, seem to be approximations
to the type of the Red Indians, the aboriginal inhabitants. And, it is
said, this approximation of type can only be due to hereditary
accumulation of the direct effects of the climate on individuals.
Another way in which climate has been held to modify racial mental
qualities by direct action is through the senses, especially the eye. M.
Boutmy, in his book on the English people makes great play with this
principle[107]. He points out that the thick hazy state of the air, so
common in our islands, renders vague and dull all outlines and colours,
so that the eye does not receive that wealth of well-defined hues and
forms which give so great a charm to some more sunny lands, such as the
Mediterranean coast lands. Hence, he says, the senses become or remain
relatively dull, and the sense-perceptions slow and relatively
indiscriminating. Such relative deficiency of aesthetic variety and
richness in the appearance of the outer world produces secondarily a
further and deeper modification of mental type. In the lands where
nature surrounds man with an endless variety of rich and pleasing
scenes, he can find sufficient satisfaction in mere contemplation of the
outer world; and, when he takes to art production, he tends merely to
reproduce in more or less idealised forms the objects and scenes he
finds around him; his art tends to be essentially objective. On the
other hand, in the dull northern climes, man has not ever at hand these
sources of satisfaction in the mere contemplation of the outer world;
consequently he is driven back upon his own nature, to find his
satisfactions in a ceaseless activity of mind and body, but chiefly of
the latter. Hence, races so situated are characterised by great bodily
activity and their art and literature are essentially subjective. The
thick air, the monotony of vague form and colour, drive the mind to
reflection upon itself; and in art the objects of nature serve merely as
symbols by aid of which the mind seeks to express its own broodings.
“The painter paints with the intentions of the poet, the poet describes
or sings with the motives of the psychologist or moralist. All the
literature of imagination of the English shows us the internal reacting
incessantly upon the external with a singular power of transfiguration
and interpretation[108].” Hence also poetry is the privilege of a few
rare spirits and is for them the product of deep reflection, not a
simple lyrical expression in which all can equally share.
It is certainly true that climate tends to produce these effects by its
direct action on individuals. Anyone who has lived for a time in the
southern climes must have noted these effects upon himself. But we have
no proof that the effects of climate are directly inherited. It suffices
to suppose that the direct effects are imposed afresh by the climate on
the minds of each generation. This view is borne out by the fact that
two races may live for many generations in the same climate and yet
remain very different in temperament in these respects; for example the
Irish climate is very similar to the English, perhaps even more misty
and damp; yet the Irish have much more wit and liveliness than the
English. And in every case in which adaptation to physical environment
has clearly become innate or racial, an explanation can be suggested in
terms of selection of spontaneous variations, or of crossing of races.
Thus, the approximation of the American people to the type of the
aboriginals, if it is actual, and some observers deny it, may well be
due to the small infusion of the native blood which has admittedly taken
place. It may well be that certain qualities of the Red Indian, for
example, the straight dark hair and prominent cheek bones, are what the
biologists call ‘dominant characters’ when the Indian is crossed with
the European; that is, qualities which always assert themselves in the
offspring, to the exclusion of the corresponding quality of the other
race involved in the cross. If that is so, a very small proportion of
Indian blood would suffice to make these features very common throughout
the population of America. As an exception to the supposed law of direct
hereditary adaptation to climate take the colour of the skin. The black
negroes live in the hot moist regions of Africa, and it has been said
that pigmentation is the hereditary effect of a hot moist climate. But
there are men of a different race who have long lived in an equally hot
and moist climate, but who do not show this effect—namely, tribes in the
heart of Borneo, right under the equator, whose skins are hardly darker
than the average English skins and less dark than the Southern
Europeans’. Take again the indolence of the peoples of warm hot climates
and the energy of peoples of colder climates. These certainly seem to be
racial qualities; but their distribution is adequately explained by the
indirect effect of physical environment exerted by way of natural
selection; and these differences of energy afford the best illustration
of such indirect action of physical environment in determining racial
mental qualities.
Before considering the question further, let us note yet another way in
which the physical environment affects men’s minds and has been supposed
directly to induce certain racial qualities. Buckle pointed out with
great force the influence on the mind of what he called the external
aspects of nature. He showed that where, as in India and the greater
part of Asia, the physical features of a country are planned upon a very
large scale; where the mountains are huge, where rivers are of immense
length and volume, where plains are of boundless extent, and the sun
very hot, there the forces of nature are exerted with an intensity that
renders futile the best efforts of man, at any rate of man in a state of
low civilisation, to cope with them. In such countries men are exposed
to calamities on an enormous scale, great floods, violent storms and
deluges of rain, earthquakes, excessive droughts resulting in famine and
plague; and they are exposed to the attacks of many dangerous animal
species, which are bred by the great heat in the dense and unconquerable
forests. These disasters have repeatedly occurred on a scale such that
in comparison with them the recent earthquake in California appears a
mere trifle. Millions have been destroyed in a few hours in some of the
floods of the Yellow River of China.
The magnitude of these objects and the appalling and irresistible
character of such devastating forces produce, said Buckle, two principal
and closely allied effects upon the mind; they stimulate the imagination
to run riot in extravagant and grotesque fancies; at the same time, they
discourage any attempt to cope with these great forces and to understand
their laws, and thus keep men perpetually in fearful uncertainty as to
their fate; for they cannot hope to control it by their own unaided
efforts.
Hence, the encouragement of superstition; hence, the dominance of a
degrading religion of fear throughout the greater part of such regions;
hence, the supremacy of priests and religious orders and the
discouragement of scientific reasoning. Hence, in the arts, the
literature, and the religion of India, we see a dominant tendency to the
grotesque, the enormous, the fearful; we see gods portrayed with many
arms, with three eyes and terrible visages. The legends of their heroes
contain monstrous details, as that they lived for many thousands or
millions of years. “All this,” says Buckle, “is but a part of that love
of the remote, that straining after the infinite, and that indifference
to the present, which characterises every branch of Indian intellect.
Not only in literature, but also in religion and in art, this tendency
is supreme. To subdue the understanding, and indulge the imagination, is
the universal principle. In the principles of their theology, in the
character of their gods, and even in the form of their temples, we see
how the sublime and threatening aspects of the external world have
filled the mind of the people with those images of the grand and the
terrible, which they strive to reproduce in a visible form, and to which
they owe the leading peculiarities of their national culture.”[109]
That these peculiarities of the mental life of such peoples are causally
related with those terrible aspects of nature is, I think, sufficiently
established by Buckle. But if we admit this, there remain two questions:
(1) Have these tendencies become innate racial qualities? (2) If so, how
have they been rendered innate? Buckle did not raise these questions and
offered no opinion in regard to them. But he seems to have assumed that
these tendencies have become innate; and there is much to be said for
that view. Yet, if that could be shown conclusively, it still would not
prove inheritance of these acquired qualities. It may have resulted in
some such way as this: the physical environment stimulates the
imagination, and it represses the tendency to control imagination and
superstition by reason and calm inquiry after causes; acting thus upon
successive generations of men, it determines the peculiarities of the
religious system and of the art and literature of the people.
Individuals in whom the same tendencies are innately strong will then
flourish under such a system; whereas those whose innate tendencies are
in the direction of reason and scepticism will find the system
uncongenial, unfavourable for the exercise of their best powers; they
will fail to make their mark; they may, as in many instances of European
inquirers, actually have lost their lives or their liberty through the
religious zeal of those who maintain the traditional system. Thus the
social environment, working through long ages, may have constantly
determined a certain degree of selection of the innate tendencies
congenial to it, and a weeding out of the opposed tendencies; until the
former have predominated in the race[110].
We have here a very important principle which we must constantly bear in
mind—namely, that not only the physical environment, but also the
social environment, may determine the survival of those temperaments and
qualities of mind best fitted to thrive in it, and, by handicapping
those least fitted to it, may gradually bring the mental qualities of
the race into conformity with itself. We shall later see other examples
by which this principle is more clearly illustrated.
We conclude that, while physical environment may act powerfully upon the
minds of individuals, moulding their acquired qualities in the three
ways noticed—namely, influencing the mind through bodily habit, through
the senses, and through the imagination—there is no sufficient evidence
that the acquired qualities so induced ever become innate or racial
characters by direct transmission. In those instances in which the
racial qualities approximate to these direct effects of physical
environment, it may well be because the physical environment has brought
about adaptation of the race by long continued selection of individuals,
or because it has determined peculiarities of social environment, which
in turn have brought about adaptation of the racial qualities by long
continued selection.
CHAPTER XVI
THE RACE-MAKING PERIOD (_continued_)
We considered in our last chapter the principal modes in which physical
environment affects the character of a people—namely, (1) influence on
temperament exerted chiefly through climate acting upon the bodily
functions: (2) influence through the senses, exerting secondary effects
upon the higher mental processes: (3) direct influence on the
imagination. We concluded that these effects become innate in some
degree; though whether they are impressed on the race by direct
inheritance, or by processes of direct or of social selection, or in all
three ways, remains an open question.
We distinguished, besides these direct modes of influence, two indirect
modes by which physical environment affects the mind and character of a
people: (1) by its selective action on individuals apart from its
influence upon their minds: (2) by determining occupations and social
organisation. We may consider them in turn.
It is recognised, as I pointed out above, that the races inhabiting hot
moist countries are commonly indolent, while those of the moderately
cold and moist climates tend to be extremely active and energetic.
This difference is well brought out by Mr Meredith Townsend in an essay
on the charm of Asia for the Asiatics[111]; and he is speaking not of
Asia in general but of Southern Asia. He says Asiatics “will not, under
any provocation, burden themselves with a sustained habit of taking
trouble. You might as well ask lazzaroni to behave like Prussian
officials.” After quoting Thiers’ description of the immense labours of
detailed administration which he supported while minister of State, he
says “No Asiatic will do that.... One half the weakness of every
Oriental government arises from the impossibility of finding men who
will act as M. Thiers did.” These races, bred in the tropics, are in
fact incurable lotus-eaters, their chief desire is for the afternoon
life or, as is commonly said of the Malays throughout the Eastern
Archipelago, they are great leg-swingers, they prefer to undertake no
labour more arduous than sitting still swinging their legs. All this,
though more or less true of the tropical races in general, is
pre-eminently true of those inhabiting regions which are moist as well
as hot, the Malays, the Burmese, the Siamese, the Papuans, the Negroes
of the African jungle regions.
Such peoples have failed to acquire the energy which leads men to
delight in activity for its own sake, not merely because a hot moist
climate inclines directly to indolence, but rather because the prime
necessities of life are to be had almost without labour; the heat
dispenses with the necessity for clothing and shelter, while the hot sun
and the moisture provide an abundance of vegetable food in response to a
minimum of labour. Hence, no man perishes through lack of energy to
secure the prime necessities of life; and there has been no great
weeding out of the indolent by severe conditions of life, such as alone
can produce an innately energetic race, one that loves activity for its
own sake. For the same reason these same peoples also exercise but
little foresight, they are naturally improvident; the abundance of
nature renders it possible to survive and propagate without any prudent
provision for the future.
Contrast with these races the northerly races—in Asia the Japanese,
whose energy and industry we all recognise, and the northern Mongols or
Tartars, who have so often overrun and conquered with fire and sword the
less energetic peoples of the south, or the Goorkhas or Pathans of the
highlands of northern India. But more especially contrast with them the
English people. M. Boutmy rightly asserts that “the taste for and the
habit of effort must be regarded as the most essential attribute, the
profound and spontaneous quality, of the race[112].” It is displayed in
the English love of sport and adventure and travel, especially in such
recreations as mountain climbing, which is pre-eminently an English
sport; also throughout our social life, in the intensity of commercial
and industrial activity, often carried on ardently by men far removed
from any necessity of making money. In our political life, where a vast
amount of effort is constantly expended in achieving comparatively small
results, we always seem to prefer to achieve any reform by the methods
which give scope to and demand the greatest amount of public activity
and effort. It is shewn also in the immense amount of public service
rendered without remuneration, for the mere love of activity and the
exercise of power. It is very striking in English colonies in tropical
lands, and has been no doubt an important factor in our success in
tropical administration and in colonisation.
Boutmy is inclined to attribute to this love of activity, as a secondary
effect, the dislike of the mass of Englishmen for generalisations and
for theoretical construction; for, he says, these are the results
naturally achieved by the reflective mind, whereas the English mind gets
no time for reflection, its attention is perpetually drawn off from
general principles by its tendency to pursue some immediate practical
end. Hence, he says, abstraction is subordinated to practical ends and
does not soar for its own sake. This truth is well illustrated by the
fact that all our English philosophers, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Mill,
Bentham, Spencer, etc., have been practical moralists, and have
conducted their investigations always with an eye to concrete
applications to the conduct of the State or of private life.
Boutmy regards this love of activity, together with foresight and
self-control, as racial qualities engendered by the severity of the
climate, working chiefly by way of natural selection. In the prehistoric
period more especially, when man had little knowledge of means of
protection from climate and hardship such as have been developed by
civilised societies, those individuals who were deficient in these
qualities must have succumbed to the rigours of the climate, leaving
their more energetic fellows to propagate the race.
That there is truth in the view is shown by the fact that the degree to
which the love of activity is developed seems to vary roughly with the
severity of the climate even among the closely allied races of Europe.
As we pass northward from the coast of the Mediterranean, we find the
quality more and more strongly marked; and it is in accordance with this
principle that the dominant power, the leadership in civilisation, has
passed gradually northwards in the historic period. Civilisation first
developed in the sub-tropical regions, in which the abundance of nature
first gave men leisure to devote themselves to things of the mind, to
contemplation and inquiry; while the northern races were still battling
as savages against the inclemency of the climate, were still being
ruthlessly weeded out by the rigorousness of the physical environment,
and so were being adapted to it, that is to say, were being rendered
capable of sustained and vigorous effort. But, as the means of subduing
nature and of protecting himself against nature have been developed by
man, the dominance has passed successively northwards to peoples whose
innate energy and love of activity were more highly developed in
proportion to the severity of the selection exerted upon many preceding
generations.
The severe climate has not been the only cause of this evolution of an
energetic active type. No doubt military selection played its part also.
The Northern races of Europe, more particularly the Nordic, the
fair-haired long-headed race, underwent a prolonged and severe process
of such military group selection, before branches of it settled in our
island; and, among the qualities which must have tended to success and
survival in this process, energy and capacity for prolonged and frequent
effort, especially bodily effort, must have been one of the chief.
Still, even such group selection was probably a secondary result of the
direct climatic selection; for it must have been the love of activity
and enterprise that led these peoples perpetually to wander, and so to
come into conflicts with one another, conflicts in which the more
energetic would in the main survive and the less energetic succumb. In
part also it must have been determined in the third and the most
indirect manner in which physical environment shapes racial
qualities—namely, by determining occupations and modes of life, and
through these the forms of social organisation, both of which then react
upon the racial qualities.
In illustration of this third mode of action of physical conditions, let
us take a striking difference of mental quality between the French and
the English peoples, and inquire how the difference has arisen; a
difference which is recognised by every capable observer who has
compared the two peoples and which has been of immense importance in
shaping the history of the modern world. I mean the greater sociability
of the French and the greater independence of the English, a greater
self-reliance and capacity for individual initiative. The difference
finds expression in every aspect of the national life of the two
peoples. The sociability and sympathetic character of the French, on
which they justly pride themselves[113], is the inverse aspect of their
lack of the characteristic English qualities, independence and
self-reliance. In political life the difference appears in the
centralised organisation of the French nation, every detail of
administration being controlled by the central power through a rigidly
organised hierarchy of officials, in a way that leaves no scope for
initiative and independence in local administrations. Connected with
this is the almost universal desire of educated men to become state
functionaries, parts of the official machinery of administration, and
the consequent excessive growth of this class of persons.
The same quality of the French shows itself in the tendency to prefer
the monarchical rule of any man who shows himself capable of ruling, a
tendency which constantly besets the republican State with a
well-recognised danger. These are not local and temporary
manifestations, but have characterised the French nation throughout the
whole period of its existence. In the feudal period which preceded its
formation, there was considerable local independence; but the feudal
system was due to the dominant influence of Frankish chiefs, of the same
race as our Saxon forefathers, who overran most of France as a ruling
caste, but did not contribute any large element to the population, and
whose blood therefore has been largely swamped. It appears in the
greater violence among the French people of collective mental processes,
those of mobs, assemblies, factions, and groups of all kinds. Each
individual is easily carried away by the mass; there are none to
withstand the wave of contagion and, by so doing, to break and check its
force.
In England on the other hand political activity has always been
characterised by extreme jealousy of the central power, and by the
tendency to achieve everything possible by local action and voluntary
private effort. All reforms are initiated from the periphery, instead of
from the centre as in France. Great institutions, the universities,
schools, colleges, hospitals, railways, canals, docks, insurance
companies, even water supplies and telephones and many other things
which, it would seem, should naturally and properly be undertaken by the
State, or other official public body, have been generally set on foot
and worked by individuals or private associations of individuals. Even
vast colonial empires—India, Rhodesia, Canada, Sarawak, Nigeria, North
Borneo—have been in the main acquired through the enterprise and efforts
of individuals or associations of individuals; the State only
intervening when the main work has been accomplished.
In their religion, too, the English are markedly individualistic; our
numerous dissenting bodies have mostly dispensed with the centralised
official hierarchy which in Roman Catholic countries mediates between
God and man, and have insisted upon a direct communion with God; and we
have many little churches each of which governs itself in absolute
independence of every other. In the family relations the same difference
appears very strongly. The French family regards itself, and is
regarded by law, as a community which holds its goods in common; each
child has his legal claim upon his share, relies upon his family for
support in his struggle with the world, and is encouraged by his parents
to do so. In the English family, on the other hand, the father is a
supreme despot, who disposes of his property as he wills. The children
are not encouraged to look for further support, when once they become
adult, but are taught that they must go out into the world to seek their
fortunes unaided. At an early age, the English boy is usually thrust out
of the family into the life of a school in which, by his own efforts, he
must find and keep his position among his fellows; and he lives a life
which, compared with that of the French boy, is one of freedom and
independence. In the distribution of the people on the land we see the
same difference of mental qualities revealed. The French peasants are
for the most part congregated sociably in villages and small towns; the
English farmer builds his homestead apart upon his own domain. And this
determines one of the most striking differences in the aspect of the
rural districts of both countries. In the towns also the same tendencies
are clearly shown; in the separate little homes of the English and in
the large houses of the French shared by several families.
It is in the expansion in the world of the two peoples that the effects
of this difference are most clearly expressed and assume the greatest
importance. The English race has populated a vast proportion of the
surface of the world, and rules over one-fifth of the total population.
Whereas the French people, who have conquered large areas, have never
succeeded in permanently colonising any considerable portion of their
conquests and they have failed to maintain their domination in many
regions where they have for a time established it. In every
extra-European region where they have come into conflict with the
English race they have been worsted.
The secret of the difference in the expansion of the two peoples is the
difference of innate mental quality that we are considering, enhanced by
the differences of custom and of political and family organisation
engendered by it. For, like all other innate tendencies, the two to
which we are referring obtain accentuated expression through moulding
customs, institutions and social organisation in ways which foster in
successive generations just those tendencies of which these institutions
are themselves the traditional outcome and expression. Thus, it is the
individualistic nature of the political, religious, and family
organisation of the English people which, having been engendered by
innate independence of character and having in turn accentuated it in
each generation, has enabled the people to achieve its marvels of
colonisation and tropical administration. We see these tendencies
playing a predominant part in the history of every British colony.
The difference was well brought out by Volney, a French observer of the
French and English colonists in the early days of the settlement of
North America. He wrote “The French colonist deliberates with his wife
upon everything that he proposes to do; often the plans fall to the
ground through lack of agreement.” “To visit one’s neighbours, to chat
with them, is for the French an habitual need so imperious that on all
the frontier of Louisiana and Canada you will not find a single French
colonist established beyond sight of his neighbour’s home.” “On the
other hand, the English colonist, slow and taciturn, passes the whole
day continuously at work; at breakfast he coldly gives his orders to his
wife; ... and goes forth to labour.... If he finds an opportunity to
sell his farm at a profit, he does so and goes ten or twenty leagues
further into the wilderness to make himself a new home[114].”
It is the French authors themselves who have most insisted upon this
mental difference between the French and the English, which seems to be
determining a great difference in the destinies of the two peoples; and
most of them, while justly valuing the sympathetic and sociable quality
of the French mind, deeply regret its lack of the English
independence[115]. There has been no lack of speculation and inquiry as
to the origin and causes of this supremely important difference. It is
perhaps worth while to glance at some of these attempts.
The most superficial attempt at explanation is to say that the political
and social institutions of the French people foster in each individual
the social tendencies in question, while the English institutions
develop their opposites. It is true, but it obviously is not the
explanation of the difference; for that we must go further back, in
order to find the origin of these differences of institution.
An explanation a little less superficial is that the domination of the
first Napoleon and the strong centralised system of administration
established by him accounts for the difference. But the permanence, if
not the very possibility, of that system, and the rise to power of
Napoleon himself, were but symptoms of this deep-lying tendency of the
French mind.
Buckle, recognising the profound difference which we are considering,
summed it up in the phrases ‘the dominance of the protective spirit in
France’ and of ‘the spirit of independence in England,’ He attributed
the former partly to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in
France with its centralised authoritative system, partly to the long
prevalence of the feudal system of social organisation, under which
every man was made to feel his personal dependence upon the despotic
power of an independent noble and was accustomed to look to him for all
initiative and guidance—was trained to obey a despot, whose absolute
jurisdiction and whose title to his lands and rights was unchallenged.
The system, he said, culminated in the despotism of Louis XIV, by the
subjection of the previously independent nobles to the king, and was
revived in a different form, immediately after the great revolution, by
Napoleon.
The dominance of the spirit of independence among the English people he
would explain also from the character of their political institutions
during recent centuries. After recounting the political history of
England from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and after showing
how the people during that period repeatedly succeeded in asserting its
liberties against the encroachments of the kings, he wrote—“In England
the course of affairs, which I have endeavoured to trace since the
sixteenth century, had diffused among the people a knowledge of their
own resources and a skill and independence in the use of them, imperfect
indeed, but still far superior to that possessed by any other of the
great European countries,” But he was not wholly satisfied with this
explanation; he added—“Besides this, other circumstances, which will be
hereafter related, had, as early as the eleventh century, begun to
affect our national character and had assisted in imparting to it that
sturdy boldness, and at the same time, those habits of foresight, and of
cautious reserve, to which the English mind owes its leading
peculiarities.”
When we turn to his account of the primary cause of English
independence[116], we find that it was, in his view, that the feudal
system was established by William the Conqueror in a form different from
that obtaining on the continent. The nobles received their lands
directly from the king as grants, and all land owners were made to
acknowledge their direct obligation to him. The nobles were in
consequence too weak to set up their own power against that of the
king, and therefore they called the people to their aid in resisting the
power of the king; hence, the people early acquired rights and
privileges and the habit of organised resistance to the central
authority. “The English aristocracy, being thus forced by their own
weakness, to rely on the people, it naturally followed that the people
imbibed that tone of independence and that lofty bearing, of which our
civil and political institutions are the consequence, rather than the
cause. It is to this, and not to any fanciful peculiarity of race, that
we owe the sturdy and enterprising spirit for which the inhabitants of
this island have long been remarkable.”
“The practice of subinfeudation, became in France almost universal.” The
great lords subgranted parts of their lands to lesser lords, and these
again to others, and so on—“thus forming a long chain of dependence,
and, as it were, organising submission into a system.” In this country,
on the other hand, the practice was actively checked. “The result was
that by the fourteenth century the liberties of Englishmen were
secured,” and the spirit of independence had become a part of the
national character; that is to say, Buckle maintained that three
centuries of a different form of the feudal system sufficed to produce
this profound difference between the French and English peoples.
Boutmy also fully recognises the important difference between the innate
qualities of the French and English; and he also would explain it as the
effect of political institutions since the middle ages, but on lines
somewhat different from Buckle’s—namely, that England was early ruled by
a king invested with great power, and inclined to all the excesses of
arbitrary rule. Hence the first need of the people was to fortify
themselves against his power. All the law of England carries the imprint
of this fear and this defiance. The parliament has been set up against
the crown, the judges against parliament, and the jury against the power
of the judges; and so, ever since the conquest, individuals have been
accustomed to think, and to assert, that their persons, their purse, and
their homes are inviolable; and that the State is an enemy whose
encroachments must be resisted. This way of thinking has by long usage
become instinctive, increasing from generation to generation; until the
horror of servitude has become rooted in the Englishman’s temperament,
and the desire of independence has become a native and primary passion.
Both Buckle and Boutmy agree, then, that the English love of liberty is
due to England having been conquered and ruled by a powerful king, and
that in France the opposite effect is to be attributed to the same
cause—namely, the influence of despotic rulers. Surely this is to
reverse cause and effect. If the English people had not already
possessed the sturdy spirit of independence when they were conquered by
the Norman, his strong centralised rule would only have rendered them
still less independent and would have fostered the spirit of protection,
as Buckle calls it. If the national characters had been reversed in this
respect, how easy it would have been to show that the dependence of the
English character was due to the strong rule of a foreign despot,
William of Normandy, while the French independence was due to the
existence in feudal times of many centres of independent power, the
nobles, each capable of resisting the central authority! It was just
because this spirit was theirs already that the English people resisted
their kings and were able to secure their liberties by setting up
institutions congenial to their nature, institutions and customs which
have fostered in each individual and each generation the spirit of
independence inherited as a racial quality, and which possibly, though
by no means certainly, have further intensified the racial peculiarity.
Another cause for the difference of institutions is assigned by Sir
Henry Maine. He pointed to the great influence of Roman law upon French
institutions; he showed how the French lawyers, brought up in the school
of Roman law and holding the Roman Empire as the ideal of a political
organisation, threw all their weight upon the side of the monarchy, and
in favour of centralised administration. More, perhaps, is due to this
influence than to the causes assigned by Buckle and Boutmy; but no one
of these alleged causes, nor all of them combined, can be accepted as
adequate to explain the origin of the difference of national characters.
These authors fail also to make clear how the political institutions can
have modified character. Boutmy frankly assumes use-inheritance, which,
as I have said, is, in the present state of science, an unwarrantable
assumption.
That these qualities of the French and English peoples are innate racial
qualities, evolved during the race-making or prehistoric period, is
proved not only by the inadequacy of any assignable causes operating
during the historic period, but also by the fact that similar qualities
are described by the earliest historians as characterising the
ancestors, or the principal ancestral stocks, of the two peoples, when
they first appear in history. It is proved also by the fact that other
branches of the Nordic race have displayed similar qualities, more
especially the Dutch, and also the Normans, who, though they have long
formed part of the French State in the political sense, and have
suffered most of the political influences assigned as causes of the
spirit of protection, not only displayed the spirit of independence in
the highest degree ten centuries ago, but are admitted to be still
distinguished from the bulk of the French people by the greater
individualism of their character, just as they are still markedly
different in physical traits. They offer one of the best examples of
fixity of the physical characters of a race. No one can travel in
Normandy without being struck by the very marked and distinctive
physical type, which, according to all accounts, is that of the Norman
who came over to England with the Conqueror; and there is every reason
to believe that the mental qualities of the race have been equally fixed
and enduring.
Julius Caesar, Tacitus, and other early historians have described for us
the leading qualities of the Gauls on the one hand and of the Teutons on
the other. Fouillée in his _Psychology of the French People_ has brought
together the evidence of these early historians on the point; it shows
that the Gauls and the Teutons were distinguished very strongly by the
same differences which obtain between the French and English peoples at
the present time, especially the difference in respect of independence
and initiative, the origin of which we are seeking to explain. The Gauls
were eminently sociable people, sympathetic, emotional, demonstrative,
vivacious, very given to oratory and discussion, vain and moved by the
desire of glory, capable of great gallantry, but not of persevering
effort in face of difficulties, easily elated, easily cast down. And,
what from our point of view is especially important, they were readily
led by the chiefs, to whom they were attached by the bonds of personal
loyalty; and they were constantly banding themselves together in large
groups, under such leaders as attained popularity by their superior
qualities; and, again, they were dominated by the priestly caste, the
Druids. The Gauls even had those family institutions which characterise
the modern French and which have been held to be the expression of their
recently acquired qualities and traditions; namely, the family had the
character of a community in which the wife had equal rights with the
husband, and the children were regarded also as members of the community
having their equal claims upon the family property. And society was
bound together by a system of patrons and clients, a system of personal
dependence.
On the other hand, the Teutonic people, as described by the same ancient
authorities, displayed a decided individualism in virtue of which their
social organisation was more rudimentary. The father was supreme in the
family, and his power and property descended to his eldest son. They
were a more phlegmatic people, but of great energy and persistence.
Unlike the Gauls, they were dominated by no priestly caste. The
religious rites were conducted by the elder men.
The Gauls were a mixed people of whom the minority, constituting the
nobility, were of the tall, fair, long-headed Nordic race, while the
majority, the mass of the common people, were of the short, dark,
round-headed race. And these, as the numerous observations of the
anthropologists show, constitute to-day the bulk of the population,
except in Normandy and the extreme north-east of France.
The Teutons or Germans of Caesar and Tacitus, on the other hand, were of
the fair Nordic race; and the Anglo-Saxons who overran Britain, together
with the Danes and Normans, who, with the Saxons, formed the principal
ancestral stock of the English, were of this same Nordic race, or
Northmen, as we may call them.
Now, it might seem useless to attempt to arrive at any conclusions as to
the influences that shaped these races in prehistoric times. But an
attempt has been made by one of the schools of French sociologists,
which, in spite of its speculative character, seems to be worthy of
attention. This is the school of ‘La Science Sociale,’ founded seventy
years ago by Fredericq le Play and more recently led by Ed. Demolins and
H. de Tourville. Aided by a number of ardent disciples, they have made a
special study of the influence of physical environment in determining
occupations and social organisation, and in moulding indirectly through
these the mental qualities of peoples. That is their great principle.
They rightly, I think, insist upon the relatively small importance of
political institutions in moulding a people, regarding them as secondary
results of the factors which, determining the private activities of men
and women at every moment of their lives from the cradle to the grave,
exert a far greater and more intimate influence upon their minds. In two
fascinating volumes[117] Demolins has summed up the principal results of
this school and attempted to trace the conditions that have determined
the differentiation of all the principal races of the earth; and de
Tourville has applied the same principles and traced their effects in
European history[118].
It is a curious fact that the work of the Le Play school is almost
entirely ignored by the other French sociologists and anthropologists.
It is seldom referred to by them, and outside France also it has not
received the attention it deserves. Much of it is of the nature of
brilliant speculation, and is regarded no doubt as unsound by many more
sober minds. Yet, when we attempt to understand the evolution of man in
the prehistoric period, brilliant speculation becomes a necessary
supplement to the work of measuring skulls and digging up ruins, to
which some less ingenious workers confine themselves. And, of all the
conclusions of the Le Play school, their account of the origin of the
distinctive characters of the Northmen is one of the most striking and
satisfactory; while their account of the origins of the Gauls and of
their peculiar social organisation and well marked mental traits is also
among their best work.
CHAPTER XVII
THE RACE-MAKING PERIOD (_continued_)
THE INFLUENCE OF OCCUPATIONS AND OF RACE-CROSSING
In the foregoing chapter we noticed certain well-marked and generally
recognised differences of national character presented by the French and
the English peoples—namely, the greater independence of the English, the
greater sociability of the French people; and we noted how these
differences of national character show themselves throughout the
institutions of the two nations, and how they have played a great part
in determining the difference of their histories; especially, we saw,
how they are of prime importance, when we seek to account for the
greater expansion of the English people throughout the world.
We then noticed several attempts that have been made, by Buckle, Boutmy,
Maine and others, to account for these differences as results of
differences of political institutions during the last thousand years. We
found that all these attempts fail, and that the differences of
political institutions, which these authors have regarded as the causes
of the differences of national character, are really the expressions of
a fundamental racial difference; that, in short, these authors have
inverted the true causal relation. I then drew attention to the work of
the school of Le Play and especially to its fundamental
principle—namely, that, while peoples are in a state of primitive or
lowly culture, their geographical or physical environment determines
their occupations and, through their occupations, their social
organisations, especially their domestic organisation; and that
particular modes of occupation and of social organisation of a primitive
people, persisting through many generations, mould the innate qualities
and form the racial character.
I said that two brilliant workers of the school—namely, Demolins and de
Tourville—had applied this principle to account for those differences
between the national characters of the French and English peoples which
we were considering. I have now to reproduce their account in as
condensed a form as possible.
Demolins claims to show that the short dark round-headed people, who
formed the bulk of the Gauls and also of the population of modern
France, came, in prehistoric times, from the Eurasian steppe region,
reaching France by way of the valley of the Danube, a long narrow
lowland region confined on the north by the Carpathians and mountains of
Bohemia, on the south by the Balkans and Swiss Alps. He supposes that,
for long ages, they had lived as pastoral nomads on the steppes. By
examining the nomads who still lead the pastoral life on the steppes, he
shows the kind of social organisation to which this pastoral life
inevitably gives rise and under which they lived; and he traces the
effects which such occupation and such social organisation produce on
the mental qualities of a people.
The system is the patriarchal system _par excellence_. It is something
very different from the Roman system characterised by the _patria
potestas_, which the writings of Sir H. Maine have perhaps tended to
confuse with the true patriarchal system. The patriarchal system of the
pastoral nomads is essentially a communal system, under which all the
brothers, sons, and grandsons of the patriarch form, with their
families, a community which holds all the property, consisting of flocks
and herds, in common; each member having his claim to his share of the
produce, each doing his share of the common labour, and each having a
voice in the regulation of the affairs of the family. Such a system
represses individualism; there is no individual property, there are no
individual rights, duties, or responsibilities; no scope for individual
initiative; the individual is swallowed up in the community; superior
energy or enterprise bring no superior rewards, but rather tend to
social disorganisation and to the detriment of the individual who
displays them. Further, the work of looking after the herds of cattle is
easy and delightful, calling for no sustained exertion; and the herds
provide every necessary article of food, clothing, and shelter. Beyond
the family group there exists no political organisation; for the group
is self-supporting and independent, it has no need of relations with
other groups, and each group lives far apart from others, wandering in
some ill-defined region of the immense plain.
The peculiarities of this social organisation and of this mode of life
are clearly created by the physical environment, by the boundless grassy
plains, which enable each family group to maintain a large troup of
cattle, chiefly horses. At the same time, these conditions render
necessary the co-operation of all the members of the family in the
common work of tending the cattle; while the necessity of continually
moving on to fresh pasture prevents the growth of any fixed forms of
property and of any more elaborate social organisation.
It is an extremely stable and persistent mode of life and of social
organisation. So long as the geographical conditions remain unchanged,
it is difficult to see how any change would take place in it, how any
progress towards civilisation could begin. And, as a matter of fact, the
people who have remained in these regions continue to lead just the same
patriarchal, pastoral, nomadic life. Long ages of this mode of life may
well put upon a people the stamp of sociability and communism and kill
out individualism and individual initiative! Demolins points out in a
very interesting way how these effects of the patriarchal system of the
pastoral nomads are displayed most clearly still by the population of
southern Russia, who, of all the settled European peoples descended from
such pastoral nomads, have suffered fewest disturbing influences; how
still the individual is subordinated to the community, to the _mir_, by
which all private life and industrial activity is directed and which is
the owner of the principal property, namely the land; and how, in
consequence, the people remain devoid of all individual initiative and
enterprise.
The Celts arriving in Gaul retained these qualities and something of the
patriarchal organisation, although they were no longer simply pastoral
nomads; for, in the course of their migrations, they had been forced to
take up agriculture and the rearing of other domestic animals,
especially the pig, through lack of sufficient open steppe land. While
in this disorganised condition in Gaul, they were overrun by tribes of
the Nordic race, who established themselves as a conquering nobility,
superimposing upon the rudimentary political organisation of the Celts a
loose military organisation of clans; each clan was led by a popular
warrior who attached to himself by his personal qualities as large as
possible a number of clients or clansmen, acquiring rights over their
land and property, in return for the patronage and protection he offered
them. These nobles with their blood relatives were the tall fair-haired
Gauls described by Caesar. The Celts lent themselves readily to this
system based on personal loyalty and leadership, owing to their lack of
independence of character engendered by long ages of the patriarchal
communal régime. And the new social organisation fostered and developed
still more through many generations the spirit of dependence, the
tendency to look for authoritative guidance and control to some
recognised centre of power.
Under the two circumstances, the long régime of patriarchal communism
and the subsequent prevalence for many generations of the clan system,
we may see, according to Demolins, the causes of those deep-seated
tendencies of the French nation (summed up by Buckle in the phrase the
spirit of protection) which throughout their history have played so
large a part in shaping the destinies of the people, and which are still
the source of grave anxiety to many patriotic Frenchmen.
It is interesting to note that among the Celtic populations of the
British Isles the same features have been clearly displayed. We see
among them the clan-system with its dual ownership of the soil, which
has been perpetuated in Ireland to the present day and has received more
formal and legal recognition from the British government in its recent
legislation. We see the strong clannish spirit and relative lack of
independence. These qualities are clearly shown by the Celtic Irish,
even when they have been compelled by necessity to emigrate to America.
There they are not found to be pioneers on the frontiers of
civilisation, but rather remain herded together in clannish communities
in the cities of the eastern states, where they create such powerful
unofficial associations as ‘Tammany Hall.’