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