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