CHAPTER XII
IDEAS IN NATIONAL LIFE
We have seen that the idea of the nation can and does, in virtue of the formation of the sentiment of devotion to it, lead men to choose and decide and act for the sake of the nation; they desire the welfare and the good of the nation as a whole, they value its material prosperity and its reputation in the eyes of other nations; and, in so far as the decisions and actions of a nation proceed from this motive, co-operating with and controlling other motives in the minds of its members, such decision and action are the expressions of true collective volition.
It is truly volition because it conforms to the true type of volition. Individual volition can only be marked off from every impulsive action and every lower form of effort, by the fact that in true volition, among all the impulses or motives that may impel a man to action or decision, the dominant rôle is played by a motive that springs from his self-regarding sentiment. This motive is a desire to achieve a particular end, which, viewed as the achievement of the self, brings him satisfaction, because the thought of himself achieving this end is in harmony with the ideal of the self which he has gradually built up and has learnt to desire to realize under the influence of his social setting. The same is true of national volition.
And it is collective volition in so far as the deliberations by which the decision of the nation has been reached have been effected through those formally and informally organised relations and channels of communication and by means of all the various modes of interaction of persons by which public opinion is formed and in which it is guided and controlled by the living traditions of the nation.
That this is the true nature of national volition may be more clearly realized on considering some instances of national action which could not properly be called the expression of the will of the Nation. A tariff might be adopted because a large number of men desired it, each in order that he himself might get rich more quickly; and, even though a large majority, or even all men, desired it, each for his private end, it would not be the expression of the national will, it would not be due to collective volition; it would be the expression of the will of all. Nor would it be an expression of the national will, even if each believed that, not only he, but also all his fellows would be enriched, and if he desired it for that reason also; that would be an expression of the will of all for the good of all. Only if and in so far as the decision was reached through the influence of those who desired it, because it seemed to them to be for the good of the whole nation, would it be the expression of the will of the nation.
And the difference would be not merely a difference of motive; the difference might be very important in respect both of the deliberative processes by which the decision was reached and also in respect of its ultimate consequences. For the will of all for the good of all would have reference only to the immediate future; whereas the truly national will would be influenced not only by consideration of the good of all existing citizens, but, in an even greater degree, by the thought of the continued welfare of the whole nation, in the remote future.
Again, suppose that, on the occasion of an insult or injury to the nation (I remind the reader of the incident in the North Sea when the Russian fleet fired on our fishing boats), a wave of anger against the offending nation sweeps over the whole country and that this outburst of popular fury plunges the nation into war. That would be collective mental process, but not volition; it would be action on the plane of impulse or desire, unregulated by reflection upon the end proposed in relation to the welfare of the nation and by the motives to action that are stirred by such reflection.
Again, suppose a nation of which every member was patriotic, and suppose that some proposed national action were pondered upon by each man apart in his own chamber, without consultation and discussion with his fellows in public and private. Then, though the decision would be true volition, in so far as it was determined by each man’s desire for the national welfare, it yet would not be collective or national volition; because not reached by collective deliberation.
We have seen that the idea of the nation, present to the minds of the mass of its members, is an essential condition of the nation’s existence in any true sense of the word nation; that the idea alone as an intellectual apprehension cannot exert any large influence; that it determines judgment and action only in virtue of the sentiment which grows up about this object—a sentiment which is transmitted and fostered from generation to generation, just because it renders the nation an object of value. The consideration should be obvious enough; but it has commonly been ignored by philosophers of the intellectualist school. They treat the individual mind as a system of ideas; they ignore the fact that it has a conative side which has its own organisation, partially distinct from, though not independent of, the intellectual side; and consequently they ignore equally the fact that the national mind has its conative organisation.
Imagine a people in whom anti-nationalism (in the form of cosmopolitanism, syndicalism or philosophic anarchism) had spread, until this attitude towards the nation-state as such had become adopted by half its members, while the other half remained patriotic. Then there would be acute conflict and discussion, and the idea of the nation would be vividly present to all minds; but the nature of the sentiment attached to it would be different and opposite in the two halves; one of attachment and devotion in the one half; of dislike, aversion, or at least indifference (i.e. lack of sentiment) in the other half. And the efforts of the one half to maintain the nation as a unit would be antagonised and perhaps rendered nugatory by the indifference or opposition of the other half, who would always seek to break down national boundaries and would refuse co-operation in any national action, and who would league themselves with bodies of similar interests and anti-national tendencies in other countries. Then, even though all might be well-meaning people desiring the good of mankind, the nation would be very greatly weakened and probably would soon cease to exist as such.
The illustration shews the importance of the distinction which Rousseau did not draw in his discussion of the general will—namely, the distinction between the good of all and the good of the whole, i.e. of the nation as such. It might be argued that the distinction is purely verbal; it might be said that, if you secure the good of all, you thereby ipso facto secure the good of the whole, because the whole consists of the sum of existing individuals; and that this is obvious, because, if you take them away, no whole remains. But to argue thus is to ignore the fact on which we have already insisted—namely, that the whole is much more than the sum of the existing units, because it has an indefinitely long future before it and a part to play, through indefinitely long periods of time, as a factor in the general welfare and progress of mankind.
So much greater is the whole than the sum of its existing parts, that it might well seem right to sacrifice the welfare and happiness of one or two or more generations, and even the lives of the majority of the citizens, if that were necessary to the preservation and future welfare of the whole nation as such. This is no merely theoretical distinction, it is one of the highest practical importance, which we may illustrate in two ways.
A whole nation may be confronted with the alternative, may be forced to choose between the good of all and the good of the whole. Such a choice was, it may be said without exaggeration, suddenly presented to the Belgian people, and only less acutely to ourselves and to Italy, by the recent European conflagration; and in each case the good of the whole has been preferred. Is it not probable and obvious that, if each or all of these peoples had consented to the domination of Germany, the material welfare of all their existing citizens might well have been increased, rather than diminished, and that their choice has involved not only the loss of life of large numbers of their citizens and great sufferings for nearly all the others, but also enormous sacrifice of material prosperity, in order that the whole may survive and eventually prosper as a nation working out its national destiny free from external domination? There are, or were, those who say that they would just as soon live under German rule, because they would be governed at least as well and perhaps better than by their own government hitherto; and there is perhaps nothing intrinsically bad or wrong in this attitude; the question of its rightness or wrongness turns wholly on the valuation of nationality. It is easier to appreciate this plea on behalf of another people than our own. One may hear it said even now that, after all, it would have been better for Belgium that she should have entered into the group of Germanic powers in some sort of federal system or Customs union; that, in general, it is ridiculous that the small states should claim sovereign powers and pretend to have their own foreign policy and so forth; that they are struggling against the inevitable, against a universal and necessary tendency for the absorption of the smaller states by the larger.
We may illustrate the difference between regard for the good of all members of the nation and of the nation itself in another way—namely, by reference to socialism, the principle which would abolish inequalities of wealth and opportunity, as far as possible, by abolishing or greatly restricting the rights of private property and capital, especially the right of inheritance. There can, I think, be little doubt that the adoption of socialism in this sense by almost any modern nation would increase the well being and happiness of its members very decidedly on the whole for the present generation and possibly for some generations to come. It is in respect of the continued welfare of the whole and of its perpetuation as an evolving and progressing organism that the effects seem likely to be decidedly bad. The socialists are in the main those who fix their desire and attention on the good of all; hence they are for the most part inclined to set a low value on nationality, even while they demand a vast extension of the functions of the State, conceived as an organised system of administration. Those, on the other hand, who repudiate socialism, not merely because they belong to the class of ‘Haves,’ must seek their justification in the consideration of the probable effects of such a change on the welfare of the nation conceived as an organism whose value far transcends the lives of the present generation.
When, then, we attribute to the idea of the nation or to the national consciousness this all-important creative, constitutive, and conservative function, we must be clear that the idea is not an intellectual conception merely, but implies an enduring emotional conative attitude which is the sentiment of devotion to the nation; and, further, we must remember that the nation means not simply all existing individuals, the mere momentary embodiment of the nation, but something that is far greater, because it includes all the potentialities embodied in the existing persons and organisation.
It is the presence and operation in the national mind of the idea of the nation in the extended sense just indicated that gives to national decisions and actions the character of truly collective volitions; they approach this type more nearly, the more the idea is rich in meaning and adequate or true, and the more widely it is spread, and the more powerful and widely spread is the sentiment which attaches value to the nation and sways men to decision and action for the sake of the whole, determining the issue among all other conflicting motives.
And it is the working of the national spirit and the acceptance of and devotion to the national organisation which render the submission of the minority to the means chosen by the majority a voluntary submission; for it is of the essence of that organisation that, while all accept and will the same most general end, namely the welfare of the whole, the choice of means must be determined by the judgment of the majority, formed and expressed as a collective judgment and opinion by way of all the many channels of reciprocal influence that the national organisation, both formal and informal, provides. In so far as each man holds this attitude, esteeming the nation and accepting loyally its constitution or organisation, the decision determined by even a bare majority vote of parliament becomes the expression of the national will; and the co-operation in carrying it out of those who did not judge the method to be wise, and who therefore voted against it, yet becomes a truly voluntary co-operation, in so far as they accept the established organisation.
The point may be illustrated by the instance of a nation going to war. A large minority may be against war, for reasons which to them may seem to be of the highest kind; it may be that they judge the nation to be morally in the wrong in the matter in dispute, or very questionably in the right, as many Englishmen did during the Boer War; and yet, if, by the accepted organised channels of national deliberation and decision, war has been declared, then, although it was their duty to do what they could to make their opinion prevail before the decision was reached, there is no moral inconsistency in their supporting the war measures with all their strength. It is in fact implied in their loyalty, if they are loyal and patriotic, that they shall yield their individual opinion to the expression of the national will and shall accept the means chosen to the common end. That is the truth implied in the phrase—My country right or wrong. Of course, this phrase may be taken in a reprehensible sense, as meaning that any opportunity of forwarding the immediate interests of one’s country must be taken, regardless of the interests of other communities and of the obligations of common honesty and humanity upon which all human welfare depends.
In the same way, a man might disapprove of a particular tax, say on liquor, or of obligatory military service; and yet he may accept the national will and serve faithfully as a soldier, without inconsistency, and without ceasing to be a free agent truly willing the acts imposed by his position in the whole organisation; just as during the late war many priests served as soldiers in the French army. Or, to take an extreme instance, a man who has broken the law and even incurred the death penalty may be truly said to undergo his punishment of imprisonment or death as a morally free agent, if he is loyal to his country and its institutions, accepting the penalty, while yet believing his action to be right. Such perfect loyalty to the nation is of course rare; and in all actual nations men have progressed towards it in very different degrees. Most existing nations have emerged from preceding despotisms by the repeated widening of the sphere of freedom, as the growth of loyalty in strength and extension rendered such freedom consistent with the survival of the State and its administrative functions.
Thus a people progresses from the status of an organism, in which the parts are subordinated to the whole without choice or free volition on their part, or even against their wills, towards the ideal of a Nation-state, an organic whole which is founded wholly upon voluntary contract between each member and the whole, and in which the distinction between the State and the nation becomes gradually overcome and replaced by identity. For, as national self-consciousness develops and each man conceives more fully and clearly the whole nation and his place and function in it, and grows in loyalty to the nation, he ceases to obey the laws merely because he is constrained by the authority and force of the State. An increasing proportion of citizens obey the law and render due services voluntarily, because they perceive that, in so doing, they are contributing towards the good of the whole which they value highly; in so far as they act in this spirit, the actions and restraints prescribed by law become their voluntary actions and restraints.
Thus the theory that society is founded upon a Social Contract, which, if taken as a description of the historical process of genesis, is false, is true, if accepted as the constitutive principle of the ideal State towards which progressive nations are tending.
And, as the organisation of a nation becomes less dependent upon outer authority and upon mere custom and the unreasoning acceptance of tradition, and more and more upon free consent and voluntary contract, the nation does not cease to be an organism; it retains that formal and informal organisation which has developed in large part without the deliberate guidance of the collective will and which is essential to its collective life; the national mind, as it grows in force and extension and understanding of its own organisation, accepts those features which it finds good, and gradually modifies those which appear less good in the light of its increasing self knowledge; and so it tends more and more to become a contractual organism, which, as Fouillée has insisted, is the highest type of society.
It should be noticed that this ideal of the contractual organism synthesises the two great doctrines or theories of society which have generally been regarded as irreconcilable alternatives: the doctrine of society as an organism, and that of society as founded upon reason and free will. They have been treated as opposed and irreconcilable doctrines, because those who regarded society as an organism, taking the standpoint of natural science, have laid stress upon its evolution by biological accidents and by the interaction and conflict of many blind impulses and purely individual volitions, in which collective volition, governed by an ideal of the form to be achieved, had no part. While, on the other hand, the idealist philosophers, describing society or the nation as wholly the work of reason and free will, have been guilty of the intellectualist fallacy of regarding man as a purely rational being; they have ignored the fact that all men, even the most intellectual, are largely swayed and moulded by processes of suggestion, imitation, sympathy, and instinctive impulse, in quite non-rational ways; and they have ignored still more completely the fact that the operation of these non-rational processes continues to be not only of immense influence but also inevitable and necessary to the maintenance of that organic unity of society upon which as a basis the contract-unity is superimposed as a bond of a higher, more rational and more spiritual quality.
The former doctrine logically tends to the paralysis of social effort and to the adoption of extreme individualism, to the doctrine of each man for himself, and of laissez faire, doctrines such as those of Herbert Spencer. The other, the idealist theory of the state as being founded and formed by reason, tends equally logically towards extreme State socialism; because its overweening belief in reason leads it to ignore the large and necessary basis of subrational organisation and operation.
Only a synthesis of the two in the doctrine of the contractual organism can reconcile them and give us the ideal of a nation in which the maximum and perfection of organisation shall be combined with the maximum of liberty, because in it each individual will be aware of the whole and his place and functions in it, and will voluntarily accept that place and perform those functions.
The highest, most perfectly organised and effective nation is, then, not that in which the individuals are disposed of, their actions completely controlled, and their wills suppressed by the power of the State. It is, rather, one in which the self-consciousness and initiative and volition of individuals, personality in short, is developed to the highest degree, and in which the minds and wills of the members work harmoniously together under the guidance and pressure of the idea of the nation, rendered in the highest degree explicit and full and accurate.
The Value Of Nationality
At the present time, while the mass of men continue to accept the duty of patriotism unquestioningly, and historians for the most part are content to describe with some astonishment the immense development of nationalism in the past century, many voices are loudly raised for and against nationality. The great mass of men no doubt are swept away in the flood of patriotic feeling. But the war has also intensified the antipathy, and given increased force to the arguments, of those who decry nationality and deprecate patriotism—for these are but two different modes of expressing the same attitude.
There are two principal classes of the anti-nationalists. First, the philosophic anarchists, who would abolish all states and governments, as unnecessary evils, men like Kropotkin and Tolstoi. Secondly, the cosmopolitans, who, while believing in the necessity of government and even demanding more centralised administration, would yet abolish all national boundaries as far as possible, boundaries of geography, of language, race and sentiment, and all national governments, and would aim at the establishment of one great world state.
Though the aims of these two parties are so widely different, they use much the same arguments against nationalism. According to the anti-nationalist view, nationalism and the patriotism in which it is founded are a kind of disease of human nature, which, owing to the unfortunate fact that mankind has retained the gregarious instinct of his animal ancestors, inevitably breaks out as soon as any community begins to come into free contact and rivalry with other communities, and which tends to grow in force in a purely instinctive and irrational manner the more these contacts and rivalries increase.
The liability to patriotism is thus regarded as closely comparable with mankind’s unfortunate liability to drunkenness, to feel the fascination of strong liquor—as merely a natural and inevitable result or by-product of an unfortunate flaw in human nature—a tendency which will have to be sternly repressed and, if possible, eradicated, before men can hope to live in peace and tolerable security and to develop their higher capacities.
The fact that patriotism of some degree and form is universally displayed, and that it breaks out everywhere into heat and flame when certain conditions are realized, does not for them in any degree justify it; and it should not, they hold, reconcile us to its continued existence; they draw an indictment not merely against a whole people, but against the whole human race. They attack nationalism, firstly, by describing what in their opinion patriotism is and whence it comes; secondly, by describing what they believe to be the natural consequences and effects of nationalism.
The most common mode of attack is to identify patriotism with jingoism; they speak of “jelly-bellied flag-flappers” of flag-wagging and mafficking; they assert that the essence of patriotism is hatred and all uncharitableness towards other countries and their citizens.[93]
Less virulent is the criticism of those who, looking coldly upon patriotism, describe it as the mere blind expression of the working of the gregarious instinct among us, and as something therefore quite irrational, which must and will tend to disappear, as men become more enlightened and are guided more by reason and less by instinct.[94]
Again, it is said that patriotism is a form of selfishness and therefore bad; that it is a limitation of our sympathies, a principle of injustice; that it stands in the way of the realisation of universal justice, of the universal brotherhood of man, which is the ideal we obviously must accept and aim at. Or in other words, and this is the main indictment, it is alleged that patriotism and nationalism inevitably tend to produce war, that they keep the rival nations perpetually arming for possible wars and actually in commercial and economic war, if not at real war. And of course the evils of warfare and of such perpetual preparation for war are great and obvious enough in modern Europe. In support of this indictment, they point to the golden age of the Roman Empire, when the inhabitants of all its parts were content to sink their differences of race and country and were proud to proclaim themselves citizens of the Roman Empire; and they say that in consequence the civilised world attained then a pitch of prosperity and contentment never known before or since over any large area of the earth.
This is a formidable indictment, to which the exponents and advocates of patriotism have for the most part been content to reply by renewed exhortations to patriotism, by emotional appeals, by rhetoric, by the quotation of patriotic verses, the citation of the glorious deeds of our armies and soldiers now and in past times, by all the arts of persuasion and suggestion. As a fine example of this method one may cite Mr Stratford Wingfield’s History of British Patriotism, in which he not only confines himself to these methods, but shows a positive dislike and contempt for all attempts to apply reason and scientific method to the study of human affairs.[95] In maintaining this attitude, the advocates of patriotism give some colour to the claim of their opponents that patriotism or nationalism is essentially irrational, in the sense that it is incapable of justification by reason.
The politicians and historians, on the other hand, who are so generally demanding that the European settlement after the war must accept nationality as its fundamental principle, are commonly content to note the strength and the wide distribution of the patriotic sentiment, without enquiring into its origin, nature, or value.
Let us examine the arguments against patriotism and then see what reason can advance in its defence. For, though a rational defence of patriotism will have little direct effect in making patriots, we may be sure that, if such defence cannot be maintained, patriotism will have to fight a losing battle.
In disparaging patriotism by describing it as the work of an instinct, the gregarious or the pugnacious or other instinct, or of several instincts, its critics are guilty of two psychological errors and a popular fallacy. The last is the fallacy that the worth of any thing is to be judged by the course from which it springs. Even if patriotism were nothing more than the direct expression of the gregarious instinct which we possess in common with many of the higher animals, that would not in itself condemn it. But this description of it, as a product of instinct as opposed to the principles we attain by reason, involves that false disjunction and opposition of reason to instinct which is traditional and which the intellectualist philosophers commonly adopt, when they condescend to recognise in any way the presence of instinctive tendencies in human nature.
The other psychological error is the failure to recognize that patriotism although, like all other great mental forces, it is rooted in instinct, is not itself an instinct or the direct expression of any instinct or group of instincts, but is rather an extremely complicated sentiment, which has a long and complex history in each individual mind in which it manifests itself; that it is, therefore, capable of infinite variety and of an indefinite degree of intellectualisation and refinement; that the cult of patriotism is, therefore, a field for educational effort of the highest order, and that in this field moral and intellectual education may achieve their noblest and most far-reaching effects.
The psychological justification of patriotism has already been indicated, but may be concisely stated here. The moral value of the group spirit was considered in an earlier chapter; we saw how it, and it alone, raises the conduct of the mass of men above the plane of simple egoism or family selfishness. The sentiment of devotion or loyalty to any group has this virtue in some degree; but loyalty to the nation is capable of exalting character and conduct in a higher degree than any other form of the group spirit. For the nation alone has continuity of existence in the highest degree; a long past which gives a large perspective of past history, involving the history of long series of self-sacrificing efforts and many heroic actions; and the prospect of an indefinitely prolonged future, with the possibility of continued progress and development of every kind, and therefore some security for the perpetuation of the results achieved by individual efforts[96].
Further, the nation alone, is a self-contained and complete organism; other groups within it do but minister to the life of the whole; their value is relative to that of the whole; the continuance of results achieved on their behalf is dependent upon the continued welfare of the whole (for example, the welfare of any class or profession—a fact too easily overlooked by those in whom class spirit grows strong). Hence, the nation, as an object of sentiment, includes all smaller groups within it; and, when the nation is regarded from an enlightened point of view, the sentiment for it naturally comes to include in one great system all minor group sentiments and to be strengthened by their incorporation.
It is important to notice also that, just as the minor group sentiments are not incompatible with, but rather may strengthen, the national sentiment, when subordinated to and incorporated in it, so the national sentiment is not incompatible with still more widely inclusive group sentiments—for example, that for a European system of nations, for the ‘League of Nations’ or for Western Civilisation in general. And, while loyalty to humanity as a whole is a noble ideal, it is one which can only be realized through a further step of that process of extension of the object of the group sentiment, of which extension patriotism itself is the culmination at present for the great mass of civilised mankind. The attempt to achieve it by any other road is bound to fail because psychologically unsound[97].
Let us note in passing that neglect of this truth gives rise to two of the extreme forms of political doctrine or ideal, current at the present day; first, the ideal of the brotherhood of man in a nationless world; secondly, the extreme form of democratic individualism which assumes that the good of society is best promoted by the freest possible pursuit by individuals of their private ends, which believes that each man must have an equal voice in the government of his country, because that is the only way in which his interests and those of his class can be protected and forwarded; a doctrine which regards public life as a mere strife of private and class interests. Both ideals fly in the face of psychological facts; and, though they are in appearance extreme opposites, they are apt to be found associated in the same minds.
At the other end of the scale, we have the philosophical conservatism of such a thinker as Edmund Burke, which is keenly aware of the organic unity of society and looks constantly to the good of the whole, deriving from that consideration its leading motives and principles, and which trusts principally to the growth of the group spirit for the holding of the balance between conflicting interests and for the promotion of the public welfare.
Having seen the importance for national life of the idea of the nation, the diffusion of which through the minds of the people constitutes national self-consciousness, let us glance for a moment at the way other ideas may play leading rôles in national life. Such are ideas which became national ideals, that is to say, ideas of some end to be realised by the nation which became widely entertained and the objects of strong sentiments and of collective emotion and desire and which, therefore, determine collective action.
I shall not attempt to deal separately with various classes of such ideas, or ideals—the political, the religious, the economic; but shall only note the fact that they have played and may yet play great parts in the history of the world.
Men are not swayed exclusively by considerations of material self-interest, as the older school of economists generally assumed; nor even by spiritual self-interest, as too much of the religious teaching of the past has assumed; nor even by consideration of the welfare of the social groups of which they are members. Many of the great events of history have been determined by ideas that have had no relation to individual welfare, but have inspired a collective enthusiasm for collective action, for national effort, of a disinterested kind; and the lives of some nations have been dominated by some one or two such ideas. These ideas are first conceived and taught by some great man, or by a few men who have acquired prestige and influence; they then become generally accepted by suggestion and imitation, accepted more or less uncritically and established beyond the reach of argument and reasoning.
No matter what the character of the idea, its collective acceptance by a people enhances for the time the homogeneity of mind among them, renders the people more intimately a unity, and serves also to mark it off more sharply from other peoples among whom other ideas prevail.
But, besides thus binding together at any period of its history the people that entertains it the generally accepted idea, if it endures, may produce further effects by becoming incorporated in the national organisation; in so far as it determines the form of activity of the people, it moulds their institutions and customs into harmony with itself, until they become in some measure its embodiment and expression; and in any vigorous nation there are usually one or two dominant ideas at work in this way.
It is a favourite dogma with some writers (for example M. le Bon) that ideas, before they can exert great effects in the life of a nation, must first become unconscious ideas, incorporated as they say in the unconscious soul of a people. This is an obscure confused doctrine, which, if it is meant to be taken literally, we can only reject. If it is to have any real meaning, it must be taken in the sense that the long prevalence of the ideal moulds the institutions and customs and the executive organisation of a people, so that national action towards the ideal end becomes more or less automatic or routine.
If the ideal so accepted and incorporated in the organised structure of the national mind, is one that makes for strength and at the same time permits of progress, it lives on; in other cases it may destroy the nation, or petrify it, arresting all progress.
Consider one or two examples of ideas that have played dominant rôles in the lives of nations. They are mostly political, or religious, or, most powerful of all, politico-religious. The idea of world-conquest has dominated and has destroyed several great nations, of which the latest example is the German Empire. The idea of conversion by the sword, accepted with enthusiasm by the Arab nation, gave it for a time tremendous energy, but contained no potency of permanent power or of progress. The idea of immortality, or desire of continued existence after death, seems to have dominated the minds of the ancient Egyptian people; the idea of escape from the evils of this world, those who have fully accepted Buddhism, like the Burmans[98]. The idea of caste as an eternal and impassable barrier has largely determined the history of India.
All these are ideas which have proved ineffective to sustain national vigour or to promote social evolution. It would not be strictly true to say that the fall, or the unprogressive condition, of the peoples that have entertained these ideas is the result of those ideas; because the general acceptance of them proves that they were in harmony with the type of mind of the people. Yet the formulation of the ideas by the leading minds who impressed them on the peoples must have accentuated those tendencies with which they harmonised; and in each case, if the idea had never been formulated, or if others had been effectively impressed on the mind of the people, the course of its history would have been changed. Of ideas less adverse to national life take the idea of ancestor worship, and the idea of personal loyalty to the ruler, ideas which commonly go together and have played an immense part in the life of some peoples, notably in Japan; they have served as effective national bonds in periods of transition through which despotically ruled populations have progressed to true nationhood. The idea of the divine right of kings played for a time a similar rôle in Europe.
A good example of the operation of an ideal in a modern nation is that of the ideal of a great colonial empire in the French nation. No doubt, hopes of economic advantages may have played some part in this case; but the growth of the immense oversea empire of modern France, as well as of the great extra-European conquests which France has made in the past but has ceased to control, seems to have been due in the main to the operation of this ideal in the national mind. France has no surplus population, and no Frenchman desires to leave his beautiful France; everyone regards himself as cruelly exiled if compelled to live for a time in any of the oversea possessions; and most of these, notably the Indo-Chinese Empire are very expensive, costing the nation far more in administrative expenses than any profits derived from them, and involving constant risks of international complications and war, as in Morocco in recent years. Nevertheless, the ideal still holds sway and, under its driving power, the oversea territories of France, especially in Africa, have grown enormously. And this ideal has inevitably incorporated itself in the organisation of the nation, in a colonial office and a foreign legion, and all the administrative machinery necessarily set up for securing the ends prescribed by the ideal.
In modern times the most striking illustration of the power of ideas on national life is afforded by the influence of the ideals of liberty and equality. It was the effective teaching of these ideals of liberty and equality, primarily by Rousseau, to a people prepared by circumstances to receive them, which produced the French Revolution; and all through the nineteenth century they have continued to determine great changes of political and social organisation in many countries of Europe and in America.
In England the idea of liberty has long been current and long ago had become incorporated and expressed in the national organisation; but its application received a vast extension when in 1834 England insisted on the liberation of all British-owned slaves and paid twenty million sterling in compensation. That the idea still lives on among us, with this extended application, seems to have been proved by the results of recent elections which were influenced largely by the force of the no-slavery cry in relation to coloured labour. It is an excellent example of an established collective ideal against which reason is of no avail.
The ideal of liberty never entered the minds of the most advanced peoples of antiquity; their most enlightened political thinkers could not imagine a State which was not founded upon slavery. Yet it has become collectively accepted by all the leading nations, and the ordinary man has so entirely accepted it that he cannot be brought to reason about it. Facts and arguments tending to show that the greater part of the population of the world might be happier without liberty and under some form of slavery cannot touch or enter his mind at all.
The ideal of political equality is of still later growth, and is in a sense derivative from that of liberty; it was in the main accepted as a means to liberty, but has become an end in itself. It is moulding national organisation everywhere; through its influence parliamentary government and universal suffrage are becoming the almost universal rule, and, through leading to their adoption, this ideal is in a fair way to wreck certain of the less firmly organised nations, and possibly our own also.
But the ideal which, beyond all others, characterises the present age of almost all the nations of the world is the ideal of progress. Hardly anyone has any clear notion what he means by progress, or could explicate the idea; but the sentiment is very strong, though the idea is very vague. This idea also was unknown to the leading thinkers of antiquity and is of recent growth; yet it is so almost universally accepted, and it so permeates the mental atmosphere in every direction, that it is hard for us to realise how new a thing in the history of the world is the existence, and still more the effective dominance, of the idea. It is perhaps in America that its rule is most absolute; there the severest condemnation that can be passed by the average man upon any people or institution is to say that it is fifty years behind the time. The popular enthusiasm for flying-machines, which threatens to make life almost unlivable, is one of the striking illustrations of the force of this ideal.
More recent still, and perhaps equally important, is the idea of the solidarity of the human race and of the responsibility of each nation towards the rest, especially towards the weaker and more backward peoples. We no longer cheerfully and openly exterminate an inferior people; and, when we do so, it is with some expressions of regret and even of indignation.
But this moral idea is still in process of finding acceptance and illustrates well that process. It has been taught by a few superior minds and none dares openly repudiate it; hence, it gains ground and is now commonly accepted, verbally at least, and is just beginning to affect national action.
The four ideas, liberty, equality, progress, and human solidarity or universal responsibility, seem to be the leading ideas of the present era, the ideas which, in conjunction with national sentiments, are more than any other, fashioning the future of the world.
The last two illustrate exceptionally well the capacity of nations to be moved by abstract ideas not directly related to the welfare of the individuals whose actions they determine; they show once more how false is the doctrine that national life is but the conflict of individual wills striving after individual goods. They show that, through his life in and mental interaction with organised society, man is raised morally and intellectually high above the level he could individually achieve.