Once we are sure that the human race has a reasonable chance of indefinite survival, we can proceed to contemplate the changes, if any, which are likely to take place as the centuries and millennia roll on.
Anthropologists put the age of the human race roughly at half a million years. In that comparatively long period—long as compared with history, but short as reckoned by geology—man has evolved from an ape-like, tree-dwelling nut-eater into a plodding, illiterate, monosyllabic tiller of the soil, (I take the majority of mankind as representative of its state of progress rather than the élite). The 500 millennia of human evolution have had but little effect on the human form and the average human character. The brain is somewhat larger generally and the mouth rather less protruding. The mental equipment of the representative man—the man representing the majority—is in many ways inferior to that of the dog or the ant. He is full of greeds and lusts and superstitions which place him on a level with the higher animal life, or even below it.
It is in his possibilities rather than in his actual state of development that man is a superior being. Those possibilities have to some extent been realized in the educated few. When we speak of civilization, of modern life and scientific advance, we fix our attention exclusively on the educated élite. In asserting, for instance, that nowadays nobody doubts that the earth is round, we are referring to a very small minority of the human race, composed of perhaps half the adults of Europe and America and Australia, with a small sprinkling of Africans and Asiatics, in all perhaps 10 per cent. of the total population. If a vote were taken of every man, woman, and child in the world to decide whether the earth is flat or round, there would be a majority of perhaps 9 to 1 in favour of a flat earth.
Again, “everybody” is supposed to know that a whale is not a fish, that it does not spawn or lay eggs, but that it suckles its young like any other mammalian. What proportion of the human race actually does know that simple fact? How many human beings even know that the sun is larger than the moon? A great many, no doubt, but how many out of the whole race?
Scientific knowledge is the birthright of every human child. But on that very account, perhaps, it is neither prized nor cherished. In the markets where thoughts are bought and sold, an ounce of illusion is worth a ton of fact.
The enormous disproportion between the amount of knowledge accumulated by the human intelligentsia and the general level of knowledge is productive of many evils and anomalies. It necessarily breeds an attitude of contemptuous superiority towards the uninformed masses, and supplies a temptation to profit by that superiority in order to dominate and oppress the majority. Many wars, strikes, revolutions, and other social crises are the outcome of this anomalous condition. On the other hand, the very existence of empires requires the presence of a great substratum of the half-educated or uncultivated to follow the lead and obey the behests of the Imperial few.
The British Empire derives its strength from the numerical strength of its élite. The Russian Empire and its direct heir, the present Oligarchy, have had a small élite raised above an enormous mass of what is probably the least-educated population in the world, outside Africa. The French African Empire disguises the hegemony of Paris under the liberal concession of a nominal French citizenship to its subject tribes. The French élite is broader than the British, as wealth in France is more evenly distributed. In Germany, on the other hand, and in certain smaller countries, like Denmark and Finland, it is education rather than wealth which is more or less impartially distributed. This also tends to broaden the élite and make the nation (as distinguished from the empire) more intrinsically powerful.
We thus get an élite among nations as well as individuals. This élite is, however, based upon force rather than intellectual leadership, owing to the fact that a nation regarded as an organism is in a much more primitive stage of evolution than is a civilized individual. Nations have no morality, no curbs upon their greed, their hatred, their jealousy and vindictiveness.
The rivalry among nations makes for progress, but its most active manifestations may produce a serious set-back of long duration, involving irreparable loss.