So far I have dealt with the impulses illustrated by the internal politics of a modern State. But perhaps the most important section in the whole psychology of political impulse is that which is concerned not with the emotional effect of the citizens of any state upon each other, but with those racial feelings which reveal themselves in international politics. The future peace of the world largely turns on the question whether we have, as is sometimes said and often assumed, an instinctive affection for those human beings whose features and colour are like our own, combined with an instinctive hatred for those who are unlike us. On this point, pending a careful examination of the evidence by the psychologists, it is difficult to dogmatise. But I am inclined to think that those strong and apparently simple cases of racial hatred and affection which can certainly be found, are not instances of a specific and universal instinct but the result of several distinct and comparatively weak instincts combined and heightened by habit and association. I have already argued that the instinct of political affection is stimulated by the vivid realisation of its object. Since therefore it is easier, at least for uneducated men, to realise the existence of beings like than of beings unlike themselves, affection for one's like would appear to have a natural basis, but one likely to be modified as our powers of realisation are stimulated by education. Again, since most men live, especially in childhood, among persons belonging to the same race as themselves, any markedly unusual face or dress may excite the instinct of fear of that which is unknown. A child's fear, however, of a strangely shaped or coloured face is more easily obliterated by familiarity than it would be if it were the result of a specific instinct of race-hatred. White or Chinese children show, one is told, no permanent aversion for Chinese or white or Hindoo or negro nurses and attendants. Sex love, again, even when opposed by social tradition, springs up freely between very different human types; and widely separated races have been thereby amalgamated. Between some of the non-human species (horses and camels, for instance) instinctive mutual hatred, as distinguished from fear, does seem to exist, but nowhere, as far as I know, is it found between varieties so nearly related to each other and so readily interbreeding as the various human races.
Anglo-Indian officials sometimes explain, as a case of specific instinct, the fact that a man who goes out with an enthusiastic interest in the native races often finds himself, after a few years, unwillingly yielding to a hatred of the Hindoo racial type. But the account which they give of their sensations seems to me more like the nervous disgust which I described as arising from a constantly repeated mental and emotional adjustment to inharmonious surroundings. At the age when an English official reaches India most of his emotional habits are already set, and he makes, as a rule, no systematic attempt to modify them. Therefore, just as the unfamiliarity of French cookery or German beds, which at the beginning of a continental visit is a delightful change, may become after a month or two an intolerable gêne, so the servility and untruthfulness, and even the patience and cleverness of those natives with whom he is brought into official contact, get after a few years on the nerves of an Anglo-Indian. Intimate and uninterrupted contact during a long period, after his social habits have been formed, with people of his own race but of a different social tradition would produce the same effect.
Perhaps, however, intellectual association is a larger factor than instinct in the causation of racial affection and hatred. An American working man associates, for instance, the Far Eastern physical type with that lowering of the standard wage which overshadows as a dreadful possibility every trade in the industrial world. Fifty years ago the middle class readers to whom Punch appeals associated the same type with stories of tortured missionaries and envoys. After the battle of the Sea of Japan they associated it with that kind of heroism which, owing to our geographical position, we most admire; and drawings of the unmistakably Asiatic features of Admiral Togo, which would have excited genuine and apparently instinctive disgust in 1859, produced a thrill of affection in 1906.
But at this point we approach that discussion of the objects, sensible or imaginary, of political impulse (as distinguished from the impulses themselves), which must be reserved for my next chapter.
CHAPTER II
POLITICAL ENTITIES
Man's impulses and thoughts and acts result from the relation between his nature and the environment into which he is born. The last chapter approached that relation (in so far as it affects politics) from the side of man's nature. This chapter will approach the same relation from the side of man's political environment.