[629] Cp. Brown, in Cambridge Modern History, 1902, vol. i, The Renaissance, p. 285.
[630] Cp. Armstrong, in Cambridge History, i, 150-51.
PART V
THE FORTUNES OF THE LESSER EUROPEAN STATES
Chapter I
THE IDEAS OF NATIONALITY AND NATIONAL GREATNESS
It lies on the face of the foregoing surveys that the principle which gives mass-form to all politics—to wit, the principle of nationality—makes at once for peace and war, co-operation and enmity. As against the tendency to atomism, the tribal principle supplies cohesion; as against tribalism, the principle of the State plays the same part; and as against oppression the instinct of race or nationality inspires and sustains resistance. But in every aggregate, the force of attraction tends to generate a correlative repulsion to other aggregates, and—save for the counterplay of class repulsions—the fundamental instinct of egoism takes new extensions in pride of family, pride of clan, pride of nation, pride of race. Until the successive extensions have all been rectified by the spirit of reciprocity, politics remains so far unmoralised and unrationalised.
The nullity of the conception of "race genius" has been forced on us at every meeting with it. No less clear, on a critical analysis, is the irrationality of the instinct of racial pride which underlies that conception, and which is involved in perhaps half of the strifes of tribes, States, and nations. Yet perhaps most of the reflections made by historical writers in the way of generalisations of the history of States and peoples are in terms of the fallacy and the irrationality in question. And the instinctive persistence of both reveals itself when we come to reflect on the fortunes of what we usually call the little nations—employing a term which at once sets up a whole series of partial hallucinations.