It seems to have been in no way a revelation of genius, and, indeed, the absence of any great profundity and scope of speculation is rather remarkable in the minds of the numerous German political philosophers. The idea would appear rather to have been developed out of the circumstances of the country, and to have been almost a habit before it became a conception. At any rate, its appearance was greatly favoured by the political conditions and history of the region in which it arose. If this had not been the case, it is scarcely conceivable that the principle could have been accepted so readily by the people, and in a form which was not without its asperities and its hardships for them, or that it could have been discovered without the necessary biological corollaries which are indispensable to the successful application of it.

Germany in some ways resembles a son who has been educated at home, and has taken up the responsibilities of the adult, and become bound by them without ever tasting the free intercourse of the school and university. She has never tasted the heady liquor of political liberty, she has had no revolution, and the blood of no political martyrs calls to her disturbingly from the ground. To such innocent and premature gravity the reasonable claims of what, after all, had to her the appearance of no more than an anxiously paternal Government could not fail to appeal.

Explain it how we may, there can be no doubt that to the German peoples the theoretical aspects of life have long had a very special appeal. Generalizations about national char­ac­ter­is­tics are notoriously fallacious, but it seems that with a certain reserve one may fairly say that there is a definite contrast in this particular between the Germans and, let us say, the English.

To minds of a theoretical bias the appeal of a {165} closely regulative type of Government, with all the advantages of organization which it possesses, must be very strong, and there is reason to believe that this fact has had influence in reconciling the people to the imposition upon it of the will of the Government.

Between a docile and intelligent people and a strong, autocratic, and intelligent Government the possibilities of conscious national direction could scarcely fail to become increasingly obvious and to be increasingly developed. A further and enormously potent factor in the progress of the idea was an immense accession of national feeling, derived from three almost bewilderingly successful wars, accomplished at surprisingly small cost, and culminating in a grandiose and no less successful scheme of unification. Before rulers and people an imperial destiny of unlimited scope, and allowing of unbounded dreams, now inevitably opened itself up. Alone, amongst the peoples of Europe, Germany saw herself a nation with a career. No longer disunited and denationalized, she had come into her inheritance. The circumstances of her rebirth were so splendid, the moral exaltation of her new unity was so great that she could scarcely but suppose that her state was the beginning of a career of further and unimagined glories and triumphs. There were not lacking enthusiastic and prophetic voices to tell her she was right.

The decade that followed the foundation of the Empire was, perhaps, more pregnant with destiny than that which preceded it, for it saw the final determination of the path which Germany was to follow. She had made the immense stride in the biological scale of submitting herself to conscious direction; would she also follow the path which alone leads to a perfect concentration of national life and a permanent moral stability? {166}

To a nation with a purpose and a consciously realized destiny some principle of national unity is indispensable. Some strand of feeling which all can share, and in sharing which all can come into communion with one another, will be the framework on which is built up the structure of national energy and effort.

The reactions in which the social instinct manifests itself are not all equally developed in the different social species. It is true that there is a certain group of char­ac­ter­is­tics common to all social animals; but it is also found that in one example there is a special development of one aspect of the instinct, while another example will show a characteristic development of a different aspect. Taking a broad survey of all gregarious types, we are able to distinguish three fairly distinct trends of evolution. We have the aggressive gre­gar­i­ous­ness of the wolf and dog, the protective gre­gar­i­ous­ness of the sheep and the ox, and, differing from both these, we have the more complex social structure of the bee and the ant, which we may call socialized gre­gar­i­ous­ness. The last-named is characterized by the complete absorption of the individual in the major unit, and the fact that the function of the social habit seems no longer to be the simple one of mere attack or defence, but rather the establishment of a State which shall be, as a matter of course, strong in defence and attack, but a great deal more than this as well. The hive is no mere herd or pack, but an elaborate mechanism for making use by co-ordinate and unified action of the utmost powers of the individual members. It is something which appears to be a complete substitute for individual existence, and as we have already said, seems like a new creature rather than a congeries united for some comparatively few and simple purposes. The hive and the ant’s nest stand to the flock and the {167} pack as the fully organized multicellular animal stands to the primitive zooglœa which is its forerunner. The wolf is united for attack, the sheep is united for defence, but the bee is united for all the activities and feelings of its life.

Socialized gre­gar­i­ous­ness is the goal of man’s development. A transcendental union with his fellows is the destiny of the human individual, and it is the attainment of this towards which the constantly growing altruism of man is directed. Poets and prophets have, at times, dimly seen this inevitable trend of Nature, biology detects unmistakable evidence of it, and explains the slowness of advance, which has been the despair of those others, by the variety and power of man’s mind, and consoles us for the delay these qualities still cause by the knowledge that they are guarantees of the exactitude and completeness that the ultimate union will attain.

When a nation takes to itself the idea of conscious direction, as by a fortunate combination of circumstances Germany has been induced to do, it is plain that some choice of a principle of national unity will be its first and most important task. It is plain, also, from the considerations we have just laid down, that such a principle of national unity must necessarily be a manifestation of the social instinct, and that the choice is necessarily limited to one of three types of social habit which alone Nature has fitted gregarious animals to follow. No nation has ever made a conscious choice amongst these three types, but circumstances have led to the adoption of one or another of them often enough for history to furnish many suggestive instances.