It is one of the most impressive facts about the war, that while Germany is the very type of a perfected aggressive herd, England is perhaps the most complete example of a socialized herd. Corresponding with this biological difference is the striking difference in their history. Germany has modelled her soul upon the wolf’s, and has rushed through the possibilities of her archetype in fifty feverish years of development; already she is a finished product, her moral ideal is fulfilled and leaves her nothing to strive for except the imposition of it upon the world. England has taken as her model the bee, and still lags infinitely far behind the fulfilment of her ideal. In the unbroken security of her land, for near a thousand years, she has leisurely, perhaps lazily, and with infinite slowness, pursued her path towards a social integration of an {202} ever closer and deeper kind. She has stolidly, even stupidly, and always in a grossly practical spirit, held herself to the task of shaping a society in which free men could live and yet be citizens. She has had no theory of herself, no consciousness of her destiny, no will to power. She has had almost no national heroes, and has always been constitutionally frigid to her great men, grudging them the material for their experimentations on her people, indifferent to their expositions of her duty and her imperial destiny, granting them a chance to die for her with no more encouragement than an impatient sigh. She has allowed an empire to be won for her by her restless younger sons, has shown no gratification in their conquests, and so far from thrilling with the exultation of the conqueror, has always at the earliest moment set her new dominions at work upon the problem in which her wholly unromantic absorption has never relaxed. And after a thousand years she seems as far as ever from her goal. Her society is irregular, disorganized, inco-ordinate, split into classes at war with one another, weighted at one end with poverty, squalor, ignorance, and disease, weighted at the other end by ignorance, prejudice, and corpulent self-satisfaction. Nevertheless, her patience is no more shaken by what she is lectured upon as failure than was her composure by what she was assured was imperial success. She is no less bound by her fate than is Germany, and must continue her path until she reaches its infinitely remoter goal. Nations may model themselves on her expedients, and found the architecture of their liberty on the tabernacles she has set up by the wayside to rest in for a night—she will continue on her road unconscious of herself or her greatness, absent-mindedly polite to genius, pleasantly tickled by prophets with very loud voices, but apt to go to sleep under {203} sermons, too awkward to boast or bluster, too composed to seem strong, too dull to be flattered, too patient to be flurried, and withal inflexibly practical and indifferent to dreams.
No more perfect illustration of the characteristics of the two nations could be found than their attitude before the war. England the empiric, dimly conscious of trouble, was puzzled, restless, and uneasy in the face of a problem she was threatened with some day having to study; Germany, the theorist, cool, “objective,” conscious of herself, was convinced there was no problem at all.
In studying the mind of England in the spirit of the biological psychologist, it is necessary to keep in mind the society of the bee, just as in studying the German mind it was necessary to keep in mind the society of the wolf.
One of the most striking phenomena which observers of the bee have noticed is the absence of any obvious means of direction or government in the hive. The queen seems to be valued merely for her functions, which are in no way directive. Decisions of policy of the greatest moment appear, as far as we can detect, to arise spontaneously among the workers, and whether the future is to prove them right or wrong, are carried out without protest or disagreement. This capacity for unanimous decisions is obviously connected with the limited mental development of the individual, as is shown by the fact that in man it is very much more feeble. In spite of this, the unanimity of the hive is wonderfully effective and surprisingly successful. Speculators upon the physiology and psychology of bees have been forced—very tentatively of course—to imagine that creatures living in such intensely close communion are able to communicate to one another, and, as it were, to a common stock, such extremely {204} simple conceptions as they can be supposed to entertain, and produce, so to say, a communal mind which comes to have, at any rate in times of crisis, a quasi-independent existence. The conception is difficult to express in concrete terms, and even to grasp in more than an occasional intuitive flash. Whether we are to entertain such a conception or are to reject it, the fact remains that societies of a very closely communal habit are apt to give the appearance of being ruled by a kind of common mind—a veritable spirit of the hive—although no trace of any directive apparatus can be detected.
A close study of England gives the impression of some agency comparable with a “spirit of the hive” being at work within it. The impression is not perhaps to be taken as altogether fantastic, when we remember how her insular station and her long history have forced upon her a physical seclusion and unity resembling, though of course far less complete than, that of the hive. I am of course not unaware that disquisitions upon the national spirit are very familiar to us. These, however, are so loosely conceived, so much concerned with purely conventional personifications of quite imaginary qualities, that I cannot regard them as referring to the phenomenon I am trying to describe.
The conception in my mind is that of an old and isolated people, developing, by the slow mingling and attrition of their ideas, and needs, and impulses, a certain deeply lying unity which becomes a kind of “instinct” for national life, and gives to national policy, without the conscious knowledge of any individual citizen, without the direction of statesmen, and perhaps in spite of them all, a continuity of trend, and even an intelligence, by which events may be influenced in a profoundly important way.
The making of some such assumption, helped as it is by the analogy of the bee, seems to be {205} necessary when we consider at all objectively the history of England and her Empire. She has done so much without any leading, so much in spite of her ostensible leaders, so often a great policy or a successful stroke has been apparently accidental. So much of her work that seemed, while it was doing, to be local and narrow in conception and motive displays at a distance evidences of design on the great scale. Her contests with Philip of Spain, with Louis XIV, with Napoleon, and the foundation of her Colonial Empire, would seem to be the grandiose conceptions of some supreme genius did we not know how they were undertaken and in what spirit pursued.
It appears, then, that England has something with which to retort upon the conscious direction to which Germany owes so much of her strength. Among the number of embattled principles and counter principles which this war has brought into the field, we must include as not the least interesting the duel between conscious national direction on the one side and unconscious national will and knowledge on the other.
It is quite outside my province to touch upon the diplomatic events which led up to the war. They seem to me to be irrelevant to the biological type of analysis we are trying to pursue. There can be no doubt at all that the ordinary consciousness of the vast majority of citizens of this country was intensely averse from the idea of war. Those who were in general bellicose were for the moment decidedly out of influence. Can we suppose, however, that the deep, still spirit of the hive that whispers unrecognized in us all had failed to note that strange, gesticulating object across the North Sea? In its vast, simple memory would come up other objects that had gone on like that. It would remember a mailed fist that had been {206} flourished across the Bay of Biscay three hundred years ago, a little man in shining armour who had strutted threateningly on the other shore of the Channel, and the other little man who had stood there among his armies, and rattled his sabre in the scabbard. It had marked them all down in their time, and it remembered the old vocabulary. It would turn wearily and a little impatiently to this new portent over the North Sea. . . . Wise with the experience of a thousand years, it would know when to strike.
Such deeply buried combined national impulses as we are here glancing at are far removed from the influence of pacifist or jingo. Any attempt to define them must be a matter of guesswork and groping, in which the element of speculation is far in excess of the element of ascertained fact. It seems, however, that, as in the case of the bee, they concern chiefly actual decisions of crucial matters of policy. To put this suggestion in another form, we might say the spirit of the people makes the great wars, but it leaves the statesman to conduct them. It may make, therefore, a decision of incredible profundity, launch the people on the necessary course at the necessary moment, and then leave them to flounder through the difficulties of their journey as best they can. Herein is the contrast it presents with the German resource of conscious direction—superficial, apt to blunder in all the larger, deeper matters of human nature, but constant, alert, and ingenious in making immediate use of every available means and penetrating every department of activity.