The modern improvements of means of communication tend strongly to diminish the importance of the geographical factors we considered in the foregoing chapter; for they practically abolish what in earlier ages were physical barriers to intercourse; they render capital and labour more mobile; and they make many forms of industry less dependent upon local physical conditions and, therefore, less strictly confined by geographical factors. As instances of important developments of this order in the recent past or near future, the reader may be reminded of the railway over the Andes between Chile and Argentina, the tunnels through the Alps, the Channel tunnel, the Siberian railway, the Suez and Panama canals, the Cape to Cairo railway, and, above all, aerial transport. All these make for free intercourse between peoples.
Easy means of communication promote development in the direction of the organic unity of a nation in another way—namely, they promote specialisation of the functions of different regions; they thus render local groups incapable of living as relatively independent closed communities; for they make each local group more dependent upon others, each upon all and the whole upon each; hence they develop the common interest of each part in the good of the whole.
This influence already extends beyond national groups and it had been hoped that its further growth was about to render war between nations impossible[70]. To-day England is contemplating a task never before attempted, the fusing into one nation of the peoples of the mother-country and her distant colonies. Whether or no she will succeed depends upon whether the enormously increased facilities of communication can overcome the principal effects of physical barriers that we have noted—namely, lack of intermarriage and divergence of occupations, with the consequent divergence of mental type and interests. The task is infinitely more difficult than the establishment of such an Empire as the Roman; not because the distances are greater, but because the union must take the form of nationhood, because it must take the form of a collective mind and not that of a merely executive organisation. But, in the considerations which have shown us that membership in and devotion to a smaller group is by no means adverse to membership in and devotion to a larger group, we have ground for believing that the task is not impossible of achievement.
The slow rate of progress towards nationhood of such peoples as the Russian and the Chinese has been largely due to lack of means of free communication between the parts of these countries. On the introduction of improved communications, we may expect to see rapid progress of this kind; for many of the other essential conditions are already present in both countries.
The fact that in the Nation-State the communications between individuals and between the parts of the whole are in the main indirect, mediated by the press, the telegraph, and the printed word in general, rather than by voice and gesture and the other direct bodily expressions of thought and emotion, modifies the primary manifestations of group life in important ways which we must notice in a later chapter.
CHAPTER IX
THE PART OF LEADERS IN NATIONAL LIFE
We turn now to a third very important condition of the growth of the national mind, one which also has its analogue in both the crowd and the army. A crowd always tends to follow some leader in thought, feeling, and action; and its actions are effective in proportion as it does so. To follow and obey a leader is the simplest, most rudimentary fashion in which the crowd’s action may become more effective, consistent, intelligent, controlled. Not any one can be such a leader; exceptional qualities are necessary. In every army the importance of leadership is fully recognised. A hierarchy of leaders is the essence of its organisation. In the deliberately organised army, the appointment of leaders is the principal and almost the sole direct means taken by the State to organise the army. Everything is done to give to the leaders of each grade the greatest possible prestige, especially by multiplying and accentuating the distinctions between the grades. Though much can be accomplished in this way, unless the men chosen as leaders have in some degree the superior qualities required by their position in the hierarchy, the whole organisation will be of little value.