The same is true in much higher degree of nations. If a people is to become a nation, it must be capable of producing personalities of exceptional powers, who will play the part of leaders; and the special endowments of the national leader require to be more pronounced and exceptional, of a higher order, than those required for the exercise of leadership over a fortuitous crowd.
Such personalities, more effectively perhaps than any other factors, engender national unity and bring it to a high pitch. There are regions in which the other main conditions of national unity have long obtained, but which have failed to become the seat of any enduring nation. Although the greater part of Africa, perhaps the richest continent of the globe, has been in the possession of the negro races during all the ages in which the European, Asiatic, and American civilisations were being developed, those races have never founded a nation. Nevertheless many, perhaps most, negroes are capable of acquiring European culture and of turning it to good account. And, when brought under the influence of Arabs or men of other races, they have formed rudimentary nations[71]. The incapacity to form a nation must be connected with the fact that the race has never produced any individuals of really high mental and moral endowments, even when brought under foreign influences; and it would seem that it is incapable of producing such individuals; the few distinguished negroes, so called, of America—such as Douglas, Booker Washington, Du Bois—have been, I believe, in all cases mulattoes or had some proportion of white blood. We may fairly ascribe the incapacity of the negro race to form a nation to the lack of men endowed with the qualities of great leaders, even more than to the lower level of average capacity. On the other hand, there is at least one people which, in the absence of every other condition, has continued to retain something of the character of a nation for many generations—namely, the Jews. The Jews are not even racially homogeneous, and they are scattered through all the world under the most varied physical conditions; yet the influence of a succession of men of exceptional power, Moses and his successors the prophets, all devoted to the same end—namely, the establishment of the Jewish nation and religion—has lived on through many generations and still holds this people together, marking it off from all others.
This is an extreme instance. But another almost equally striking case is that of the Arab nation, which has owed its existence to one man. The Arab nation was made by the genius of Mahomet, who welded together, by the force of his personality and the originality and intensity of his religious conviction, the warring idolatrous clans of Arabia. Until his advent these had been a scattered multitude, in spite of racial and geographical uniformity, geographical isolation, and fairly free intercommunication. We have here one of the purest, clearest instances of the effect of great personalities in furthering nationhood; for there seems to be no reason to believe that, if Mahomet had not lived, any such development of the Arabian people would have taken place.
M. le Bon has produced a curious piece of evidence bearing on this question. He has measured the cranial capacity of a great number of skulls of different races, and has shown that any large collection of skulls from one of the peoples who have formed a progressive nation invariably contains a certain small number of skulls of markedly superior capacity, implying exceptionally large brains; while any similar collection of skulls from one of the unprogressive peoples, like the negro, differs, not so much in the smaller average size of the brain, as in the greater uniformity of size, that is to say, the absence of individuals of exceptionally large brains[72]. He, rightly, I think, sees in the absence of such individuals a main condition of the unprogressive character of these races; and, in the exceptionally large brains produced among the other peoples, a main condition of their progress.
These indications are borne out by a review of the history of any nation that has achieved a considerable development. Every such people has its national heroes whom it rightly glorifies or worships; for to them it owes in chief part its existence.
To them also it owes in large measure the forms of its institutions, its religion, its dominant ideas and ideals, its morals, its art and literature, all that of which it is most proud, all its victories of peace as well as of war, the memory of which and the common pride in which is the strongest of all national bonds[73].
Who can estimate the enormous influence of Confucius and Laotse in moulding and rendering uniform the culture of China? The influence of single individuals has undoubtedly been greater in the early than in the later stages of civilisation; for there was then a more open field, a virgin soil, as it were, for the reception of their influence. In the developed nation the mass of accumulated knowledge and tradition is so much greater, that the modifications and additions made by any one man necessarily are relatively small.
The leading modern nations owe their position to their having produced great men in considerable numbers; for that reason also no one man stands out so prominently as Mahomet or Confucius or Moses. Nevertheless their existence can in many cases be traced to some few great men. Would Germany now be a nation, but for Frederick the Great and Bismarck? Would America, but for Washington, Hamilton, and Lincoln? Would Italy, but for Garibaldi and Mazzini and Cavour? How greatly is the unity of national spirit and tradition among Englishmen due to the great writers who have produced the national literature, and to the great statesmen and soldiers and sailors who have given her a proud position in the world! What would England be now if Shakespeare, Newton and Darwin, Cromwell and Chatham, Marlborough and Nelson and Wellington had never been born?
And it is not only the men of great genius who are essential to the modern nation, but also men of more than average powers, though not of the very highest.
Let us try to imagine the fifty leading minds in each great department of activity suddenly removed from among us. That will help us to realise the extent to which the mental life of the nation is dependent on them. Clearly, we should be reduced to intellectual, moral, and aesthetic chaos and nullity in a very short time. If a similar state of affairs should continue for some few generations, Britain would very soon cease to be of any importance in the world. The force of national traditions might keep up a certain unity; but we should be a people, or a crowd, living in the past, without energy, without pride in the present or hope in the future, having perhaps a little melancholy national sentiment, but incapable of national thought or action.