The continuance of the power and prosperity and unity of national life, the continued existence of the national mind and character, depends, then, upon the continued production of numbers of such men of more than average capacity. It is these men who keep alive from generation to generation, and spread among the masses and so render effective, the ideas and the moral influence of the men of supremely great powers. These men exert a guidance and a selection over the cultural elements which the mass of men absorb. They praise what they believe to be good, and decry what they believe to be bad; and, in virtue of the prestige which their exceptional powers have brought them, their verdict is accepted and moulds popular opinion and sentiment.
Consider how great in this way has been the influence of men like Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and Ruskin. The tone and standard of taste, thought, and sentiment are set and maintained by such men. It is in their minds chiefly that the system of ideals and sentiments, which are the guiding principles and moving forces of the national mind, is perpetuated. They are truly ‘the salt of the earth’; without them the nation would soon fall into fragments, or become an inert and powerless mass of but low degree of organisation and unity.
It is because the national ideals and sentiments are formed by these leading spirits, and are perpetuated and developed by them, and by them impressed in some degree upon the mass of the people, and because in all national movements their influence predominates, that the judgments and actions, the character and the sentiments, of a nation may be different from, and in the higher nations are superior to those of the average men of the nation. As Fouillée said—“The national character is not always best expressed by the mass, by the vulgar, nor even by the actual majority. There exists a natural élite which, better than all the rest, represents the soul of the entire people, its radical ideas and its most essential tendencies. This is what the politicians too often forget[74].” That is to say, it is what they forget when, as is too often the case in this country, they consider that no movement must be undertaken till the mass of the people demands it. They ignore the fact that leadership is essential to the maintenance of national life at a high level, and, instead of exercising initiative, they wait for it to come from below—wait for a mandate, as they say. The late President Rooseveldt was a fine example of the contrary type of statesmanship. The character of the talents displayed by these exceptionally gifted individuals determines largely the form of the civilisation and, through shaping the social environment, tends to bring the minds of the mass of individuals more or less into harmony with it, giving them something of the same tendencies.
The men of genius of certain peoples, more especially peoples of relative racial purity, have excelled in some one direction. Thus the Semites have produced great religious teachers and little else, and have given to the world its three great monotheistic religions. The Tartar race has produced from time to time great soldiers and little else. It has made immense conquests and established dynasties ruling over other peoples. But, as in the case of the Turks, who owe their national existence to a line of great despots of the house of Othman, they make little progress in civilisation and they do not unify the peoples they rule; for they produce ability of no other kind.
We see in most of the leading European nations the predominance of certain forms of genius. Modern Italy boasts chiefly men great in religion and art, perhaps owing to the predominance of Homo Mediterraneus; Spain in pictorial art and military conquest; England in poetry and administration and science; Germany in music and philosophy. Nevertheless, each of these peoples has produced men of the greatest power in all or several kinds; and this we may connect with the fact that they are all of very mixed racial composition. And we may add that France, the most composite or mixed racially, has produced the greatest variety of genius.
The production of the largest numbers of eminent men by peoples of mixed and blended racial elements, not too widely different, is what biological knowledge would lead us to expect. For, if a subrace is produced by crossing of varieties, it will be one of much greater variability than a pure race; as we see in the cases of the domesticated horse and dog and pigeon, of which the modern varieties are only kept pure by continual rejection of the departures from the standards, and of which the great variability renders possible the production, by selection of very marked new features in a brief period of time.
The many elements which go to form the mental constitution of an individual become, in a mixed race, variously combined. If the crossed races are very widely different, the results seem to be in nearly all cases bad. The character of the cross-bred is made up of divergent inharmonious tendencies, which give rise to internal conflict, just as the physical features appear in bizarre combination; what examples we have—the Spanish Americans, the Eurasians, the Mulattoes, the half-breeds of Java and Canada—seem to show that a people so composed will produce few great men and will not become a great nation.
But, when the crossed races are less widely divergent, the elements of which the mental constitution is composed (and which direct observation and analogy with physical heredity show to be transmitted more or less independently of one another from parent to offspring) have opportunities to come together in new combinations, which result in mental constitutions unlike those of either parent (that is to say, the cross-breds are variable); and among these new combinations, while some will form minds below the average, others will form minds above the average in various degrees; and these, so long as the constitution is not too much weakened by radical lack of harmony of its elements, will be the effective great men.
Incidentally, these considerations perhaps throw light on a fact much discussed—namely, that exceptional powers, especially when of highly specialised nature, are often exhibited by persons of unstable mental constitution; whence arises the popular belief that genius is allied to, or is a form of, insanity.
These considerations also raise a presumption that peoples derived by the blending of several stocks may be expected to have progressed further in civilisation and in national growth than those of purer stock; and that, while the racial purity of a people may give stability, such a people will be liable to arrest and crystallisation of civilisation at an early stage, before culture is sufficiently advanced to render possible a highly developed national life. These indications are well borne out by a survey of the peoples of the world. We may see here, in all probability, one of the main causes of the early crystallisation of Chinese civilisation. Homogeneity and racial purity have produced extreme stability, but at the cost of the variability which produces great and original minds, and, therefore, at the cost of capacity for national progress beyond an early stage.