THE IDEAS OF NATIONALITY AND NATIONAL GREATNESS

It lies on the face of the foregoing surveys that the principle which gives mass-form to all politics—to wit, the principle of nationality—makes at once for peace and war, co-operation and enmity. As against the tendency to atomism, the tribal principle supplies cohesion; as against tribalism, the principle of the State plays the same part; and as against oppression the instinct of race or nationality inspires and sustains resistance. But in every aggregate, the force of attraction tends to generate a correlative repulsion to other aggregates, and—save for the counterplay of class repulsions—the fundamental instinct of egoism takes new extensions in pride of family, pride of clan, pride of nation, pride of race. Until the successive extensions have all been rectified by the spirit of reciprocity, politics remains so far unmoralised and unrationalised.

The nullity of the conception of "race genius" has been forced on us at every meeting with it. No less clear, on a critical analysis, is the irrationality of the instinct of racial pride which underlies that conception, and which is involved in perhaps half of the strifes of tribes, States, and nations. Yet perhaps most of the reflections made by historical writers in the way of generalisations of the history of States and peoples are in terms of the fallacy and the irrationality in question. And the instinctive persistence of both reveals itself when we come to reflect on the fortunes of what we usually call the little nations—employing a term which at once sets up a whole series of partial hallucinations.

The main distinction between civilised nations being difference of language, there has spontaneously arisen the habit of identifying language with "race," and regarding a dwindling tongue as implying a dwindling people. In the British Islands, for instance, the decline in the numbers of the people speaking Celtic dialects—the Erse, the Welsh, and the Gaelic—leads many persons, including some of the speakers of those tongues, to regard the "Celtic stock" as in course of diminution; and statesmen speak quasi-scientifically of "the Celtic fringe" as representing certain political tendencies in particular. Yet as soon as we substitute the comparatively real test of name-forms for the non-test of language, we find that the Welsh and Gaelic-speaking stocks have enormously extended within the English-speaking population, so that "Welsh blood" is very much commoner in Britain than "Saxon," relatively to the proportions between the areas and populations of Wales and England, while "Highland blood" is relatively predominant in "Saxon"-speaking Scotland; and "Irish blood" is almost similarly abundant even in England, to say nothing of its immense multiplication in the United States.

Enthusiasm for one's nation as such thus begins on scrutiny to resolve itself into enthusiasm for one's speech; and as our English speech is a near variant of certain others held alien, as Dutch and Scandinavian and German, with a decisive control from French, enthusiasm for the speech-tie begins, on reflection, to assimilate to the enthusiasm of the district, the glen, the parish. Millions of us are at a given moment rapturous about the deeds of our non-ancestors, on the supposition that they were our ancestors, and in terms of a correlative aversion to the deeds of certain other ancients loosely supposed to have been the ancestors of certain of our contemporaries. Thus the ostensible entity which plays so large a part in the common run of thought about history—the nation, considered as a continuous and personalised organism—is in large measure a metaphysical dream, and the emotion spent on it partakes much of the nature of superstition.

How hard it is for anyone trained in such emotion to transcend it is seen from the form taken by the sympathy which is bestowed by considerate members of a large community on members of a small one. "Gallant little Wales" is a phrase in English currency; and a contemporary poet, who had actually written pertinently and well in prose on the spurious conception of greatness attached to membership in a large population, has also written in verse a plea for "little peoples" in terms of the assumption of an entity conscious of relative smallness. Some of these more sympathetic pictures of the lesser States obscurely recall the anecdote of the little girl who, contemplating a picture of martyrs thrown to the lions, sorrowed for the "poor lion who hadn't any Christian." The late Sir John Seeley, on the other hand, wrote in the more normal Anglo-Saxon manner that "some countries, such as Holland and Sweden, might pardonably (sic) regard their history as in a manner wound up; ... the only practical lesson of their history is a lesson of resignation."[631] The unit in a population of three millions is implicitly credited with the consciousness of a dwarf or a cripple facing a gigantic rival when he thinks of the existence of a community of thirty or sixty millions. Happily, the unit of the smaller community has no such consciousness;[632] and, inasmuch as his state is thus intellectually the more gracious, there appears to be some solid psychological basis for the paradox, lately broached by such a one, that "the future lies with the small nations." That is to say, it seems likely that a higher level of general rationality will be attained in the small than in the large populations, in virtue of their escaping one of the most childish and most fostered hallucinations current in the latter.

Certain patriots of the wilful sort are wont to flout reason in these matters, blustering of "false cosmopolitanism" and "salutary prejudice." To all such rhetoric the fitting answer is the characterisation of it as false passion. Those who indulge in it elect wilfully to enfranchise from the mass of detected and convicted animal passions one which specially chimes with their sentiment, as if every other might not be allowed loose with as good reason. Matters are truly bad enough without such perverse endorsement of vulgar ideals by those who can see their vulgarity. Ordinary observation makes us aware that the most commonplace and contracted minds are most prone to the passion of national and racial pride; whereas the men of antiquity who first seem to have transcended it are thereby marked out once for all as a higher breed. It is in fact the proof of incapacity for any large or deep view of human life to be habitually and zealously "patriotic" in the popular sense of the term. Yet, in the civilisations which to-day pass for being most advanced, the majority of the units habitually batten on that quality of feeling, millions of adults for ever living the political life of the schoolboy; and, as no polity can long transcend the ideals of the great mass, national fortunes and institutions thus far tend to be determined by the habit of the lower minds.

It is pure paralogism to point to the case of a large backward population without a national-flag idea—for instance, the Chinese[633]—as showing that want of patriotic passion goes with backwardness in culture. There is an infinity of the raw material of patriotism among precisely the most primitive of the Chinese population, whose hatred of "foreign devils" is the very warp of "imperialism." The ideal of cosmopolitanism is at the other end of the psychological scale from that of the ignorance which has gone through no political evolution whatever; its very appearance implies past patriotism as a stepping-stone; and its ethic is to that of patriotism what civil law is to club law. If "salutary prejudice" is to be the shibboleth of future civilisation, the due upshot will be the attainment of it one day by the now semi-civilised races, and the drowning out of European patriotisms by Mongolian.

If a saner lesson is to be widely learned, one way to it, if not the best way, may be an effort on the part of the units of the "great nations" to realise the significance of the fortunes of the "little nations," in terms, not of the imagined consciousness of metaphysical entities, but of actual human conditions—material, passional, and intellectual. We have seen how erudite specialists can express themselves in terms of the fallacy of racial genius. Specialists perhaps as erudite, and certainly multitudes of educated people, seem capable of thinking as positively in terms of the hallucinations of racial entity, national consciousness, political greatness, national revenue, and imperial success. Thus we have publicists speaking of Holland as an "effete nation," of Belgium as "doomed to absorption," of the Scandinavian peoples as "having failed in the race," and of Switzerland as "impotent"; even as they call Spain "dying" and Turkey "decomposing."

Nearly every one of those nations, strictly speaking, has a fairer chance of ultimate continuance without decline of wealth and power than England, whose units in general show as little eye for the laws of decline as Romans did in the days of Augustus. Spain has large potentialities of rich agricultural life; Turkey needs only new habits to develop her natural resources; the life of Belgium, indeed, is, like that of England, in part founded on exhaustible minerals; but Switzerland and Scandinavia, with their restrained populations, may continue to maintain, as they do, a rather higher average of decent life and popular culture than that of the British Islands,[634] though they, too, have at all times a social problem to deal with. British greatness, on dissection, consists in the aggregation of much greater masses of wealth and much greater masses of poverty, larger groups of idlers and larger swarms of degenerates, with much greater maritime power, than are to be seen in the little nations; certainly not in a higher average of manhood and intelligence and well-being. Sir John Seeley, in a moment of misgiving, avowed that "bigness is not necessarily greatness"; adding, "if by remaining in the second rank of magnitude we can hold the front rank morally and intellectually, let us sacrifice mere material magnitude."[635] But he had before used the term "greatness" without reserve as equivalent to "mere material magnitude"; and even in revising his doctrine, it seems, he must needs crave some sort of supremacy, some sense of the inferiority of the mass of mankind. Without any such constant reversion to the instinct of racial pride, let us say that "the things that are most excellent" have no dependence on mere material magnitude. Given a saner and juster distribution of wealth and culture-machinery, each one of the smaller States may be more civilised, more worth living in, than the larger, even as Athens was better worth living in than Rome, and Goethe's Weimar than the Berlin of 1800. It was a poet of one of the larger nations—though it had to be a poet—who saw not hardship but happiness in the thought of "leaving great verse unto a little clan." And it was a Christian bishop, looking on the break-up of a great empire, who asked, An congruat bonis latius velle regnare?—Doth it beseem the good to seek to widen their rule?—and gave the judgment that if human things had gone in the happier way of righteousness, all States had remained small, happy in peaceful neighbourhood.[636]

As for the sentiment of a national greatness that is measured by acreage and census and quantity of war material, it is hard to distinguish ethically between it and that individual pride in lands and wealth which all men save those who cherish it are agreed to pronounce odious. Even the snobs of nationality have, as a rule, a saving sense which withholds them from flaunting their pride in the eyes of their "poorer" neighbours, the members of the less numerous communities. Yet the note which is thus tacitly admitted to be vulgarly jarring for alien ears is habitually struck for domestic satisfaction; few newspapers let many days pass without sounding it; and certain poets and writers of verse appear to find their chief joy in its vibrations. The men of some of the lesser States, then, stand a fair chance of becoming ethically and Æsthetically, as well as intellectually, superior in the average to those of the larger aggregates, in that their moral codes are not vitiated nor their literary taste vulgarised by national purse-pride and the vertigo of the higher dunghill; though they, too, have their snares of "patriotism," with its false ideals and its vitiation of true fraternity.

To some degree, no doubt, the habit of mind of our megalophiles connects with the vague but common surmise that a small aggregate is more liable to unscrupulous aggression than a large one. If, however, there be any justice in that surmise, there is obviously implied a known disposition in the larger aggregates to commit such aggression; so that to act or rest upon it is simply to prefer being the wronger to being the wronged. Thus to glory in being rather on the side of the bully than on the side of the bullied is only to give one more proof of the unworthiness of the instinct at work. All the while, there is no real ground for the hope; and as regards the small nations themselves, the apprehension does not appear to prevail. There has indeed been a recrudescence of the barbaric ethic of the Napoleonic period in the Bismarckian period; but there is no present sign of a serious fear of national suppression on the part of Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal, and the Scandinavian States; while, apart from Bismarck's early aggression upon Denmark, and the ill-fortune of Greece in attacking Turkey, it is not small but large aggregates—to wit, Austria, France, Russia, Turkey, Spain—that have suffered any degree of military humiliation during the past half century; and it is precisely the large aggregates that avowedly live in the most constant apprehension either of being outnumbered in their armies and navies by single rivals or coalitions, or of losing their "prestige" by some failure to punish a supposed slight. It is a matter of historic fact that the "patriotic" consciousness in England had its withers wrung during a long series of years by the remembrance of such military disasters as the fall of Gordon at Khartoum, and the defeat of an incompetent general at Majuba Hill.[637] No "little nation" could exhibit a more wincing sense of humiliation and disgrace than is thus visibly felt by multitudes of a great aggregate over military repulses at the hands of extremely small and primitive groups. Politically speaking, then, the future of the small nations seems rather brighter than that of the large; and thus in the last analysis the pride of the unit of the latter is found to be still a folly.

[631] The Expansion of England, 1883, p. 1.