This conception of the State as the political embodiment of homogeneous doctrine is due in large part not only to the distortion produced by false analogy, but to the survival of a terminology which has become obsolete, and, indeed, the whole of this subject is vitiated by those two things. The State in ancient times was much more a personality than it is today, and it is mainly quite modern tendencies which have broken up its doctrinal homogeneity, and that breakup has results which are of the very first importance in their bearing upon international pugnacity. The matter deserves careful examination. Professor William McDougal, in his fascinating work, An Introduction to Social Psychology, says in the chapter on the instinct of pugnacity:
The replacement of individual by collective pugnacity is most clearly illustrated by barbarous peoples living in small, strongly organized communities. Within such communities individual combat and even expressions of personal anger may be almost completely suppressed, while the pugnacious instinct finds itself in perpetual warfare between communities whose relations remain subject to no law. As a rule no material benefit is gained, and often none is sought, in these tribal wars. … All are kept in constant fear of attack, whole villages are often exterminated, and the population is in this way kept down very far below the limit at which any pressure on the means of subsistence could arise. This perpetual warfare, like the squabbles of a roomful of quarrelsome children, seems to be almost wholly and directly due to the uncomplicated operation of the instinct of pugnacity. No material benefits are sought; a few heads and sometimes a slave or two are the only trophies gained, and if one asks an intelligent chief why he keeps up this senseless practice, the best reason he can give is that unless he does so his neighbors will not respect him and his people, and will fall upon them and exterminate them.
Now, how does such hostility as that indicated in this passage differ from the hostility which marks international differences in our day? In certain very evident respects. It does not suffice that the foreigner should be merely a foreigner for us to want to kill him: there must be some conflict of interest. The English are completely indifferent to the Scandinavian, the Belgian, the Dutchman, the Spaniard, the Austrian, and the Italian, and are supposed for the moment to be greatly in love with the French. The German is the enemy. But ten years ago it was the Frenchman who was the enemy, and Mr. Chamberlain was talking of an alliance with the Germans—England’s natural allies, he called them—while it was for France that he reserved his attacks.106 It cannot be, therefore, that there is any inherent racial hostility in English national character, because the Germans have not changed their nature in ten years, nor the French theirs. If today the French are England’s quasi-allies and the Germans her enemies, it is simply because their respective interests or apparent interests have modified in the last ten years, and their political preferences have modified with them. In other words, national hostilities follow the exigencies of real or imagined political interests. Surely the point need not be labored, seeing that England has boxed the compass of the whole of Europe in her likes and dislikes, and poured her hatred upon the Spaniards, the Dutch, the Americans, the Danes, the Russians, the Germans, the French, and again the Germans, all in turn. The phenomenon is a commonplace of individual relationship: “I never noticed his collars were dirty till he got in my way,” said someone of a rival.
The second point of difference with Professor McDougal’s savage is that when we get to grips our conflict does not include the whole tribe; we do not, in the Biblical fashion, exterminate men, women, children, and cattle. Enough of the old Adam remains for us to detest the women and children, so that an English poet could write of the “whelps and dams of murderous foes”; but we no longer slaughter them.107
But there is a third fact which we must note—that Professor McDougal’s nation was made up of a single tribe entirely homogeneous. Even the fact of living across a river was sufficient to turn another tribe into foreigners and to involve a desire to kill them. The development from that stage to the present has involved, in addition to the two factors just enumerated, this: we now include as fellow-countrymen many who would under the old conception necessarily be foreigners, and the process of our development, economic and otherwise, has made of foreigners, between whom, in Homer Lea’s philosophy, there should exist this “primordial hostility leading inevitably to war,” one State from which all conflict of interest has disappeared entirely. The modern State of France includes what were, even in historical times, eighty separate and warring States, since each of the old Gallic cities represented a different State. In England people have come to regard as fellow-citizens between whom there can be no sort of conflict of interest scores of
