m 
 
 of Xonoon 
 
 >. OM LECTURE 
 
 .CE SENTIMENT AS 
 A FACTOR IN HISTORY 
 
 A LECTURE DELIVERED BEFORE THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF LONDON ON 
 
 FEBRUARY 22, 1915 
 
 BY THE RIGHT HON. 
 
 VISCOUNT BRYCE, O.M, 
 
 Xonoon : Wniverstts of Xonooti press 
 
 PUBLISHED FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PRESS, LTD. 
 BY HODDER & STOUGHTON, WARWICK SQUARE, E.C. 
 
 Price One Shilling Net.
 
 TUniversits of Xonoon 
 
 CREIGHTON IECTURE 
 
 r~ 
 
 RACE SENT/MENT AS 
 A FACTOR IN HISTORY 
 
 A LECTURE DELIVERED BEFORE THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF LONDON ON 
 
 FEBRUARY 22, 1915 
 
 BY THE RIGHT HON. 
 
 VISCOUNT BRYCE, O.M. 
 
 Xonfcon : Ulntverstts of Xonoon press 
 
 PUBLISHED FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PRESS, LTD. 
 BY HODDER & STOUGHTON, WARWICK SQUARE, E.C. 
 
 1915 
 
 7?
 
 RACE SENTIMENT 
 AS A FACTOE IN HISTOEY 
 
 No branches of historical inquiry have suffered 
 more from fanciful speculation than those which 
 relate to the origin and attributes of the races of 
 mankind. The differentiation of these races began 
 in prehistoric darkness, and the more obscure a 
 subject is, so much the more fascinating. Hypo- 
 theses are tempting, because though it may be im- 
 possible to verify them, it is, in the paucity of data, 
 almost equally impossible to refute them. Many 
 tests have been suggested for determining the 
 affinities of racial groups, but none has proved 
 adequate. Language cannot be trusted, because 
 we know of instances in which peoples have lost 
 their original tongue and adopted another. Bodily 
 characters have been tried, but it is often doubtful 
 to what race the skulls found in ancient sepulchres 
 belong, and some craniologists admit that the shape 
 of the skull is not constant. One of these has lately 
 gone so far as to declare that cephalic measurements 
 of children born to Italian immigrants dwelling in 
 New York indicate a shape different from that 
 of the parental heads. Some writers have sought 
 to represent certain political and social institutions 
 as characteristic of certain linguistic families of 
 mankind. When, however, it was found that the 
 popular assembly the Agora of Homeric Greece
 
 4 RACE SENTIMENT 
 
 and the Folkmot of Sa xpn England once supposed 
 to be the peculiar glorwof the Aryan peoples, could 
 be paralleled by the Pit\o of South African Basutos, 
 this doctrine withered up and died. Neither has 
 the attempt to determine racial affinities by the 
 possession of a common stock of superstitions or 
 religious rites and usages been more successful. 
 Whoever looks into that vast treasury of folklore 
 which the lifelong labours of Sir James Frazer have 
 given us in the volumes called The Golden Bough., 
 will find that certain religious beliefs and ceremonial 
 usages have prevailed over most of the world 
 in forms practically identical. Traces survive in 
 Western Europe of superstitions now alive among 
 the aborigines of Queensland. Some day, no doubt, 
 we may discover solid ground for a theory of race 
 origins and race affinities, but at present we are 
 only groping and guessing. 
 
 Even as regards the existing human stocks, for 
 the study of which we have ample materials, how 
 little is scientifically known ! What are the pure 
 (i. e. the unmixed) races ? Is there any such thing 
 as a really pure race, one in which no considerable 
 intermingling of divers elements has occurred within 
 historical times ? Iceland is the only European 
 country in which the population has remained, 
 since it was peopled by Norsemen more than a 
 thousand years ago, unaffected by immigration or 
 conquest. Disraeli used to speak of his own race 
 as quite pure, but we know that it received numerous 
 accretions from without during the Middle Ages; 
 and a recent able and very learned Anglo-German 
 writer (Houston Stewart Chamberlain), in his Founda- 
 tions of the Nineteenth Century, argues that in the days
 
 RACE SENTIMENT 5 
 
 of the old Monarchy Israel was already largely 
 Canaanitish. Indeed, he bants that King David 
 was probably half an Amoriije, which means for him 
 an Indo-European or Aryan, that is to say, in the 
 last resort a German, since tlie German is the highest 
 specimen of the Indo-European family. Much more, 
 then (so he argues), must we deem Solomon to have 
 been very little of an Israelite, seeing that his mother, 
 Bathsheba, who had been the wife of Uriah the 
 Hittite, was presumably herself a Hittite. " Thus 
 we should have an explanation of the peculiar 
 incompatibility between Solomon's nature and aims 
 and the character of Israel and Judah." l 
 
 Similarly, the importance of what may be called 
 the racial constituent in national character has been 
 much exaggerated. Something is due to it, but much 
 more is due to the conditions physical and economic 
 and social under which the nation has been devel- 
 oped. In the thought and imagination of every civil- 
 ised people there is an unquestionable racial strain. 
 But the habit of referring to this cause practical 
 aptitudes, such as the merits or defects visible in a 
 nation's political life, has been pushed much too far. 2 
 Do we not see even in our own time how quickly a 
 people may pass from one phase of character into 
 
 1 Vol. I., p. 386, of English translation. 
 
 2 Has not the practice of explaining the characters of prominent 
 individuals by their racial qualities been also overdone ? King 
 George III, for instance, has long been regarded as a typical 
 Englishman, yet he had practically not a drop of English blood 
 in his veins, being mostly German, with a very little Scotch, 
 and a still smaller trace of Welsh. Mr. H. S. Chamberlain, on 
 the other hand, is in his wide learning and his ingenuity typically 
 a German, but in blood purely English. Environment and 
 education, moulding ideas and implanting habits, how far do 
 they not go ? 
 
 A2
 
 6 RACE SENTIMENT 
 
 another, and begin to sbow features alien to its own 
 past ? The distinctive qualities which are now 
 visible in each nationv are at least as much the 
 consequences as the ca f uses of its history. When 
 other explanations are available it is unscientific 
 to resort to the Disraelian notion, equally easy 
 and un verifiable, that " Race is everything." The 
 peoples of South America at one end of the world 
 and the Japanese at the other may, under the swiftly 
 changing conditions of this age, be entirely different 
 a century hence from what they are now, even though 
 they receive no mixture of new blood. 
 
 With all these large and still obscure parts of the 
 subject I have, however, nothing to do to-day; 
 and I mention them only to indicate the difficulties 
 which surround it and the comparatively small 
 progress yet made in its investigation. For the 
 purposes of this present lecture let us pass by all 
 questions of the origin and the affinities and the 
 special peculiar attributes and gifts of the various 
 human stocks, and take them to be just what the 
 ordinary books of geography and history represent 
 them, calling them by familiar names which embody 
 no theory. It is only one quite definite and limited 
 inquiry that I propose to undertake, and one which 
 falls within the region of authentic records. What 
 part has been played in history by the conscious 
 sentiment of Race ? How far have feelings of racial 
 sympathy or of racial antagonism affected peoples 
 in strengthening their sense of national unity and 
 their national pride ? How often have such feelings 
 prompted friendship with nations of the same, or 
 enmity towards nations of a different stock? We 
 all know for how much religious hatred has at
 
 RACE SENTIMENT 7 
 
 various times counted in international relations, and 
 what effect traditions of Ancient intercourse and 
 reciprocal good will have had on political relations, 
 as, for instance, between prance and Scotland in 
 the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Can it be 
 said that race sympathy has worked in like manner 
 as an active force in the international policy of 
 States ? This is a question that is to be elucidated 
 by, and only by, a review of the events which history 
 records. A priori arguments and hypotheses are out 
 of place. So let us float quickly down the stream of 
 time, searching for such evidences of the action 
 of racial sentiment as can be discerned, just as an 
 explorer in some river of the Canadian West might, 
 while his canoe is swept along by the current, seek 
 to discover on the banks traces of native wigwams 
 or camping grounds. 
 
 But before starting on such a voyage let us dis- 
 tinguish race feeling, in the strict sense, from two 
 things with which it is liable to be confounded the 
 Tribal Instinct, and the sentiment of Nationality. 
 
 By the Tribal Instinct I mean that natural 
 tendency which draws men towards those who 
 resemble themselves in aspect, in speech and in 
 customs especially religious customs. The small 
 human aggregates in which social organisation 
 begins, Phratriae in Greece, Gentes in Italy, clans 
 among the Celts, tribes in many other peoples, 
 were squeezed together by the necessities of self- 
 defence against other such aggregates, and each 
 became a sort of large family. Indeed, they often 
 deemed themselves to be blood relatives sprung from 
 a common ancestor, and they were known to their 
 neighbours by a common name. The tie between
 
 8 RACE SENTIMENT 
 
 their members was, therefore, very close, the sense 
 of duty to the tribe and its chief extremely strong. 
 Such aggregates were, however, not racially, perhaps 
 not linguistically, different from other such tribes 
 around them; yet their hostility to those tribes 
 might be just as fierce as it was towards tribes of 
 a stock quite dissimilar. Kinship and loyalty to the 
 chieftain, rather than a sense of belonging to the 
 same race, were the bonds of union. One sees this 
 in the relations to one another of the cognate tribes 
 of ancient Mexico just as in the bitter feuds that 
 raged between the Gaelic clans in Scotland. 
 
 The sentiment of nationality on the other hand, 
 which belongs to a more advanced stage of social 
 progress, may have in it a comparatively slender 
 racial element. That sentiment is the product of 
 many things, such as a common language and 
 literature, traditions and the memory of past 
 exploits, a sense of collective interest, a belief in 
 national institutions, perhaps even in a " national 
 mission." If the race and the people are contermin- 
 ous these sentiments may strengthen and elevate 
 national consciousness as a whole. Yet you may 
 have a nationality composed of different races and 
 speaking different tongues as in Switzerland, in 
 Belgium and in Canada. You may have commun- 
 ities of practically the same race yet divided into 
 various and perhaps hostile nations, such as the 
 republics of Spanish America. To-day, however, I 
 am asking you to think not of tribes but of peoples, 
 and the question to be examined is how far peoples 
 have been influenced in their historical careers by 
 the sense of belonging to a particular stock or branch 
 of mankind, as distinguished from the other motives
 
 RACE SENTIMENT 9 
 
 which dispose them to befriend or to dislike their 
 neighbour peoples. Race sentiment is one of the 
 elements which go to make' up national sentiment 
 and national pride. It h^lps to make a people 
 cohesive. That is clear enough; but how far does 
 the power of race sentiment extend beyond national 
 boundaries as a factor determining national action ? 
 History is sometimes represented as a record of the 
 long conflict of races. Many such conflicts there have 
 been, but the problem I ask you to consider recog- 
 nises that fact as part of the case and goes on to 
 put a further question : How far have races striven 
 with one another because they knew that they 
 were Races, separate families of mankind diverse 
 in blood? 
 
 Let us begin with the ancient world. It was a 
 world full of strife. " War," says Plato, " is the 
 natural relation between all cities." x The stranger 
 is presumably an enemy. If he speaks a different 
 tongue he is even more likely to be deemed an 
 enemy because he cannot explain his (possibly 
 friendly) intentions. Of the endless wars that went 
 on in that ancient world, wars of robbery between 
 tribes, wars of conquest between better organised 
 cities or kingdoms, some were waged between nations 
 of different stocks. Such were the conquering 
 marches of the Egyptian kings Thothmes and 
 Rameses, such those of the rulers of Assyria and 
 Babylon. Such, too, were the expeditions of the 
 Achsemenid kings of Persia against Egypt, the 
 Scythians and the Greeks. These, however, were 
 not prompted by racial feeling but were mere efforts 
 at conquest. Through all those early ages we find 
 
 1 IIdX/xo5 <f>v<reL vTrdpxtt TT/JOS aTrtieras ras TrdXets.
 
 10 RACE SENTIMENT 
 
 only three peoples in whom there may seem to have 
 existed a sort of racial consciousness. One was the 
 Phoenician. When the Persian kings called upon the 
 Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon, of which they were 
 suzerains, to furnish naval contingents in their ex- 
 peditions, the Phoenicians, quite willing to fight their 
 maritime rivals the Greeks, stipulated that they 
 should not be required to serve against their kinsfolk 
 of Carthage with whom they had maintained rela- 
 tions of friendship. Another was the Greeks. Feeling 
 their intellectual superiority, they looked down upon 
 all their neighbours, even the Italians who were 
 destined to vanquish them. They had a kind of 
 Pan-Hellenic sentiment which drew most of them 
 together to resist first Darius and then Xerxes, and 
 which now and then induced one city to send help to 
 another hard pressed by Persians ; but they fought 
 just as often and as fiercely among themselves. 
 Thebes and Platsea hated each other as heartily as 
 any Greek hated any barbarian. And they could 
 admire barbarians. When Xenophon writes a sort 
 of ethico-historical romance, he makes the Persian 
 conqueror Cyrus its hero. The third people in 
 whom a strong national passion is visible was Israel. 
 There are features in its history which may seem to 
 indicate a racial antagonism to its neighbours. The 
 Book of Joshua, which, to be sure, is far from being 
 a contemporary record, describes the slaughter of 
 the whole population of captured Canaanite cities. 
 Saul, on the fatal field of Gilboa, bids his armour- 
 bearer kill him, lest he fall into the hands of the 
 uncircumcised Philistines. Yet Israel was willing 
 not only to intermarry with Amorites and Hittites 
 and Jebusites, but also to adopt their gods; and
 
 EACE SENTIMENT 11 
 
 down till the end of the monarchy, prophets were 
 vainly striving to bring them back to the worship 
 of Jehovah only. Edom and Moab and the Beni 
 Ammon were held by Israel to be of kindred stock, for 
 Edom is in the Book of Genesis traced to Abraham, 
 the other two tribes to his nephew Lot, yet the 
 enmity between them was intense. They never 
 thought of helping one another against the Assyrian 
 invader. 
 
 When the curtain rises upon Italy we find there 
 also peoples and city states differing in blood and 
 speech. Besides those of Latin or Oscan stock, there 
 were Greek immigrants in the south, Etruscans, and, 
 somewhat later, Gauls in the north. Wars among 
 them were incessant, but these wars had little to 
 do with racial distinctions, of which indeed we hear 
 much less than ethnologists would like to know. 
 
 Neither was Rome (herself with a population of 
 mixed blood), during the centuries of her conquering 
 career, influenced by such sentiments. No people 
 was ever prouder than the Romans, nor with better 
 reason. Yet, though in the fulness of their strength 
 they held themselves called by Fate to rule the world, 
 they showed little contempt for their provincial 
 subjects and no racial aversion. Among those 
 subjects, once they had been conquered, we hear of 
 extremely few revolts, such as wounded national 
 feeling might have prompted. The long and terrible 
 struggle with the Semites of Carthage was a strife 
 of races, but it was a struggle for dominion, not one 
 of the Italian against the Phoenician. Of the great 
 poets who adorned the literary ages of Rome only 
 Lucretius was Roman born. Virgil and Catullus 
 were probably Celts, as the one came from Mantua
 
 12 
 
 and the other from Verona; Ovid was a Pelignian 
 from the Adriatic Coast, Propertius an Umbrian, 
 Horace the son of a freedman from Apulia; Seneca 
 and Lucan belonged to a Spanish family, Statius 
 came from Naples, Juvenal from Aquinum. Yet 
 none of them seems to have been in any way dis- 
 paraged on the score of his non-Roman origin. 
 When the imperial system had come to embrace the 
 civilised world, every office even that of Emperor- 
 soon lay open to every man of every sort of blood. 
 Trajan, the greatest sovereign since Augustus, was a 
 Spaniard. Only two races seem to have been objects 
 of aversion. The Egyptians were considered an un- 
 attractive people conceited and quarrelsome and 
 though Isis and Serapis had their votaries at Rome, the 
 beast worship as it was practised at Memphis excited 
 disgust. The Jews were disliked, not as Orientals, 
 but on grounds which were rather creditable to them 
 than otherwise. They were active and pushing; 
 they held together and helped one another. Because 
 they kept aloof and refused to acknowledge the gods 
 of the heathen they were accused of hating the human 
 race. Nevertheless, not a few educated Romans, 
 who found no satisfaction in the outworn official 
 religion, or even in Greek philosophy, were attracted 
 to Judaism, of which Christianity was for a long time 
 deemed to be only a form. Even towards the most 
 formidable nations that stood outside the Empire, 
 the sense of racial antagonism was not very strong. 
 Tacitus holds up to admiration the simple virtues 
 of the Germans who were already threatening the 
 northern frontiers. Claudian's finest verses celebrate 
 the prowess of the Vandal Stilicho. The patriotic 
 pride of Procopius, himself a Greek-speaking Syrian,
 
 RACE SENTIMENT 13 
 
 resents the arrogance of the Sassanid kings of Persia, 
 but there is little in his pages to indicate that the 
 conflict with these terrible enemies is in his view a 
 conflict of races as well as of great Powers. 
 
 We moderns think of ttfose southward and west- 
 ward migrations of many tribes, which the Germans 
 call the " Volkerwanderung," and which brought the 
 East Goths and Lombards into Italy, the Vandals 
 into Africa, the West Goths into Spain, the Franks 
 into Gaul and the Angles into Britain, as a gigantic 
 Race Movement. Such, indeed, it was, but men did 
 not so think of it while it was happening. The 
 provincial subjects of the Empire saw the conquerors, 
 as they streamed in, admiring Roman arts and 
 adopting the Roman religion. In the writers of the 
 time one finds few, if any, suggestions of a natural 
 opposition, much less of enmity, between Teutonic 
 and Latin peoples. On the part of the invaders, 
 except the savage Huns, there is respect, rising 
 almost to awe, for the civilisation they found, and 
 very little destruction of its monuments. No sign 
 in the West Gothic Alaric, or the East Gothic 
 Theodoric, of any such vengeful passion as is ex- 
 pressed in Byron's famous line, " Arise ye Goths, 
 and glut your ire." 
 
 We now come down to those Dark and Middle 
 Ages which used to be called the Ages of Faith, and 
 which were at any rate the ages of ecclesiasticism. 
 There we find ourselves in a new world, in which the 
 real distinctions are those of religion and church 
 polity, and there is even less notion than there had 
 been in Hellenic or Roman times of alliances or 
 hostilities springing out of differences in blood and 
 speech. They were ages of incessant strife, but when 
 
 A3
 
 14 RACE SENTIMENT 
 
 men were not fighting for booty or conquest they 
 were fighting to propagate their own creeds or wor- 
 ships. From the Arab invasion of Syria, soon after 
 Mohammed's death, down to the Balkan War of 
 1912, there has been racing a seldom interrupted 
 conflict between Islam and Christianity. The 
 Christians did not know, and would not have cared 
 if they had known, to what branch of the human 
 family their Arab, or Moorish, or Turkish enemies 
 belonged : it was enough that they were followers 
 of Mahound. " Unbeliever " was on each side the 
 watchword of enmity. Inside Islam there was not 
 then, and to only a slight extent has ever been, any 
 race discrimination. That a dark skin should have ex- 
 cited little or no repulsion in the ancient world, from 
 the days of Homer, who makes Zeus and the other 
 gods pay a honorific visit to the blameless Ethiopians, 
 is easily explained, for very few full blacks made 
 their way into the civilised countries. But neither 
 are the colour and the features of a negro found 
 repellent in such Mussulman countries as Egypt, 
 Turkey or Persia. To be a true believer is to be 
 every one's equal. The Turk is, no doubt, disliked 
 both by Persians and by Arabs, for both of them fear 
 his ruthless will, while they despise his intelligence. 
 But this dislike has led to no solidarity amongst 
 Arabs against the Turk, while the enmity of the 
 Persians is rooted in the ecclesiastical hatred of 
 Sunnis and Shiahs. We read the other day in the 
 newspapers that some Arab tribes of Irak, who had 
 been on the point of siding with the British forces 
 against the Turkish Sultan, paused when they learnt 
 that he had, as Khalif, proclaimed a Jehad against 
 the infidel. It is religion that counts. 
 
 Within Christendom there were some national
 
 RACE SENTIMENT 15 
 
 animosities which might seem on the surface to be 
 race conflicts. The Teutonic Emperors strove for 
 four centuries to establish their dominion in Italy, 
 but they fought for a claim of right which all Italians 
 admitted in theory, though many resisted it in 
 practice. The real issue was not between Germans 
 and Latins, but between the pretensions of the 
 secular and those of the spiritual power, with 
 Italian princes and cities ranged on both sides 
 alike. Dante, most patriotic of Italians, welcomes 
 the Germanic Emperor Henry VII. There was 
 no hatred of Italians for Germans, like that which 
 we recall from our youth, when Austrian governors 
 held their reign of terror in Milan and Venice. 
 Neither was there, in the long wars of England and 
 France, any general national opposition of the 
 combatants. Edward III and his sons were as much 
 Frenchmen as Englishmen, and it was a French 
 archbishop (no doubt under English pressure), who 
 condemned Joan of Arc. That which Dante singles 
 out as the most bitter animosity of his time " the 
 pride which makes the Englishman and the Scot 
 mad " l had nothing racial in it, for the two peoples 
 spoke the same tongue and had much the same 
 character, the Gael of the Highlands coming hardly 
 at all into question. So in the fifteenth and six- 
 teenth centuries there was no more envenomed 
 hostility than that of Danes and Swedes, yet they 
 were as near of kin as any two peoples in Europe. 
 
 Another long sweep of the Time-stream brings us 
 into a new landscape. With the great ecclesiastical 
 revolt of the sixteenth century there begins in Ger- 
 many, France and Britain, the period of the Wars of 
 
 1 Paradiso, canto xix, line 121.
 
 16 RACE SENTIMENT 
 
 Religion. These are entangled with the dynastic 
 ambitions of the sovereigns of France, Spain, Austria 
 and the lesser German States, but the religious issue 
 was generally involved, and religious antagonism 
 so strong as to leave litt'le room for the growth of 
 race consciousness. Nearly every race was, in fact, 
 itself divided, for though the Protestant element was 
 stronger in the Teutonic than in the Celtic and in 
 the so-called Latin countries, yet Teutonic Antwerp 
 and Cologne and Munich were Catholic; while 
 French-speaking Geneva and Vaud and parts of 
 Southern France, as well as some Piedmontese 
 valleys, were Calvinist. 
 
 Where these divisions existed, they retarded, 
 especially in Germany, the growth of a national 
 consciousness, while, on the other hand, the countries 
 which were whole-heartedly either Roman Catholic 
 or Protestant felt themselves more thoroughly 
 united and more exultant in their collective character 
 and achievements. Spain, under Charles V and his 
 first two successors, is an example. Marked as were 
 the differences between Castile and Aragon and 
 Andalusia, all Spaniards had been drawn together by 
 the long struggle against the Moors, and they had 
 become almost a militant Church as well as a military 
 people. In England the sense of national unity and 
 national pride sprang into full life in the days of 
 Elizabeth, under the stimulus of the strife with Spain, 
 carried on far beyond our own narrow seas. The 
 religious issues involved as well as the sense of world 
 competition had roused the people in a way unknown 
 before, calling forth an emotion that sprang from 
 deeper fountains than even loyalty to a king or the 
 joy of knightly deeds on many a foreign field.
 
 RACE SENTIMENT 17 
 
 Everywhere, except in Italy and the Germanic 
 Empire, real nations were beginning to emerge from 
 the welter of the Middle Ages, and when in the 
 eighteenth century the religious wars had come to 
 an end, and the diverse local elements in each country 
 had been melted into one, there appeared in each a 
 national consciousness, accompanied, especially as 
 between Spain and Portugal, between Spain and 
 France, between Russia and Poland, and between 
 England and France, by a national antagonism. 
 Yet both in the consciousness and the antagonism 
 the racial strain was weak. No nation, hardly even 
 France, which had most claim to lead the rest, 
 vaunted its own art or letters to the disparagement 
 of others : each was willing, and very wisely, to 
 learn what it could from without. In Germany, for 
 instance, despite the long wars which the House of 
 Hapsburg and other German potentates had to 
 sustain against the power of Louis XIV, French 
 fashions and manners were everywhere copied. 
 Peter the Great had gone to Holland and England to 
 find what he could carry back to his rude people. 
 Frederick the Great, who had with difficulty held 
 his ground against the armies of France, wrote 
 treatises and verses in French and was never so 
 happy as when he could draw French men of science 
 or letters to his Court. Yet before the end of his 
 reign there had come a change, and though Lessing 
 could not understand what was called the love of 
 country " it is to me at best a heroic weakness " 
 he lived to see the first stirrings of a national spirit 
 in Germany. 
 
 Before, however, we come to that new Europe 
 which the French Revolution called into being, let
 
 18 RACE SENTIMENT 
 
 us turn back to consider some facts, lying a, little 
 off the main stream of history, which illustrate the 
 phenomena of race contact and admixture. 
 
 In the ninth century, the region which lies south 
 of the Baltic, eastward from the Elbe, seems to have 
 been occupied by Slavonic or Lithuanian tribes. 
 Brandenburg, now the heart of Prussia, was then a 
 Wendish stronghold. Into this region the Teutons 
 from the south and west advanced, and a long 
 strife followed in which the latter, stronger and 
 better organised, everywhere prevailed. The later 
 stages of the process were comparatively peaceful, 
 and the Germanisation of the country was so 
 complete that it has left no angry memories now 
 surviving. The Wendish tongue is, or was very 
 recently, spoken about Meissen in Lusatia, the 
 region lying along the Elbe below Dresden, and 
 the population of Mecklenburg is still mostly of 
 Slavonic origin. How far the character of the 
 present inhabitants of all these regions has been 
 differentiated by the admixture of blood from that 
 of the purer German stocks, it is hard to say. No 
 one really knows what difference to the mental 
 quality of a people blood does make, as compared 
 with the influences which operate in the intellectual 
 and moral sphere. The " type " is, in most of these 
 regions, now quite German; indeed, Pomerania, 
 with its Slavonic name, 1 is deemed to be one of the 
 most Prussian parts of the Prussian kingdom. 
 
 A somewhat similar process has been in progress 
 for the last five centuries in Russia. The original 
 Russians were two closely allied groups of Slavs: 
 
 1 Po More, near the sea, as Prussia is Po Russia. The original 
 Prussians were Lithuanians.
 
 RACE SENTIMENT 19 
 
 the northern having its centres at Novgorod and 
 Moscow, the southern at Kiev. They have now 
 Slavonised many Finnic tribes that dwelt to the 
 north-east and east as fa_r as the Ural Mountains, 
 Mordvins and Tchuvasses and Tcheremisses and 
 Votiaks, and sundry others; and similarly various 
 Turkic tribes that dwelt to the south-east, of whom 
 only those that are Mussulman in faith still remain 
 distinct. By this gradual and scarcely noticed 
 process, the language, manners, religion and mental 
 type of the more advanced and better organised 
 race was (as in Baltic Germany) gradually, and hi 
 Northern Russia with comparatively little blood- 
 shed, accepted by rather than forced upon the 
 weaker. No racial conflict showed itself, because 
 no race consciousness existed. Out of all these 
 peoples only one refused, and still refuses, to be 
 Russified. This people is the Finns of Finland. 
 When the Russian Czar became their sovereign in 
 the beginning of the nineteenth century, they had 
 enjoyed for some generations a civilisation received 
 from Sweden, and through it, and by their own 
 cultivated intelligence, they were fully the equals 
 of the Russians. Till questions arose between 
 Finland and the Czars within our own time, no racial 
 issue was raised. The Finns have now developed a 
 strong national feeling, not without stimulation from 
 the study of their ancient lays and legends. 
 
 In another region where grave antagonisms have 
 recently appeared, the contact of divers races was 
 causing, some centuries ago, very little irritation. 
 In Hungary and Transylvania the Magyar element 
 was dominant, when not overborne by Turkish 
 rule; but not till some time after the Napoleonic
 
 20 RACE SENTIMENT 
 
 wars did there begin to be talk of antagonism 
 between Magyars, whether nobles or peasants, and 
 the subject Slavs or Roumans. In Bohemia, how- 
 ever, the antagonism of t\e Czechs to the then much 
 smaller German element was visible as early as the 
 fifteenth century, and found expression in the 
 quarrels that distracted the University of Prague. 
 These quarrels were not purely racial, but compli- 
 cated with the religious disputes of the Hussites and 
 the orthodox Catholics, and with scholastic disputes 
 between the Nominalists (mostly Germans) and the 
 Realist Party which embraced the bulk of Czech 
 teachers and students. 
 
 For other illustrations of the phenomena that arise 
 where races originally different dwell together under 
 the same sovereign, we need not go beyond our own 
 islands, where the Gael of Scotland and Ireland and 
 the Cymry of Wales stood over against the Sassenach, 
 who had come across the sea into Celtic lands. There 
 is always a certain slight repulsion between peoples 
 speaking different tongues and with characters 
 markedly unlike. Traces of such repulsion were to 
 be, and may possibly still be, found in Wales, where 
 I remember, just fifty years ago, to have noted 
 among the English on the border, a sKght measure of 
 scorn for what they thought the excitable instability 
 of the Welsh, and where the latter secretly resented 
 what seemed to them the brusque and overbearing 
 ways of the English. 
 
 In Scotland there was some antagonism between 
 the Celts of the northern hills and the English- 
 speaking Lowlanders, whose cattle were apt to be 
 driven off by the clansmen ; and even in the middle 
 of the eighteenth century Clydesdale and Galloway
 
 RACE SENTIMENT 21 
 
 had not forgotten the devastation wrought by that 
 " Highland Host " which the ministers of Charles 
 the Second had launched against the Covenanters. 
 It was Walter Scott and IJobert Burns who created 
 Scottish nationality and made Scotsmen of both 
 stocks proud each of the other, just as it was Scott 
 who, in Rob Roy and Waverley, as well as in The 
 Lady of the Lake, has given us the liveliest picture 
 of the two peoples while still unblent. Yet was not 
 Scott himself, in that striking passage * where the 
 chief of Clan Alpine casts at the Saxon Fitzjames the 
 defiance of the ancient tribes of Alban, importing 
 into the men of the sixteenth century ideas and 
 sentiments that were the product of his own historic 
 imagination ? Roderick Dhu is made to say 
 
 " The Gael, of plain and river heir, 
 Shall with strong hand redeem his share." 
 
 Clan Alpine hated the Lowlanders. But can the 
 thought of a secular strife of Celt and Saxon have 
 filled the breasts of wild MacGregors who fought 
 as fiercely against the Celtic Macdonalds and Mac- 
 farlanes to the north and west of them as they did 
 against the " Saxon " nobles of Lenox and Menteith ? 
 A lingering trace of the old mutual repulsion 
 appears in the dislike which Thomas Carlyle, a 
 typical Lowlander of peasant stock, expressed for 
 the wife of Thomas Campbell, the poet, with her 
 Highland accent and manner. This critical spirit 
 might have mollified Samuel Johnson, one of whose 
 complaints against the Scotch was their too frequent 
 appreciation of one another's merits : " No, sir, the 
 
 1 In the fifth canto of The Lady of the Lake.
 
 22 RACE SENTIMENT 
 
 Irish are a fair people. They never speak well of 
 one another." 
 
 The strife of the Celt and Teuton is commonly 
 supposed to have been more accentuated in Ireland 
 than elsewhere. But it was observed long ago, and 
 observed truly, that the Anglo-Norman adventurers 
 who conquered the best lands of that island, soon 
 became more Irish than the Irish themselves (ipsis 
 Hibernis Hiberniores). The offspring of Cromwell's 
 soldiers, settled in Tipperary, grew to be the White- 
 boys and Ribbonmen who gave so much trouble in 
 the earlier half of last century. They were few 
 among many of the aboriginal population. It was 
 only in the north-east corner of Ulster where a 
 pretty large and compact mass of Scots settlers had 
 been planted that the new element remained dis- 
 tinct, and this was due more to religion than to 
 race. Sixty years ago the Presbyterian farmers, 
 dwelling on the richer lands in the low country, 
 continued to speak broad Scotch, and talked of the 
 Roman Catholics who had been driven into the 
 glens of Antrim and the Mourne Mountains in 
 Down as " thae Eerish." 
 
 As regards the island generally, the sentiment of a 
 separate Irish nationality seems to date from the 
 strife, first over land and then over religion also, 
 which began in the time of Elizabeth. And even 
 in the days of the United Irishmen and the rebellion 
 of 1798, national feeling was not distinctively racial. 
 The chiefs of the Irish National party were men 
 of English or Scottish origin, like Wolfe Tone 
 and Thomas Russell (both Protestants), and their 
 Presbyterian allies in Belfast, such as Orr and 
 McCracken. The first Irishmen who were permeated
 
 RACE SENTIMENT 23 
 
 by Celtic traditions, or who used the Irish language 
 and the achievements of Irish heroes for popular 
 agitation, seem to have been Thomas Moore in 
 literature, and in politic^ Daniel O'Connell, the 
 end of whose career some of us now living can 
 remember. 1 Those who talk of " two nations in 
 Ireland " generally mean that the one consists of 
 the Gaelic aborigines, the other of the English and 
 Scottish immigrants. But if there be any truth 
 or fitness at all in the expression a question which 
 be it far from me to discuss neither of such nations 
 would consist wholly of Celtic, neither wholly of 
 Teutonic blood. 
 
 If there were time here and now to pass from the 
 Old World to the New, for the sake of examining 
 the phenomena of racial relations in those parts of the 
 western hemisphere which were thickly peopled when 
 the Spanish conquerors arrived, these phenomena 
 would be found to point to conclusions much the same 
 as those we have noted in the Old World. That the 
 American aborigines inspired in the invaders no 
 general sense of repulsion appears from the fact that 
 intermarriage began from the first. It went on so 
 largely that in these countries, Argentina and 
 Uruguay alone excepted, the bulk of the population 
 is to-day either native Indian or mixed. There 
 may be some few hundred thousand pure Spaniards 
 in Mexico, and nearly as many in Chile and in Cuba 
 (the mixture in that island being with negroes, not 
 Indians), but in the other republics a smaller pro- 
 portion. Between the Mestizos (men ofmixed blood) 
 and the pure-blooded Europeans there exists no 
 
 1 O'Connell convoked a great meeting to be held at Clontarf , 
 where Brian Boroimhe defeated the Danes and Icelanders.
 
 24 RACE SENTIMENT 
 
 social separation, much less enmity. Persons of 
 mixed race are practically reckoned as white. The 
 aboriginal Indians are on a lower level, being un- 
 educated, some of them dy labourers for the whites, 
 some uncivilised and living in a tribal state. They 
 are not disliked by the upper class, and they bear to 
 the latter no hatred beyond that aloofness and 
 timorous suspicion which they naturally feel for 
 those who despise and in some places oppress them. 
 It was long-continued injustice and oppression that 
 produced the only great Indian revolt, that led by 
 Tupac Amaru against the Spanish Viceroy of Peru 
 in 1780. Race sentiment has never been a factor 
 in the politics of Latin America (except in so far as 
 the oppressed, who are nearly all of the aboriginal 
 race, dislike the oppressors) ; and such sentiment has 
 indeed been always much weaker among the South 
 European peoples than among the Teutonic. In 
 Brazil as in South-east Africa, the Portuguese are 
 not unwilling to contract marriages with mulattos 
 or quadroons. 
 
 Into the large and painful question of the relations 
 of the coloured race with the whites in the Southern 
 States of the North American Union I need not 
 enter. Its present acuteness is due not only to the 
 fact of antecedent slavery, but to the unwise policy 
 followed in the first years after the Civil War of 
 handing over the lately conquered States to be 
 governed by white adventurers, put and kept in 
 office by negro votes. 
 
 As the United States is the most striking instance 
 of the power of a strong and well-defined national 
 type to impress itself on all accretions to the original 
 population giving unity to all the white people of a
 
 RACE SENTIMENT 25 
 
 blood now more mixed than can be found anywhere 
 else in the world, so Canada is an instance of how 
 easy it is for two races to remain quite distinct under 
 the same government, if each of them dwells by itself 
 in its own district. The French-speaking Canadians 
 have not been perceptibly Anglicised (except as 
 regards their political habits) during the century 
 and half that has seen them included in the 
 Dominion. Fortunately the absolutely equal share 
 they enjoy in self-government and the growth of a 
 sentiment of Canadian national pride, has prevented 
 any ill feeling between the two races. 
 
 If this hasty survey of the facts be correct, it 
 has shown us that down till the days of the French 
 Revolution there had been very little in any country, 
 or at any time, of self-conscious racial feeling. In 
 the ancient world it is discoverable only among the 
 Greeks and Phoenicians, for the national sentiment 
 of Israel was religious rather than racial : in the 
 mediaeval world it is scarcely visible at all, being ob- 
 scured by religious attraction or repulsion. There 
 were plenty of struggles between communities (tribes 
 and cities and kingdoms) belonging to some one 
 particular branch of mankind, and communities 
 belonging to some other branch, because political 
 communities have tended to form themselves upon 
 lines of local habitation and of speech. But, however 
 much men of different races may have striven with one 
 another, it was seldom any sense of racial opposition 
 that caused their strife. They fought for land. They 
 plundered one another. They sought glory by 
 conquest. They tried to force their religion on one 
 another. Sometimes, in recent days, they have, as 
 a means for enforcing uniformity, or rooting out
 
 26 RACE SENTIMENT 
 
 disaffection, tried to substitute their own language 
 for that of the conquered, as the Danes did in 
 Sleswig and the Prussians have been doing in 
 Posen. But, strong as,, patriotism and national 
 feeling might be, they did not think of themselves 
 in the terms of ethnology and in making war for 
 every other sort of reason never made it for the sake 
 of imposing their own type of civilisation. When a 
 subject community sought to shake off the tyranni- 
 cal rule of another, Race was not its war-cry. When 
 the Dutch rose against Philip II of Spain, it was 
 religion that moved them, as it was national feeling 
 that roused the Portuguese against the Spanish king 
 in 1640. In none of such cases did the thought of 
 racial distinctions come to the front. 
 
 In our own time things are altogether different. 
 The world is full of the rival pretensions and jarring 
 claims of races. We see many a human group with 
 a blood which it thinks its own mixed as it may 
 often be and at any rate, with a speech and tradi- 
 tions of its own, chafing under the dominance of some 
 alien people, and eager either to stand alone or to 
 unite with groups of a kindred stock. 1 Not to 
 speak of Greek and Armenian Christians under the 
 barbarous sway of the Turk, there is in Europe an 
 Italia irredenta. There are Slavs and Roumans rest- 
 less under the rule of Magyars, Czechs dissatisfied 
 with their position in the Austrian monarchy, 
 
 1 A grotesque instance of the way in which crude ethnological 
 notions may be twisted to political uses was furnished by a 
 small group of discontented Hindus and ex-Fenian Irishmen, 
 with some rather tepid support from a few German- Americans, 
 who, several years ago, formed in the United States what they 
 called a " Pan- Aryan League," to overthrow what they called 
 " the Robber Power of England."
 
 RACE SENTIMENT 27 
 
 Bulgarian Macedonians complaining of having been 
 placed beneath Serb dominion, Danes of North 
 Sleswig anxious to be reunited to Denmark, Poles 
 and Finns asking for autonomy. A great Slavonic 
 power has assumed the championship of all the 
 various Slavonic peoples, and they rally to her on 
 the ground of racial kinship. 1 Another great nation 
 claims to reunite all who anywhere speak any form 
 of its tongue, and having discovered the completest 
 kind of efficiency in learning, in science, and in the 
 arts of material life whether or no in the moral 
 sphere also, I will not venture to inquire it proposes 
 to extend the benefits of this type to other peoples, 
 and tells mankind, almost in the language of an 
 advertisement, that when it can supply the Best 
 they must be content with no other. Even we 
 ourselves seem to have raised apprehensions by too 
 frequently coupling Britannia's name with the 
 waves, and have been accused of course by those 
 who do not know how essentially modest we are of 
 claiming that we alone have discovered how to com- 
 bine peace, freedom and empire. Other examples 
 that might be given will occur to your minds. 
 
 National pride and a traditional rivalry more per- 
 vasive and more evident than before are tending to 
 degenerate into international hatreds. Why is this 
 happening in a time when the peoples know more of 
 one another than they ever did before, and are 
 linked by a far more active commerce as well as by 
 
 1 Before the Panslavic movement, which is quite recent, had 
 attained importance, Louis Napoleon, when he ruled in France, 
 tried to assert for her a sort of hegemony of the so-called " Latin 
 races," and used this pretext to justify his invasion of Mexico. 
 The experiment did not succeed, nor was the claim he made for 
 France recognised either in Italy or in Spain.
 
 28 RACE SENTIMENT 
 
 co-operation in the labours of science ? Why was 
 the racial element in national feeling so seldom 
 visible, and so weak when visible, in earlier days ? 
 Why so little race consciousness in ancient or 
 mediaeval times ? 
 
 The reason seems to be that men had till recently 
 thought little about the matter at all. In the 
 ancient world and the mediaeval world they, of 
 course, noticed the differences in aspect and language 
 and in the stage of progress attained which marked 
 off from one another different branches of the human 
 family. No traveller had ever a more intelligent 
 curiosity than Herodotus, and he often describes 
 the characteristics of races, sometimes touching also 
 upon their languages. But the ancients had no 
 notion of the classification of languages and of the 
 ethnical affinities of the peoples. They had not 
 learnt to talk of Indo-Europeans and Semites and 
 Turanians, nor had they been told that the Aryan 
 started from the slopes of the Hindu Kush, driving 
 his cattle before him, and fared always westward 
 till he arrived at the Ocean House at San Francisco 
 in a motor-car. They had no anthropology and 
 ethnology, just as they had no geology, though 
 the different strata in the earth's crust were there 
 for them to see, and they could have examined 
 the fossils therein just as we do. Their minds 
 had not been turned to the subject. That Greeks 
 were superior to barbarians, as, in later ages, that 
 Christians were better than Muslims or idolaters, 
 was enough for them. 
 
 We have now reached, if this sketch be in its broad 
 features correct I am far from claiming that it is 
 more than roughly true, for many qualifications
 
 RACE SENTIMENT 29 
 
 might have to be made in the details the following 
 conclusions 
 
 That in early times the^B were strong tribal in- 
 stincts and tribal antagonisms, but no more general 
 hostility between different racial groups than existed 
 between tribes or peoples of kindred stock : 
 
 That in the progress of civilisation tribal instincts 
 and antagonisms were largely superseded by an- 
 tagonisms based on the rivalry of political com- 
 munities, and of their sovereigns, as well as (after the 
 rise of Christianity and Islam) by religious enmities : 
 
 That although there was always an undercurrent 
 of tribal instinct or racial feeling, these sentiments 
 became powerful only when reinforced by religious 
 passion or by the lust of conquest : 
 
 That the modern sentiment of Nationality, based 
 at first chiefly on community of language literature 
 and historical traditions, was visible before the end 
 of the eighteenth century, and grew rapidly during 
 the nineteenth, taking, as it grew, more and more of 
 a racial character. 
 
 The question follows : How came it that the 
 sense of Race Consciousness, running underground, 
 so to speak, during so many centuries, suddenly 
 emerged to become a tremendous force in inter- 
 national relations, a sort of dialytic power capable 
 of breaking up kingdoms and dragging their com- 
 ponent parts in different directions ? 
 
 Several reasons may be suggested for your con- 
 sideration. 
 
 The American Revolution, and after it the French 
 Revolution, aroused in the peoples a sense of what
 
 30 RACE SENTIMENT 
 
 one may call their collective political world-life as 
 well as of their right to share in the government 
 at home. Henceforth, popular sentiment became a 
 factor in international relations as well as in domestic 
 questions. The nation, which had formerly left 
 international politics to its sovereign, throwing itself 
 into whatever wars he or the ruling class might 
 undertake, now realised itself as a force among the 
 forces of the world at large. Finding its unity in 
 its common blood, it attached a new value to the 
 racial bond. Rivalries and wars, hitherto merely 
 dynastic, had now become popular. Simultaneously, 
 racial groups that lay under alien dominion awoke 
 to the feeling that freedom could be won only by 
 rejecting the external power that held it down by 
 arms. Thus the principle of Nationality inspired 
 Greeks and Italians and Poles and Magyars, and 
 still later, Serbs, Roumans, Bulgarians, and Arme- 
 nians; being, in these last-named cases, powerfully 
 reinforced by religious feeling. Thus in Germany 
 the movement for popular self-government, which 
 burst forth in 1848, went hand in hand with the 
 movement for political unity under a national govern- 
 ment, and tended to die down when unity had been 
 attained and when power and prosperity, rather 
 than freedom, became the national ideals. The 
 old traditions of each people were filled with a 
 new spirit. Race consciousness sprang into life and 
 became the core of Nationality. 
 
 While these spiritual forces were growing stronger, 
 the progress of science was enabling the larger 
 nations to spread out their trade and their emigrants 
 beyond the seas. The rivalry of nations extended 
 itself into new fields. Competition in manufacture
 
 RACE SENTIMENT 31 
 
 and in world commerce became brisk. Territory and 
 colonies were desired for the sake of the wealth they 
 might bring to the mother country ; and the aggressive 
 ambition which had formerly stirred monarchs was 
 now transferred to the peoples striving in the vaster 
 arena of the world and each feeling its pride challenged 
 and its efforts stimulated by the progress of its rivals. 
 
 Meanwhile the learned had been at work in ex- 
 ploring the fields of history and philology. The 
 origins of the several families of mankind were 
 investigated and their affinities set forth. The old 
 annals were edited and republished, the old poems 
 popularised. The ancient exploits of the race were 
 held up to admiration, and each people was supplied 
 by historians and poets with fuel to feed the flame 
 of national pride. It was all natural, and in one 
 sense it was laudable. Men's souls are raised by the 
 recollection of great deeds done by their forefathers. 
 But the study of the past has its dangers when it 
 makes men transfer past claims and past hatreds to 
 the present. A sage friend remarked to me lately 
 while we were discussing the complications of South- 
 eastern Europe : " How much better if we could 
 get rid of history altogether ! " The learned men 
 and the literary men, often themselves intoxicated 
 by their own enthusiasms, never put their books to 
 a worse use than when they filled each people with 
 a conceit of its own super-eminent gifts and merits. 
 
 A great German writer, to whom the possession 
 of a second and older nationality gave an unusual 
 detachment and breadth of view, saw the evil that 
 lurked in this undue exaltation of racial sentiment. 
 Heinrich Heine more than once warned his country- 
 men against the vanity and bigotry it might tend
 
 32 RACE SENTIMENT 
 
 to foster, and bade them hope for a time when reason 
 rather than prejudice would rule the minds of peoples 
 and guide them to liberty and peace " the peace 
 of the world as well a$ peace within their own 
 borders." 1 
 
 Heine's counsel has not been taken in his own 
 country, or perhaps in any other. Possibly, indeed, 
 the world has in this respect gone back rather than 
 forward. Those of us whose recollection extends 
 over half a century sometimes think that there was 
 then a stronger sense of the allegiance which the 
 members of every nation owe to Humanity, and a 
 more general sympathy with the efforts of back- 
 ward peoples towards freedom and progress than 
 the last few decades have shown. We are often told 
 that the advance of democracy is tending to dispose 
 nations to peace. It may be so, though longer 
 experience is needed before this can be deemed 
 certain. But democracy has not, so far, made 
 nations less selfish or less vain of their own greatness. 
 
 That glorification of national virtues and achieve- 
 ments on which I have been dwelling, might at 
 other times have been a harmless form of pleasure. 
 But it came at a time of keen rivalry, when 
 everything that tended to stimulate racial vanity 
 
 1 Cf. Franzosische Zustande and Reisebilder II, 29. I owe 
 these two references to the kindness of Mr. Joseph R. Fisher. 
 
 In the diverting poem (written in 1844) which begins with the 
 lines 
 
 "Das ist der Teutoburger Wald, 
 Den Tacitus beschrieben 
 Das ist der klassische Morast 
 Wo Varus stecken geblieben " 
 
 Heine expends his satiric wit upon the extravagant Teutonism 
 which had made its appearance even in his time.
 
 RACE SENTIMENT 33 
 
 was caught up and used by those statesmen and 
 other leaders who sought to embark on policies of 
 expansion and aggression even at the cost of rousing 
 national jealousies or embittering national animosi- 
 ties. We all know how vanity may, in individual 
 men, become a powerful spring of action, and in- 
 tensify energy even while it disturbs the balance of 
 judgment. It is the same with nations. When 
 convinced of their own superiority they may wish 
 to assert it by force, contemning their neighbours, 
 and fancying that they hold a commission from 
 Providence or Fate to improve the rest of the world 
 against its will. 
 
 As we see to-day that science has made war more 
 hideous and terrible, so we must also confess that 
 learning and literature have done something to 
 prepare nations for war. A sounder learning and 
 a deeper insight might have corrected this danger 
 and taught the peoples that they have at least as 
 much to gain by co-operation as by competition 
 and more to gain from friendship than from hatred. 
 But there is a faculty in man that is sometimes 
 prone to choose the evil and reject the good. 
 
 One topic more remains on which a few words 
 may be said : What is likely to be the future of 
 Races and of that racial sentiment whose strength 
 we see to-day ? 
 
 Everything points to a reduction of the number 
 of human stocks and languages. The weaker will 
 disappear, some by extinction, as in the case of 
 many small aboriginal tribes in Africa, for instance, 
 and in the two Americas, and in the isles of the 
 Pacific. Where two stocks dwell together on the 
 same ground the stronger type will assimilate and
 
 34 RACE SENTIMENT 
 
 absorb the weaker. In the days of Herodotus, there 
 may have been eighty or a hundred languages spoken 
 in the countries all round the Mediterranean ; to-day 
 there are about a dozen.^ In the whole world there 
 are barely two dozen that possess literatures and 
 are likely to hold their ground, for a race without 
 a language of its own seldom remains for long 
 unabsorbed by its neighbours. 
 
 When races dwell together on the same ground, 
 or in close proximity, as the Magyars and Saxons 
 live among or close to the Roumans in Transylvania, 
 or the Lithuanians near to Poles and Russians, or 
 the Ainos among the Japanese, the more numerous 
 or otherwise stronger element ultimately absorbs 
 the weaker. Intermarriage is a more potent factor 
 in the blending process than government or com- 
 merce; and intermarriage always goes on except 
 where checked by differences of colour or differences 
 of religion. Even these two causes of separation 
 may not be permanent. The latter at any rate 
 seems likely to lose some of its power, and colour 
 repulsion is strong only among the Teutonic peoples. 
 In the competition of races the principle holds : " To 
 him that hath shall be given." The races already 
 great become greater, absorbing or assimilating the 
 smaller, so that a time seems likely to arrive when 
 a few great races, perhaps only six or seven, will 
 practically divide the world between them. Which 
 of these races will also constitute great States it is 
 of course vain to conjecture. We have some data 
 for forecasting the future of languages and races, 
 but none fit to be made the basis of any political 
 speculations beyond the next forty years. 
 
 As the number of ethnic groups diminishes and
 
 RACE SENTIMENT 35 
 
 as each of those that survive becomes more 
 unified by the dominance of one national type, 
 it may seem natural to expect that in each of them 
 race consciousness will become more intense. If 
 we can guess at the future from the recent past, 
 the pride and the rivalry evident to-day may 
 probably continue, perhaps become even more 
 pronounced. It need not, however, be assumed 
 that these feelings will necessarily lead to more 
 strife. Race sentiment, taken alone, has never been 
 a cause of war : it has merely aggravated other 
 grounds of enmity ; and even now it is not so much 
 itself a motive for self-assertion as a particular 
 form of national vanity. When the quarrels of 
 South-eastern Europe have been settled as it may 
 be hoped they will be by a due recognition of 
 ecclesiastical and racial sentiment and a consequent 
 redrawing of the present ethnologic ally indefensible 
 frontiers, a period of stability may set in which will 
 allow race passions to subside. It may also be 
 suggested that when the suspended struggles between 
 Capital and Labour are resumed, nations will be too 
 much divided by these troubles to attack their neigh- 
 bours ; and that among the labouring masses a sense 
 of class solidarity with the workers in other countries 
 may override national arrogance and the sense of 
 racial unity, and may check the spirit of aggression. 
 Those who last June saw in such international class 
 solidarity a guarantee of peace have been dis- 
 appointed, just as those also have been undeceived 
 who expected commercial interests to hold back 
 the dogs of war. Yet it is possible that in the 
 years of exhaustion which must follow the present 
 measureless destruction of life as well as wealth,
 
 36 RACE SENTIMENT 
 
 economic issues may leave little room for any 
 others. 
 
 How unpredictable is the action of the forces 
 that govern the affair of states we have now all 
 learnt to our astonished grief. Things undreamt 
 of sixty, forty, twenty years ago have happened. 
 A racial quarrel has lit up a war on a scale vaster 
 than the world had seen before, for more than half 
 mankind is involved. An invading army has carried 
 sudden ruin and slaughter over a peaceful country 
 
 " Amazement in their van with Terror joined, 
 And Sorrow's faded form, and Solitude behind." 
 
 Yet even this cataclysm of violence and suffering 
 need not make us despair of the future. Its lesson 
 is that the doctrines and passions deep-rooted 
 passions whence these evils spring, can be removed 
 only by the slow and steady working of great 
 spiritual forces. What the world needs is an elimi- 
 nation of the feelings which in most perhaps in 
 all nations make for jealousy and hatred, which 
 prompt men to defiance and aggression. The situa- 
 tion is in some respects worse than in the days 
 when dynastic ambitions were the chief cause of 
 war, for it was then possible to arrange a settlement 
 by family alliances, whereas to-day the passions 
 of whole peoples are involved. Whatever condem- 
 nation may be passed and justly passed upon 
 reckless leaders and a ruthless caste that lives for 
 and worships war, it is the popular sentiment be- 
 hind them, the exaggeration of racial vanity and 
 national pretensions, that has been and is the real 
 source of mischief, for without such sentiments no 
 caste could exert its baleful power. Such senti-
 
 RACE SENTIMENT 37 
 
 ments are not confined to any single nation, and they 
 are even more widespread in the wealthier and more 
 educated classes than in the humbler. As it is 
 largely by the educated, oy students and writers 
 as well as by political leaders, that the mischief 
 has been done, more or less everywhere, even if 
 most conspicuously in one country, so it should 
 be the function and the privilege of thinkers and 
 writers as well as of practical men to enforce a 
 broader, saner, and more sympathetic view of the 
 world as a vast community, in which every race has 
 much to give and much to receive, to point out that 
 it is by the co-operation, unconscious but unceasing, 
 by the reciprocal teaching and learning of the more 
 gifted races, that all progress has been achieved. 
 Perfection is attained not by the ascendancy of any 
 one form of excellence, but by the blending of what 
 is best in many different forms. 1 Every race and 
 nation needs to learn that it ought not, even in its 
 own interest, to desire predominance, nor strive to 
 impose its own type on the world; and needs to 
 recognise that it exists not solely for its own 
 good but for that of its fellow-creatures also, and 
 owes a moral responsibility to the whole human 
 family. 
 
 A general recognition of such principles may 
 seem to be a long way off, but is there anything left 
 for men of good will to do save to work patiently 
 towards such an end, with faith in the spiritual 
 forces and in the ultimate victory of truth? 
 
 "It is more blessed to give than to receive." 
 This may seem to be a hard saying which no race 
 or nation will accept. Yet ought not the highest 
 
 1 'Ex TWV Stae^epovTaiv KaAXicmy dpfj.ovia.
 
 88 RACE SENTIMENT 
 
 pride of a nation to be in what it can give to others 
 out of its own abundance ? As we honour the great 
 figures of the past, legislators and discoverers, 
 artists and poets, for what they have bequeathed 
 to us, ought not a people also to be chiefly honoured 
 for the services it renders, and for the gifts it bestows 
 upon all mankind, and will not posterity count this 
 to be its truest glory ? 
 
 Printed in Great Britain for the UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PRBSS, Ltd. 
 by RICHARD CLAY & SONS, Ltd., London and Buugay.
 
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