contact between its members is rendered impossible, then a manifestation of a different nature appears—that of disruption or swarming. The disintegrating tendency is just as much a part of Nature's evolutionary contrivance as is the isolating and unifying effect of the tribal spirit. For breeding purposes the group must be kept within certain bounds. Modern man has overcome the tendency to disruption on the part of massed communities by the invention of means of rapid intercommunication. The daily press, the hourly post, and a network of electric wires can bind a hundred millions of modern people into a sentient tribal web.

The Origin of Race Feeling

Small isolated communities are the cradles in which new tribal breeds of mankind are reared. But how do new races arise? If isolation were to be continued throughout long intervals of time we may justly infer that the physical and mental characters of a breed would become more and more emphasized until a stage of differentiation is reached which we must regard as racial. A racial spirit is merely the tribal spirit matured and consolidated. The manifestations which begin as tribal, end, in the course of time, by becoming racial. We cannot account for the differentiation of mankind into distinct races, nor the existence of many intermediate forms which link one human race to another, unless we postulate the existence in mankind of a deeply rooted tribal mechanism.

Transformation of a Tribal into a National Spirit

Having thus glanced at the nature of the instinctive machinery which has controlled human communities throughout the greater part of man's history we now return to ask ourselves: What have become of the tribal instincts which were so deeply grafted in the nature of our ancestors? Our tribal forefathers are not so far removed from us. We can still trace the distribution of the Highland clans in Scotland; the tribal spirit is still strong in the Scottish glens. The organization of Ireland was on a tribal basis even when the Anglo-Normans settled there; in subsequent centuries, even until the times of the British settlements, the tribal spirit was still rampant in Ireland; even now it is very much alive. Two thousand years ago Great Britain was in a tribal state from end to end. Practically every one of us is the descendant of ancestors who, forty generations back, were exercising their tribal instincts to the full. The Roman occupation did much to break down the tribal organization of Britain; the Saxon colonization did still more. The forces, however, which forged the tribal links into a national chain were commerce, communication, and the building of massed populations. Tribes were united to form nations, but there is no greater mistake than to suppose that the subconscious tribal impulses or instincts were wholly converted into a sense of common nationality.

Tribal Instincts now manifested in Everyday Life

We have only to watch our commoner actions and predilections to see that in our modern States the spirit of nationality has only absorbed a fraction of our tribal instincts. Every one of you regards your own college and all the men belonging to it with pride; other colleges and other men you view with a critical eye. You cheer your own crews and teams; you want to see them beat all their rivals; you take sides. In all of these actions and prejudices you manifest the elementary basis of a tribal spirit. Every week we see hundreds of thousands attend football or other competitive games, not so much to see an exhibition of skill as to see their own side win. The spectators, as they cheer, are moved by a tribal spirit. If we do not belong to a cricketing county we may go so far as to adopt one as a foster-parent in order that we may exercise our tribal instincts in being elated by its success or cast down by its failure. Local national politics give us many opportunities of exercising our tribal instincts. In politics we have to take sides; a political party is a tribal organization, using ancient means for compelling a unity of sentiment amongst its members. The church, too, provides modern tribesmen with occasions for exercising their inherited impulses; a heresy hunt finds its counterpart in the most ancient of tribal communities. Women even more than men are slaves of their tribal instincts; they are as susceptible to the dictates of fashion as their ancient sisters were impressionable to the movings of the tribal spirit. The local spirit which is so inherent a trait of the countryman, particularly in the case of the Scotsman, Irishman, and Welshman, is another, and often a very powerful, manifestation of the tribal spirit. Men from the same locality or district, when they go to live in foreign communities, are drawn together by a clannish sentiment—a manifestation of their inherited tribal instincts. Turn in what direction you will, you will find amongst modern peoples innumerable tribal manifestations which find no room for display in the more intellectual exhibitions of a national spirit.

In present-day politics we see the tribal spirit striving to work out certain novel effects. Although in ancient times a tribal frontier usually corresponded to a territorial frontier, such was not always the case. The tribal spirit is strong enough to hold a people together even when there is no territorial boundary. In modern massed populations, as in the organization of both ancient and modern India, the tribal spirit works so as to produce frontiers between classes of citizens; trades unions are in essence artificial tribal organizations. Except for the existence of tribal instincts within the inherited mental organization of the manual workers, such unions were impossible. Many writers believe that class or sectional tribal organizations can actually be made to cut across national and even racial frontiers. We have seen, however, that at the declaration of war, all such sectional bonds snap, for war is the match which fires the tribal spirit, exalts it to a national flame, and destroys intertribal schisms. All the petty manifestations of the tribal spirit are changed by war; the impulses which moved men and women in peace time to games and sports, to party politics, to heresy hunting—even to displays of fashion—are turned to patriotic desires and deeds.

A Knowledge of Tribal and Racial Spirit is essential for Statesmen

Several modern statesmen have grasped the important part played by the tribal spirit in unifying the action of modern nations. I shall cite only three examples to illustrate this form of political insight—Bismarck, Lincoln, and Lloyd George. Bismarck employed war to rouse and unify the German peoples; three campaigns were sufficient to raise an unbounded feeling of tribal confidence and superiority. He gave the German Empire a sharply demarcated tribal frontier; he purposely surrounded his country with a ring of animosity, true to his tribal instincts. Abraham Lincoln's tribal problem was of another kind. The conditions which led up to the Civil War concerned the freeing of slaves; but Lincoln made the war, when it became inevitable, an intratribal quarrel. He realized that the danger to the United States was disintegration, one which must continually threaten all nationalities compounded out of great massed populations. Lincoln therefore made the main issue of the war the right of a single state or a confederation of states to secede from the main tribe or union. The Civil War determined the issue in favour of the North: the natural process of tribal disruption was declared illegal. Lloyd George's task was of a