in Down and Antrim. These counties were settled in the earlier decades of the seventeenth century by a process of spontaneous colonization. The movement commenced in a small way in 1606 by Hugh Montgomery, a south Scotch laird, purchasing a large tract of the O'Neill's land in county Down. He settled that land with his relations and tenantry—a farming community. Such was the beginning of the colonial fringe on the north-east coast of Ulster. The fringe was fed by a spontaneous exodus of farming folk mainly from the south of Scotland, but the stream was also kept up and maintained from the north of England and from Scottish counties as far north as those of Aberdeen and Inverness. The men who flocked to Ulster found it easier to raise crops on the greensward of Antrim than on the heathery hill-sides of Aberdeenshire. Herein we see a repetition, but on a small scale, of the Saxon colonization of England. The settled communities established by the Scotch pioneers sheltered and nursed the national spirit they brought with them. As the fringe of colonists expanded it came to cover Antrim and Down and made inroads on adjacent counties, overwhelming and absorbing the tribal organization of the native population. In 1672 Sir William Petty estimated that there were 100,000 Scots in Ulster. Thus in the north-east of Ireland there has been established a people which manifests all the qualities of a new nationality. History can explain to us how it has come about that the inhabitants of Ireland, all of them derivatives of the same breed of Europeans, should be divided into two peoples, each possessed by its own peculiar sense of nationality. The north is predominantly industrial and Protestant; the south is predominantly pastoral and Catholic. But these circumstances are not sufficient to account for a national—almost a racial—antagonism between the inhabitants of a single small island who have so much to gain by a sense of unity. To understand national antagonisms we have to look at the inheritance which modern man has carried with him from his distant past.

The Nature of Tribal Instinct

I now enter the third stage of my argument. In the first I cited and discussed the various forms in which racial and national feelings are manifested by various peoples abroad; in my second I dealt with the nature of the various national movements at home. We now set out in search of the root from which the flower of our complex modern civilization has sprung. In the world of to-day we see many peoples exhibiting every phase in the evolution of that organization which permits mankind to live in massed populations. Fortunately for us there yet survive, in outlandish parts of the earth, remnants of native races retaining the primitive organization which guided mankind through that great hinterland of time lying between the emergence from apedom and the dawn of the modern world. For the student of sociology the immense primitive first stage of man's history is by far the more important. In his Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin draws a picture of the Fuegians which gives us a real insight into the ancient state of social organization. Spencer and Gillan supply us with complementary pictures representing the conditions of life among native tribes of Central Australia. These primitive peoples live on the natural produce of the territory which they inhabit and claim as their own. Their social organization represents for us the conditions in which the modern races of mankind were evolved. It is in such primitive societies that there must have existed the machinery which differentiated mankind into races and racial breeds. It is in the long first phase that we must search for the origin of the social impulses and tendencies which have come down to modern man by inheritance.[1]

When we survey a country still in the most primitive stage of human society, the first observation to impress us is the fact that its inhabitants are separated into definitely isolated groups. Such groups are usually small, consisting of men, women, and children belonging to several closely related families and numbering two or three hundred souls. Each group, forming an elemental community, occupies, and considers itself the owner of, a definite tract of country; there is developed in them a feeling—an attachment—which serves to bind them to the soil on which they live. When we look at the nature of the bonds which serve to bind the members of a primitive community together, we see that they are formed out of subconscious impulses or instincts. These instincts form an essential part of the machinery of organization. There is usually no head man or chieftain to determine the action of the community; there is no deliberative assembly to lay down rules of conduct. In Galton's phrase the members of a primitive community form 'a sentient web', dominated by traditional beliefs and customs. I have no wish to analyse the subconscious states and instinctive reactions which rule and bind together the members of a primitive community; what I want to make clear is that the tribal instincts have above all an isolating effect. These instincts serve not only as a machinery for binding the members of a community together, but also as a means of separating them from all surrounding groups. Within the community this machinery compels unity of sentiment and of action; it serves to repress schism and faction. But the tribal machinery is operative only up to the territorial boundaries of the community. At that limit the tribal instincts immediately change in their mode of action. The tribal instincts surround the community with a frontier, across which there is no peaceful traffic, only robbery and plunder; or at the best covert enmity. The tribal frontier is also a blood barrier; across it the tribal instinct forbids any form of peaceful matrimonial exchange or tribal intermixture. Nothing impressed Darwin so much as the ring of neutral territory which surrounded the primitive Fuegian settlements.

Tribal Isolation provides the Conditions necessary for Race-breeding

The tribal or clannish spirit tends to manifest itself in many forms, but in all its varieties there is a common factor—that of isolation. At first sight we are tempted to regard the tribal spirit as part of a machinery evolved for the protection and survival of a primitive community, but to any one who has searched for conditions which will explain the origin of separate races of mankind, the conviction grows that the tribal spirit is an essential part of Nature's evolutionary machinery. It was in these isolated cradles of primitive mankind that Nature nursed and reared new races. When a breeder wishes to produce a new type of animal, or to preserve a 'sport', his first step is to isolate the group of animals with which he is to experiment. The isolated stock becomes the cradle in which he hopes to rear his new breed. The experimental breeder, in such instances, copies the conditions which rule in primitive human communities. Under modern civilization Nature's cradles have been smashed to atoms, but the tribal instincts which Nature intended for the propagation of new breeds of humanity have come down to modern man in undiminished force. Hence our present national and racial troubles.

The Conditions of Tribal Disintegration

The tribal spirit, which maintains the unity of an elementary community, is efficient just so long as personal contact between its members is possible. If a tribal community becomes overgrown, so that mutual