Most of the great societies which have developed a high civilization
and have played a dominant part in the world have been--and
are--artificial; not merely in social structure, but in the sense of
including totally different race types. A great nation rarely belongs
to any one race, though its citizens generally have one essentially
national speech. Yet the curious fact remains that these great
artificial societies acquire such unity that in each one all the parts
feel a subtle sympathy, and move or cease to move, go forward or go
back, all together, in response to some stir or throbbing, very
powerful, and yet not to be discerned by our senses. National unity is
far more apt than race unity to be a fact to reckon with; until indeed
we come to race differences as fundamental as those which divide from
one another the half-dozen great ethnic divisions of mankind, when
they become so important that differences of nationality, speech, and
creed sink into littleness.
An ethnological map of Europe in which the peoples were divided
according to their physical and racial characteristics, such as
stature, coloration, and shape of head, would bear no resemblance
whatever to a map giving the political divisions, the nationalities,
of Europe; while on the contrary a linguistic map would show a general
correspondence between speech and nationality. The northern Frenchman
is in blood and physical type more nearly allied to his
German-speaking neighbor than to the Frenchman of the Mediterranean
seaboard; and the latter, in his turn, is nearer to the Catalan than
to the man who dwells beside the Channel or along the tributaries of
the Rhine. But in essential characteristics, in the qualities that
tell in the make-up of a nationality, all these kinds of Frenchmen
feel keenly that they are one, and are different from all outsiders,
their differences dwindling into insignificance, compared with the
extraordinary, artificially produced, resemblances which bring them
together and wall them off from the outside world. The same is true
when we compare the German who dwells where the Alpine springs of the
Danube and the Rhine interlace, with the physically different German
of the Baltic lands. The same is true of Kentishman, Cornishman, and
Yorkshireman in England.
In dealing, not with groups of human beings in simple and primitive
relations, but with highly complex, highly specialized, civilized, or
semi-civilized societies, there is need of great caution in drawing
analogies with what has occurred in the development of the animal
world. Yet even in these cases it is curious to see how some of the
phenomena in the growth and disappearance of these complex, artificial
groups of human beings resemble what has happened in myriads of
instances in the history of life on this planet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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