The great hopeful fact of it all is this: tolerance begets tolerance. That hatred causes hatred is well known, for it is the normal course of every personal conflict or national war. Each unfriendly act of one side is followed by one of the other, until nations enter warfare all ready to hate one another, and leave it hating more than ever. But friendship, fairness, tolerance, have the same way of spreading by their own inner force. If America discriminates against Japanese immigrants, the Japanese think of ways to show their dislike of America. But if America gives back the Boxer indemnity to China, the Chinese send their students to America, then these return to their native land with an attitude of friendliness, and the process of tolerance and peace, once begun, grows by its own power. Lines of tolerance radiate from every true center of justice, of inquiry, of religion. Human growth is slow, but we can mark its methods and take part in its tremendous process. CHAPTER IV. AMERICAN HISTORY—A DEVELOPMENT OF GROUPS All history may reasonably be regarded as a process of group minds in conflict and association, struggle and integration. Probably this method of study will bring out more genuine facts and a more fundamental order of causation than political or military or economic history alone; at the least, it presents one significant and important mode of studying human association in both the past and present. From this point of view, Greece was a congeries of competitive city states, which united only against an outside foe; Israel was the union of twelve different tribes, together with the Canaanites whom they subdued; Rome was a product of the various organizations, the patricians and plebeians; England the growth into each other of the successive waves of conquest—Celts, Romans, Saxons, Normans—and the more recent peaceful immigrants. From this point of view, the United States is conspicuous among all nations for the number and variety of its groups and for their union (on the whole) by a federal principle of agreement, rather than a forcible levelling and unification from without. And this process of group synthesis is not a modern one only, as it is sometimes erroneously considered; it is characteristic of the piece-meal, haphazard colonization from the very outset; it pervaded the Revolutionary army, and was the outstanding fact that confronted the framers of the Federal Constitution in 1787. 1. E. B. Greene sums up the reasons for adopting the Constitution in this way: [60]The movement for a more effective union was partly the work of far-sighted leaders who could look beyond state boundaries to the larger interests of the country as a whole ... another group were beginning to see that the weakness of Congress might have something to do with troubles nearer home.