When a nation takes to itself the idea of conscious direction, as by a fortunate combination of circumstances Germany has been induced to do, it is plain that some choice of a principle of national unity will be its first and most important task. It is plain, also, from the considerations we have just laid down, that such a principle of national unity must necessarily be a manifestation of the social instinct, and that the choice is necessarily limited to one of three types of social habit which alone Nature has fitted gregarious animals to follow. No nation has ever made a conscious choice amongst these three types, but circumstances have led to the adoption of one or another of them often enough for history to furnish many suggestive instances. The more or less purely aggressive or protective form has been adopted for the most part by primitive peoples. The history of the natives of North America and Australia furnishes examples of {168} almost pure types of both. The aggressive type was illustrated very fully by the peoples who profited by the disintegration of the Roman Empire. These northern barbarians showed in the most perfect form the lupine type of society in action. The ideals and feelings exemplified by their sagas are comprehensible only when one understands the biological significance of them. It was a society of wolves marvellously indomitable in aggression but fitted for no other activity in any corresponding degree, and always liable to absorption by the peoples they had conquered. They were physically brave beyond belief, and made a religion of violence and brutality. To fight was for them man’s supreme activity. They were restless travellers and explorers, less out of curiosity than in search of prey, and they irresistibly overran Europe in the missionary zeal of the sword and torch, each man asking nothing of Fate but, after a career of unlimited outrage and destruction, to die gloriously fighting. It is impossible not to recognize the psychological identity of these ideals with those which we might suppose a highly developed breed of wolves to entertain. With all its startling energy, and all its magnificent enterprise, the lupine type of society has not proved capable of prolonged survival. Probably its inherent weakness is the very limited scope of interest it provides for active and progressive minds, and the fact that it tends to engender a steadily accumulating hostility in weaker but more mentally progressive peoples to which it has no correspondingly steady resistiveness to oppose.