So far as likeness is necessary it is apparently a likeness of essential ideas and, still more, of sentiments, appropriate to the activity in question. Thus a Japanese writer explains the patriotic unity of his countrymen by their common devotion to the Mikado and the imperial family. “When a Japanese says ‘I love my country,’ a great or even the greater part of his idea of his ‘country’ is taken up by the emperor and the imperial family ... his forefathers and descendants are also taken into account.” “In joy and in sorrow he believes that they (his own ancestors) are with him. He serves them as if they were living. And these ancestors whom he loves and reveres were all loyal to their emperors in their days; so he feels _he_ must be loyal to _his_ emperor. “Nothing is so real to him as what he feels; and he feels that with him are united the past, the present and the future generations of his countrymen.” “Thus fully conscious of the intense sympathy of his compatriots, both dead and living, and swelled with lofty anticipations of his glorious destiny, no danger can appall and no toil can tire the real Japanese soldier.”[144] In America unity of spirit is intense, and yet singularly headless and formless. There is no capital city, no guiding upper class, no monarch, no creed, scarcely even a dominating tradition. It seems to be a matter of common allegiance to vague sentiments of freedom, kindliness and hope. And this very circumstance, that the American spirit is so little specialized and so much at one with the general spirit of human nature, does more than anything else to make it influential, and potent in the assimilation of strange elements. The only adequate proof of a lack of solidarity is inefficiency in total action. There may be intense strife of parties and classes which has nothing really disintegrating in it; but when we see, as was apparently the case in Russia not long ago, that the hour of conflict with an external enemy does not unite internal forces but increases their divergence, it is clear that something is wrong. It is sometimes said that France has more solidarity than Great Britain or the United States, the ground being that we have a less fluent unity of the social mind, a more vigorous self-assertion of the individual. But this is as dubious as to say that the contention of athletes among themselves will prevent their uniting to form a strong team. Yet there does seem to be an interesting difference in kind between the sort of unity, of common discipline and sentiment, which exists among the French and that of English or Americans—these latter, however different, being far more like each other in this respect than either to the French. The contrast seems to me so illuminating, as a study of social types, that I will spend a few pages in attempting to expound it.