The replacement of individual by collective pugnacity is most clearly illustrated by barbarous peoples living in small, strongly organized communities. Within such communities individual combat and even expressions of personal anger may be almost completely suppressed, while the pugnacious instinct finds itself in perpetual warfare between communities whose relations remain subject to no law. As a rule no material benefit is gained, and often none is sought, in these tribal wars.... All are kept in constant fear of attack, whole villages are often exterminated, and the population is in this way kept down very far below the limit at which any pressure on the means of subsistence could arise. This perpetual warfare, like the squabbles of a roomful of quarrelsome children, seems to be almost wholly and directly due to the uncomplicated operation of the instinct of pugnacity. No material benefits are sought; a few heads and sometimes a slave or two are the only trophies gained, and if one asks an intelligent chief why he keeps up this senseless practice, the best reason he can give is that unless he does so his neighbors will not respect him and his people, and will fall upon them and exterminate them. Now, how does such hostility as that indicated in this passage differ from the hostility which marks international differences in our day? In certain very evident respects. It does not suffice that the foreigner should be merely a foreigner for us to want to kill him: there must be some conflict of interest. The English are completely indifferent to the Scandinavian, the Belgian, the Dutchman, the Spaniard, the Austrian, and the Italian, and are supposed for the moment to be greatly in love with the French. The German is the enemy. But ten years ago it was the Frenchman who was the enemy, and Mr. Chamberlain was talking of an alliance with the Germans--England's natural allies, he called them--while it was for France that he reserved his attacks.[106] It cannot be, therefore, that there is any inherent racial hostility in English national character, because the Germans have not changed their nature in ten years, nor the French theirs. If to-day the French are England's quasi-allies and the Germans her enemies, it is simply because their respective interests or apparent interests have modified in the last ten years, and their political preferences have modified with them. In other words, national hostilities follow the exigencies of real or imagined political interests. Surely the point need not be labored, seeing that England has boxed the compass of the whole of Europe in her likes and dislikes, and poured her hatred upon the Spaniards, the Dutch, the Americans, the Danes, the Russians, the Germans, the French, and again the Germans, all in turn. The phenomenon is a commonplace of