The American nation is interesting in this connexion. If we ask—Why is their public life on a relatively low level, in spite of so many favouring conditions, including a healthy and strong public opinion?—the answer is that they have been until recently too much shut off from collective intercourse with other nations, too far removed from the region of conflict and rivalry. And judicious well-wishers of the American nation rejoice that it has recently entered more fully into the international arena, and has not continued to pursue the policy of isolation, which was long in favour; because, as is already manifest, this fuller intercourse and intenser rivalry with other nations must render fuller and more effective their national spirit, develop the national will and raise the national life to a higher plane, giving to individuals higher ends and motives than the mere accumulation of wealth, and removing that self-complacency as regards their national existence which hitherto has characterised them in common with the peoples of Thibet and China. CHAPTER XII IDEAS IN NATIONAL LIFE We have seen that the idea of the nation can and does, in virtue of the formation of the sentiment of devotion to it, lead men to choose and decide and act for the sake of the nation; they desire the welfare and the good of the nation as a whole, they value its material prosperity and its reputation in the eyes of other nations; and, in so far as the decisions and actions of a nation proceed from this motive, co-operating with and controlling other motives in the minds of its members, such decision and action are the expressions of true collective volition. It is truly volition because it conforms to the true type of volition. Individual volition can only be marked off from every impulsive action and every lower form of effort, by the fact that in true volition, among all the impulses or motives that may impel a man to action or decision, the dominant rôle is played by a motive that springs from his self-regarding sentiment. This motive is a desire to achieve a particular end, which, viewed as the achievement of the self, brings him satisfaction, because the thought of himself achieving this end is in harmony with the ideal of the self which he has gradually built up and has learnt to desire to realize under the influence of his social setting. The same is true of national volition. And it is collective volition in so far as the deliberations by which the decision of the nation has been reached have been effected through those formally and informally organised relations and channels of communication and by means of all the various modes of interaction of persons by which public opinion is formed and in which it is guided and controlled by the living traditions of the nation.