As a matter of fact, white solidarity has been one of the great constants of history. For ages the white peoples have possessed a true "symbiosis" or common life, ceaselessly mingling their bloods and exchanging their ideas. Accordingly, the various white nations which are the race's political expression may be regarded as so many planets gravitating about the sun of a common civilization. No such sustained and intimate race-solidarity has ever before been recorded in human annals. Not even the solidarity of the yellow peoples is comparable in scope. Of course the white world's internal frictions have been legion, and at certain times these frictions have become so acute that white men have been led to disregard or even to deny their fundamental unity. This is perhaps also because white solidarity is so pervasive that we _live in it_, and thus ordinarily do not perceive it any more than we do the air we breathe. Should white men ever really lose their instinct of race-solidarity, they would asphyxiate racially as swiftly and surely as they would asphyxiate physically if the atmospheric oxygen should suddenly be withdrawn. However, down to 1914 at least, the white world never came within measurable distance of this fatal possibility. On the contrary, the white peoples were continually expressing their fundamental solidarity by various unifying concepts like the "Pax Romana" of antiquity, the "Civitas Dei" or Christian commonwealth of the Middle Ages, and the "European Concert" of nineteenth-century diplomacy. It was typical of the _malaise_ which was overtaking the white world that the close of the nineteenth century should have witnessed an ominous ignoring of white solidarity; that national-imperialists should have breathed mutual slaughter while internationalists caressed visions of "human solidarity" culminating in universal race-amalgamation; lastly, that Asia's incipient revolt against white supremacy, typified by the Russo-Japanese War, should have found zealous white sponsors and abetters.