This movement, on the whole, seems chiefly to proceed—though other factors have intervened in it—from a kind of reaction against the standardising tendency, from a material and moral point of view, of modern Western civilisation, especially the Anglo-Saxon civilisation, and also from a reaction against the extreme unification aimed at by russifying the numerous peoples living within the Russian Empire. Modern civilisation, having reached its present climax, has aimed—and its political and social repercussions have had the same influence—at doing away with all differences between human minds and making the world homogeneous; thus all men would have been brought to live in the same way, to have the same manners, and their requirements would have been met in the same way—to the very great advantage of its enormous industrial development. Of course, all this proved an idle dream; human nature soon asserted itself, amidst the commotions and perturbations experienced by the States, and a reaction set in among those who hitherto only aimed at enslaving various human groups, or linked them together politically in a most artificial way. Then the same feeling spread among all those peoples. All this enables us to see to what extent this movement is legitimate, and to know exactly what proportions of good and evil it contains. It rightly asserts that various peoples have different natures, and by protecting their freedom, it aims at ensuring the development of their peculiar abilities. For let us not forget that the characters of peoples depend on physical conditions, that even the features we may not like in some peoples are due to the race, and that if, by blending and mixing populations nowadays these features are modified, they are generally altered only from bad to worse. But this principle is true only so far as it frees and enables to shape their own destinies peoples who have distinctive qualities of their own and are able to provide for themselves. It cannot be extended—as has been attempted in some cases—to States within which men descending from various races or having belonged in the course of centuries to different nationalities have long been united, and through a long common history and a centuries-old co-operation have formed one nation. This is one of the erroneous aspects of Mr. Wilson’s conception, and one of the bad consequences it has entailed.