Chapter 3

In Ireland we have an opportunity of contrasting the results of an artificial or forced settlement with those of a natural or spontaneous colonization. Elizabeth, James, and Cromwell settled their colonists on Irish tribal lands, thus exposing them to the full force of the clannish or tribal spirit which then animated the natives of Ireland. The consequence was that the progeny of the British colonists, as it grew up, absorbed the Irish tribal spirit, for this spirit, being more primitive and more easily understood than a sense of nationality, always makes a dominant appeal to the young mind. The blood which English statesmen of the seventeenth century poured into Ireland to quench its national flame only served to feed it. It was otherwise in the north-east of Ireland--particularly in Down and Antrim. These counties were settled in the earlier decades of the seventeenth century by a process of spontaneous colonization. The movement commenced in a small way in 1606 by Hugh Montgomery, a south Scotch laird, purchasing a large tract of the O'Neill's land in county Down. He settled that land with his relations and tenantry--a farming community. Such was the beginning of the colonial fringe on the north-east coast of Ulster. The fringe was fed by a spontaneous exodus of farming folk mainly from the south of Scotland, but the stream was also kept up and maintained from the north of England and from Scottish counties as far north as those of Aberdeen and Inverness. The men who flocked to Ulster found it easier to raise crops on the greensward of Antrim than on the heathery hill-sides of Aberdeenshire. Herein we see a repetition, but on a small scale, of the Saxon colonization of England. The settled communities established by the Scotch pioneers sheltered and nursed the national spirit they brought with them. As the fringe of colonists expanded it came to cover Antrim and Down and made inroads on adjacent counties, overwhelming and absorbing the tribal organization of the native population. In 1672 Sir William Petty estimated that there were 100,000 Scots in Ulster. Thus in the north-east of Ireland there has been established a people which manifests all the qualities of a new nationality. History can explain to us how it has come about that the inhabitants of Ireland, all of them derivatives of the same breed of Europeans, should be divided into two peoples, each possessed by its own peculiar sense of nationality. The north is predominantly industrial and Protestant; the south is predominantly pastoral and Catholic. But these circumstances are not sufficient to account for a national--almost a racial--antagonism between the inhabitants of a single small island who have so much to gain by a sense of unity. To understand national antagonisms we have to look at the inheritance which modern man has carried with him from his distant past.

THE NATURE OF TRIBAL INSTINCT

I now enter the third stage of my argument. In the first I cited and discussed the various forms in which racial and national feelings are manifested by various peoples abroad; in my second I dealt with the nature of the various national movements at home. We now set out in search of the root from which the flower of our complex modern civilization has sprung. In the world of to-day we see many peoples exhibiting every phase in the evolution of that organization which permits mankind to live in massed populations. Fortunately for us there yet survive, in outlandish parts of the earth, remnants of native races retaining the primitive organization which guided mankind through that great hinterland of time lying between the emergence from apedom and the dawn of the modern world. For the student of sociology the immense primitive first stage of man's history is by far the more important. In his _Voyage of the Beagle_, Darwin draws a picture of the Fuegians which gives us a real insight into the ancient state of social organization. Spencer and Gillan supply us with complementary pictures representing the conditions of life among native tribes of Central Australia. These primitive peoples live on the natural produce of the territory which they inhabit and claim as their own. Their social organization represents for us the conditions in which the modern races of mankind were evolved. It is in such primitive societies that there must have existed the machinery which differentiated mankind into races and racial breeds. It is in the long first phase that we must search for the origin of the social impulses and tendencies which have come down to modern man by inheritance.[1]

When we survey a country still in the most primitive stage of human society, the first observation to impress us is the fact that its inhabitants are separated into definitely isolated groups. Such groups are usually small, consisting of men, women, and children belonging to several closely related families and numbering two or three hundred souls. Each group, forming an elemental community, occupies, and considers itself the owner of, a definite tract of country; there is developed in them a feeling--an attachment--which serves to bind them to the soil on which they live. When we look at the nature of the bonds which serve to bind the members of a primitive community together, we see that they are formed out of subconscious impulses or instincts. These instincts form an essential part of the machinery of organization. There is usually no head man or chieftain to determine the action of the community; there is no deliberative assembly to lay down rules of conduct. In Galton's phrase the members of a primitive community form 'a sentient web', dominated by traditional beliefs and customs. I have no wish to analyse the subconscious states and instinctive reactions which rule and bind together the members of a primitive community; what I want to make clear is that the tribal instincts have above all an isolating effect. These instincts serve not only as a machinery for binding the members of a community together, but also as a means of separating them from all surrounding groups. Within the community this machinery compels unity of sentiment and of action; it serves to repress schism and faction. But the tribal machinery is operative only up to the territorial boundaries of the community. At that limit the tribal instincts immediately change in their mode of action. The tribal instincts surround the community with a frontier, across which there is no peaceful traffic, only robbery and plunder; or at the best covert enmity. The tribal frontier is also a blood barrier; across it the tribal instinct forbids any form of peaceful matrimonial exchange or tribal intermixture. Nothing impressed Darwin so much as the ring of neutral territory which surrounded the primitive Fuegian settlements.

TRIBAL ISOLATION PROVIDES THE CONDITIONS NECESSARY FOR RACE-BREEDING

The tribal or clannish spirit tends to manifest itself in many forms, but in all its varieties there is a common factor--that of isolation. At first sight we are tempted to regard the tribal spirit as part of a machinery evolved for the protection and survival of a primitive community, but to any one who has searched for conditions which will explain the origin of separate races of mankind, the conviction grows that the tribal spirit is an essential part of Nature's evolutionary machinery. It was in these isolated cradles of primitive mankind that Nature nursed and reared new races. When a breeder wishes to produce a new type of animal, or to preserve a 'sport', his first step is to isolate the group of animals with which he is to experiment. The isolated stock becomes the cradle in which he hopes to rear his new breed. The experimental breeder, in such instances, copies the conditions which rule in primitive human communities. Under modern civilization Nature's cradles have been smashed to atoms, but the tribal instincts which Nature intended for the propagation of new breeds of humanity have come down to modern man in undiminished force. Hence our present national and racial troubles.

THE CONDITIONS OF TRIBAL DISINTEGRATION

The tribal spirit, which maintains the unity of an elementary community, is efficient just so long as personal contact between its members is possible. If a tribal community becomes overgrown, so that mutual contact between its members is rendered impossible, then a manifestation of a different nature appears--that of disruption or swarming. The disintegrating tendency is just as much a part of Nature's evolutionary contrivance as is the isolating and unifying effect of the tribal spirit. For breeding purposes the group must be kept within certain bounds. Modern man has overcome the tendency to disruption on the part of massed communities by the invention of means of rapid intercommunication. The daily press, the hourly post, and a network of electric wires can bind a hundred millions of modern people into a sentient tribal web.

THE ORIGIN OF RACE FEELING

Small isolated communities are the cradles in which new tribal breeds of mankind are reared. But how do new races arise? If isolation were to be continued throughout long intervals of time we may justly infer that the physical and mental characters of a breed would become more and more emphasized until a stage of differentiation is reached which we must regard as racial. A racial spirit is merely the tribal spirit matured and consolidated. The manifestations which begin as tribal, end, in the course of time, by becoming racial. We cannot account for the differentiation of mankind into distinct races, nor the existence of many intermediate forms which link one human race to another, unless we postulate the existence in mankind of a deeply rooted tribal mechanism.

TRANSFORMATION OF A TRIBAL INTO A NATIONAL SPIRIT

Having thus glanced at the nature of the instinctive machinery which has controlled human communities throughout the greater part of man's history we now return to ask ourselves: What have become of the tribal instincts which were so deeply grafted in the nature of our ancestors? Our tribal forefathers are not so far removed from us. We can still trace the distribution of the Highland clans in Scotland; the tribal spirit is still strong in the Scottish glens. The organization of Ireland was on a tribal basis even when the Anglo-Normans settled there; in subsequent centuries, even until the times of the British settlements, the tribal spirit was still rampant in Ireland; even now it is very much alive. Two thousand years ago Great Britain was in a tribal state from end to end. Practically every one of us is the descendant of ancestors who, forty generations back, were exercising their tribal instincts to the full. The Roman occupation did much to break down the tribal organization of Britain; the Saxon colonization did still more. The forces, however, which forged the tribal links into a national chain were commerce, communication, and the building of massed populations. Tribes were united to form nations, but there is no greater mistake than to suppose that the subconscious tribal impulses or instincts were wholly converted into a sense of common nationality.

TRIBAL INSTINCTS NOW MANIFESTED IN EVERYDAY LIFE

We have only to watch our commoner actions and predilections to see that in our modern States the spirit of nationality has only absorbed a fraction of our tribal instincts. Every one of you regards your own college and all the men belonging to it with pride; other colleges and other men you view with a critical eye. You cheer your own crews and teams; you want to see them beat all their rivals; you take sides. In all of these actions and prejudices you manifest the elementary basis of a tribal spirit. Every week we see hundreds of thousands attend football or other competitive games, not so much to see an exhibition of skill as to see their own side win. The spectators, as they cheer, are moved by a tribal spirit. If we do not belong to a cricketing county we may go so far as to adopt one as a foster-parent in order that we may exercise our tribal instincts in being elated by its success or cast down by its failure. Local national politics give us many opportunities of exercising our tribal instincts. In politics we have to take sides; a political party is a tribal organization, using ancient means for compelling a unity of sentiment amongst its members. The church, too, provides modern tribesmen with occasions for exercising their inherited impulses; a heresy hunt finds its counterpart in the most ancient of tribal communities. Women even more than men are slaves of their tribal instincts; they are as susceptible to the dictates of fashion as their ancient sisters were impressionable to the movings of the tribal spirit. The local spirit which is so inherent a trait of the countryman, particularly in the case of the Scotsman, Irishman, and Welshman, is another, and often a very powerful, manifestation of the tribal spirit. Men from the same locality or district, when they go to live in foreign communities, are drawn together by a clannish sentiment--a manifestation of their inherited tribal instincts. Turn in what direction you will, you will find amongst modern peoples innumerable tribal manifestations which find no room for display in the more intellectual exhibitions of a national spirit.

In present-day politics we see the tribal spirit striving to work out certain novel effects. Although in ancient times a tribal frontier usually corresponded to a territorial frontier, such was not always the case. The tribal spirit is strong enough to hold a people together even when there is no territorial boundary. In modern massed populations, as in the organization of both ancient and modern India, the tribal spirit works so as to produce frontiers between classes of citizens; trades unions are in essence artificial tribal organizations. Except for the existence of tribal instincts within the inherited mental organization of the manual workers, such unions were impossible. Many writers believe that class or sectional tribal organizations can actually be made to cut across national and even racial frontiers. We have seen, however, that at the declaration of war, all such sectional bonds snap, for war is the match which fires the tribal spirit, exalts it to a national flame, and destroys intertribal schisms. All the petty manifestations of the tribal spirit are changed by war; the impulses which moved men and women in peace time to games and sports, to party politics, to heresy hunting--even to displays of fashion--are turned to patriotic desires and deeds.

A KNOWLEDGE OF TRIBAL AND RACIAL SPIRIT IS ESSENTIAL FOR STATESMEN

Several modern statesmen have grasped the important part played by the tribal spirit in unifying the action of modern nations. I shall cite only three examples to illustrate this form of political insight--Bismarck, Lincoln, and Lloyd George. Bismarck employed war to rouse and unify the German peoples; three campaigns were sufficient to raise an unbounded feeling of tribal confidence and superiority. He gave the German Empire a sharply demarcated tribal frontier; he purposely surrounded his country with a ring of animosity, true to his tribal instincts. Abraham Lincoln's tribal problem was of another kind. The conditions which led up to the Civil War concerned the freeing of slaves; but Lincoln made the war, when it became inevitable, an intratribal quarrel. He realized that the danger to the United States was disintegration, one which must continually threaten all nationalities compounded out of great massed populations. Lincoln therefore made the main issue of the war the right of a single state or a confederation of states to secede from the main tribe or union. The Civil War determined the issue in favour of the North: the natural process of tribal disruption was declared illegal. Lloyd George's task was of a different nature. He touched and wakened Britain's sleeping tribal instincts with the insight of genius. War gave him his opportunity, but had he not known that tribal instincts lie deeply buried in man's emotional nature and are intertwined with his most primitive feeling he could not have known how to touch the ancient strings. Intellectual appeals had failed to stir the primitive and basal tribal impulses of the people.

THE PROBLEM OF IRELAND

There was one part of the country, however, where Lloyd George's appeal did not succeed in evoking British patriotism; it left the greater part of the people of Ireland not only apathetic but even more actively hostile than before. Yet their country formed an intrinsic part of these islands; their economic interests had much more to gain by the success of Britain than of Germany. History throws light on only part of this thorny problem; the real difficulty thus encountered dates back to prehistoric days--to the origin of the inherent, inherited, and deeply-rooted tribal instincts of the Irish people. The Irish spirit leapt up, as it had often done before, into a naming tribal antagonism directed against everything British. What then is a British statesman to do? We too have our tribal instincts, and their first impulse on being awakened is--as it was in ancient days--to meet force with force, even to extermination. That is the ancient tribal practice; but in these days we have entered another era in the world's history when intelligent effort must master and direct our inherited instincts. Statesmen know that forcible means, when applied to extinguish a national flame, only serve to feed it. Statecraft has never discovered, and I think it never will discover, a method of forcing or grafting a new national or tribal spirit on an old people. We have seen that a nation can colonize only when the force which drives its members to migrate arises spontaneously within the communities; a colonization initiated and conducted by a government always fails to hold. Nationalization is a similar process; the forces which control and guide it must arise within the hearts of the people; it cannot be imposed on them from above. All that a statesman can do is to provide conditions in which a favourable spirit is most likely to develop and mature. He must sow judiciously for years and wait patiently for his harvest--even if it be for generations. Ireland's friendship is a prize which is worth working for and waiting for, even if it costs Britain a weary century of patient courtship.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] I have dealt more fully with primitive tribal organization in 'Certain Factors concerned in the Evolution of Human Races', _Journ. Royal Anthropological Institute_, 1916, vol. 46, p. 10.