has its only chance of solution through the same principle. Somewhere there must be a frontier where strangers meet; where they must learn to be friends if not enemies, and to trade if not to plunder. The world cannot exist half savage and half civilized. There is a genuine difference between a savage and a foreigner, between a Hottentot and a Chinaman. The one is to be educated or protected as a child; the other to be regarded, if not with understanding, then at least with respect, as another way of being a man. The obligation of civilization to savagery is that of helping it to its feet, without directing where it shall walk. We shall have done our work well in the Philippines if we have taught those who live there how to be different from ourselves, and how to do it well. If we were to force our culture upon them, and convert them, for example, to the literary school of Bret Harte, Mary E. Wilkins and James Whitcomb Riley, we should commit an impertinence, and impoverish the world. But if we can show them how to keep the peace among themselves and with others, how to find their own resources and develop their own capacities, and then leave them to perfect themselves in their own way, we shall have helped a brother and created a new nation. 9. He who takes up arms must enter the service of peace. This is not a mere paradox, or the echo of a prevailing sentiment, but honest downright morals. Universalism must take precedence of nationalism on the same ground that entitles nationalism to take precedence of individualism. Nationalism is a higher principle of action than individualism, by all the other individuals of whom it takes account. A nation is not a mystical entity, other than you and me, but it is more than you or me inasmuch as it is both of us and still more besides. Similarly, humanity is more than nationality, not because it is different, but because it is bigger and more permanent. No man, least of all a soldier, can ignore any of the effects of his conduct. He must promise himself that his conduct shall in the final reckoning be helpful rather than hurtful. He must have imagination and intelligence enough to judge his action by its effects across the boundaries of his nation and of his time. If he be thus enlightened he will then justify himself only when his action, though in its first incidence it be destructive, is in its full effect a saving and multiplication of life. III THE TOLERANT NATION ORDS sometimes owe their usefulness to WORDS their ambiguity. Thus, one's doubt or utter blankness of mind when compelled to pass judgment on a work of art is decently concealed by such words as "interesting" or "suggestive." The commonest word in the technical philosophical vocabulary of any age is usually a label by which some part of the primeval chaos is neatly covered so that attention may be concentrated on the rest. Just now it is the word "experience.' In contemporary political thought a similar service is rendered by the term "nationality." It is a commonplace of recent history that the nineteenth century was peculiarly a century in which men fought and argued in terms of the principle of nationality. The present war is supposed to be due to the assertion of nationality, and justified by the defense of it. But just what nationality is, is far from clear. Indeed, most discussions of the matter are chiefly concerned to show that it is not any of those things which it is usually supposed to be. Thus, a nationality is not the same thing as a state. This is clear, whatever one's view as to their relative priority. If we are to believe Lord Acton, "a state may in course of time produce a nationality; but that a nationality should constitute a state is contrary to the nature of modern civilization." According to this view nationality may arise from "the memory of a former independence," and its principal cause be tyranny and oppression from abroad. But even so, the nationality once acquired is a different thing from mere political independence. It is a new fellow-feeling begotten by political adversity. It does not consist in the mere fact of a common government but in the new sense of common loyalty and common proprietorship. Similarly, when it is argued that nationalities should be granted political autonomy, it is assumed that they may exist in its absence. Thus the AustroHungarian Empire is commonly described as a single state composed of many nationalities. Or when it is proposed that a world-state should be formed out of existing nationalities, it is taken for granted that these nationalities as such would in some sense maintain their identity. The fact is that with the growth of liberal polit 1 History of Freedom and other Essays, p. 292. ical thought it has become less and less possible to regard the state as an ultimate by which nationality or anything else can in the last analysis be explained. Once the state is divorced in principle from the de facto government, or from hereditary legitimacy, or from the sanction of the church, it must be supposed in some sense to express the collective needs and aspirations of a social group. And in so far as the citizens of any state so regard their government, as theirs to adopt, or to make and mould, it is evident that the state becomes, if it was not originally, an instrument and visible sign of something like nationality. This, of course, does not explain what nationality is; but only discourages the hope of identifying it simply with the state, and points to the necessity of looking to the deeper facts of social solidarity. There are certain solidifying agencies that are evidently not so much criteria of nationality as conditions necessary or favorable to its existence. Thus it is evident that a nationality is not an ethnological unit. Neither purity of race nor even a common racial blend defines such a nationality as our own; although it is evident that racial homogeneity conduces to national life and is in some measure invariably present. It is doubtless |