to such a pitch that in the crisis of war the national or tribal
bonds held; sixty millions of people acted as if they were members of a
Highland clan. Even defeat, if it has loosened, has not broken the
national bonds which were forged by the governing classes of Germany.

In all these processes of national fusion, as in the formation of all
trusts in the modern commercial world, the anthropologist observes that
the operation commences from above and works downwards through the mass
of the people. The governing class plays upon and fans into flame the
tribal embers of the popular mind. It is altogether a different process
which brings about the disruption of a nationality. Disruption has
nothing to do with race; the nearer the blood relationship between two
adjacent peoples the more likely is disruption to occur. We can find no
better illustration of this truth than when we cross the Baltic from
Germany to Scandinavia. The people of Norway and Sweden are of the same
racial composition; they have many interests in common; union should
have given strength. Yet after a partnership which lasted for less than
a century, they agreed to separate. In this case the movement came from
below; a tribal feeling which swept through the people of Norway
compelled a disruption. All the natural inherited forces in a people
tend towards disruption. Only when reason takes the helm can these
natural disruptive forces be overcome and the process of fusion be
effected.

BRITISH NATIONAL PROBLEMS

Having thus made a hurried survey of some of the more instructive,
racial, and national problems abroad we now return homewards to apply
the knowledge thus gained to the understanding of the national
manifestations of our own countrymen. There is no need to remind you
that the national spirit of Robert Boyle's native country is always
boiling up, often boiling over. Scotland, too, has a national spirit, so
has Wales; in both countries this spirit is separatist in its essence,
but the national instinctive tendencies are curbed and guided by the
higher reasoning centres of the brain. In England itself the sense of
nationality is usually dormant; only an insult or a threat from without
stirs this gigantic force into life. In Ireland the national kettle is
kept always on the boil; in Scotland and Wales it is kept simmering; in
England, on the other hand, it dozes quietly on the hob. Nevertheless
English nationality is a force which pervades the wh