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 on