ally subsided, and at the present time all minor groups of the
population in Western Europe have been absorbed under large national
designations; the nations are marked off within clearly cut frontiers,
and separated by the paramount distinction of languages. In Western
Europe you do not now define a man by his original race or by his
religion, you ask whose natural-born subject he is, in whose territory
he lives, and you class him accordingly as French, English, Spanish or
Italian.

Now it has been, I think, one result of this consolidation of the West
into States and Nationalities, with religion mostly corresponding to
the region, that the persistence in other parts of the world of the
earlier ideas of race and religion, the primordial grouping of
mankind, has been far too commonly overlooked and undervalued. My
present object is to lay stress on the importance of realising and
understanding them. And I may begin by throwing out the suggestion
that this oversight, this neglect of ideas and facts that still have
great strength and vitality, may be connected with the influence, in
France and England, of a certain school of political philosophy that
arose in the eighteenth century, in France. The Encyclopedistes, as
they were called, because their leaders wrote the celebrated French
Encyclopaedia, treated in theory all notions of separate races,
religions, and frontiers as so many barriers against the spread of a
common civilisation, which was to unite all peoples on general
principles of reason, scientific knowledge, and emancipation from
local or national prejudices. As a theory this might not have had much
practical effect; but at the end of the eighteenth century came the
French Revolution, when these philosophical notions took a very
seriously practical shape; for the French Republican armies invaded
the kingdoms of Western Europe with the war-cry of universal
fraternity and equality. Revolutionary France ignored both race and
religion. It proclaimed, De Tocqueville says, above and instead of all
peculiar nationalities, an intellectual citizenship that was intended
to include the people of every country to which it extended,
superseding all distinctions of language, tradition, and national
character. Under Napoleon this fierce impulse of democratic levelling
was transformed into Imperialism: he aimed at restoring an Empire in
the West. But this aroused equally fierce resistance, and when
Napoleon had been beaten do