rns out, in the long
run, to be the unwillingness of a people or a class occupying a superior
status to compete on equal terms with a people of a lower status. Race
conflicts like wars are fundamentally the struggles of racial groups for
status. In this sense and from this point of view the struggles of the
European nationalities and the so-called "subject peoples" for
independence and self-determination are actually struggles for status in
the family of nations.

Under the conditions of this struggle, racial or national consciousness
as it manifests itself, for example, in Irish nationalism, Jewish
Zionism, and Negro race consciousness, is the natural and obvious
response to a conflict situation. The nationalistic movements in Europe,
in India, and in Egypt are, like war, rivalry and more personal forms of
conflict, mainly struggles for recognition--that is, honor, glory, and
prestige.

II. MATERIALS

A. CONFLICT AS CONSCIOUS COMPETITION

1. The Natural History of Conflict[206]

All classes of society, and the two sexes to about the same degree, are
deeply interested in all forms of contest involving skill and chance,
especially where the danger or risk is great. Everybody will stop to
watch a street fight, and the same persons would show an equal interest
in a prize fight or a bull fight, if certain scruples did not stand in
the way of their looking on. Our socially developed sympathy and pity
may recoil from witnessing a scene where physical hurt is the object of
the game, but the depth of our interest in the conflict type of activity
is attested by the fascination which such a game as football has for the
masses, where our instinctive emotional reaction to a conflict situation
is gratified to an intense degree by a scene of the conflict pattern.

If we examine, in fact, our pleasures and pains, our moments of elation
and depression, we find that they go back for the most part to instincts
developed in the struggle for food and rivalry for mates. The structure
of the organism has been built up gradually through the survival of the
most efficient structures. Corresponding with a structure mechanically
adapted to successful movements, there is developed on the psychic side
an interest in the conflict situation as complete and perfect as is the
structure itself. The emotional states are, indeed, organic preparations
for action, corresponding broadly with a tendency to advance or
retreat; and a connection has