er force which he has
acquired in the world, over all other species and over nature itself, is
due to the working of these two factors. At starting he was physically
less strong than many other creatures, and if he fought with others of
his own kind, other animal species did the same. He was ahead of them by
his reason, and reason acted, and must act, through the concert of
thinking beings. This concert is not merely, or even mainly, an
attachment among those living at the same time to co-operate for some
common end; it is with man a conscious sequence of one generation on
another. Sometimes the movement of adaptation is slower, sometimes
quicker, but in every case the living are carrying on the work of the
dead, and their co-operation in time as well as space is due to the
working of the same qualities of attachment and reason, the social
factors, by which at any moment a community of men is bound together.

Still looking at the matter _a priori_, it is clear that the vast
community of mankind, though it has come more closely in contact in
recent years over all the planet, yet acts, and must act, habitually and
momentarily, through many smaller aggregates. Of these the leading types
are the family and the country or nation. The former is not directly
relevant to our inquiry, the latter plays a leading part in it. The
former is less dependent on external conditions of land-formation and
the like, and is in consequence more universal, more purely human. The
latter has been shaped by geographical conditions, by racial qualities,
by the apparent accidents of history. Its relation to the larger units
of human society raises the most difficult, fundamental and unavoidable
questions. To curb aggressive nationalism is the root-problem of the
present war. To reconcile permanently nationalism with humanity would be
to establish the everlasting peace.

Western society, indeed the whole community of mankind, is built up of
these smaller units, the family and the nation, with their various
intermediate groupings, but the historical process has by no means
conformed at all exactly to this logical order. Society has not been
made in orderly fashion by forming families and then combining families
to make hundreds, and hundreds to make counties, and counties nations,
and so on to the whole. A German god might have done this, but the way
of nature and history was less perfect. The minor forms of human
association have been taking shape