1. Tribal Society.— It is now generally agreed among students of cultural anthtopology that the earliest well-defined units of social or ganization were either the village and local group, or the clan, both of which were normally grouped with others of the same in a larger and looser entity — the tribe. While much of the psychology of tribal relationship and ac a tivities has bee rried over infoin.dern so ciety, the cont between tribal society and the modern na o state are many and obvious. Tribal society was primarily based upon blood kinship, either real or assumed, and tribal re lations were personal rather than political. Force, custom and bldod-feud were the founda tion of tribal juristic concepts and methods. The "instinct of the herd" had a much fuller sway over the group than it has at the present day. Cultural solidarity was more intense and there was little personal individuation, except that which set off a few leaders from the mass of the group. An intense religious loyalty and attachment to all the symbols of group unity were ever present and evident. So great was the domination of the groupover the individual that some eminent students, such as Durkheim and his school, have even gone so far as to claim that all of the categories of religion, thought and knowledge in the primitive group were de rived from the expressions of, and reactions to, group life and activities. Indeed, Dnrkheim finds that the essence and foundation of religion is but the psychic exuberance or stimulation from group life and activities and Trotter holds the 'instinct of the herd* to be the primordial and all-pervading psychic force controlling man from the origin of the race to the present day. Whatever may be the exaggerations of these writers in matters of detail, it is generally agreed that the struggle for the preservation and ex tension of group solidarity has been the basic factor and process in the evolution of mankind, and it was inevitable that the psychic traits developed in this process would become grounded deep in the mental life of humanity. The tremendous importance of this discipline in group life for the subsequent development of humanity has been admirably summarized by Professor Hankins: 'Man is in fact funda mentally social by nature. He has never lived in isolation but always in groups. Lacking special organs of defense he found strength, as did the ants and the bees, in group solidarity. Consequently the struggle for existence on the human plane has been fundamentally a struggle of group with group. Since his survival turned largely on the perfection of his gregarious in stinct, there has been achieved in man a keen sensitiveness to the call of the group. This herd instinct, as Trotter calls it, is, therefore, the very basis of human society and the most profound aspect of man's social nature. It is for the group what the instinct of self-preservk tion is for the individual. It is aroused only in times of stress and danger; group fear in some form is essential to its development; when awakened it not only grips every tribesman in an atmosphere of electrified suggestibility, but stirs within his bodily mechanism the internal secretory apparatus whose products are essen tial to deeds of valor. It is in its strength and vigor an assertion of the group will to live, and is therefore as deep and mysterious and indeed as permanent as the eternal nuns of nature, the insistent push of everything that throbs with life and energy.* Further, tribal groups were relatively small, as compared to modern political aggregates, and were little attached to any par ticular territory. While such groups often held with great tenacity to particular areas on ac count of special economic advantages, such as better fishing or hunting grounds, it was the economic phases of the attachment rather than the purely territorial which played the predomi nating part. There was little hesitancy in leav ing a particular locality to follow migrations of game or fish. This matter has been well sum med up by Professor Robinson: cPattiotism, the love of one's terra patria, or natal land, is a recent thing. During far the greater part of his existence man has wandered over the earth's face as a hunter and can hardly have had any sweet andpermanent associations with the tree or rock under which he was born. But the fore runners of territorial emotion were the group loyalties of the tribe, clan, family and totemisuc group, in whatever order and with whatever peculiarities these may have originated and come to exist side by side.* 2. Early City-States.— The transition from tribal groupings and modes of life to the city state, the earliest type of political organization, was gradual and slow. The chief contrast between tribal society and that of the proto historic city-states was that in the latter the basis of group and individual relations was gradually coming to be political and terri torial, rather than purely personal and con sanguineous. For many and diverse reasons, groups tended to consolidate about _certain vantage points determined by considerations of fortification and protection, religious signifi cance, economic superiority and better poten tialities for robbery and brigandage. Stability replaced the earlier nomadic life, and the habi tat became more or less permanent. The early city-states did not, however, at all resemble the modern urban centres of life and industry. Life was still primarily agricultural, and the *city* was little more than a citadel surrounded by the homes of the peasants who would retire within the walls in time of danger. As trade developed and the division of labor between city and country was established, the early city states assumed more of a commercial character and the coming of foreign merchants produced those problems of assimilation and the exten sion of citizenship which were the chief force in breaking down the remaining vestiges of tribal society and in creating the origins of the modern political order. A few historical or semi-historical instances of this specific and all important change from tribal to civil society have been preserved in historical records. Such were the occupation and retention of ancient Palestine by the Jews and their subsequent choice of a king; the constitutional reforms of Cleisthenes in Attica at the close of the 6th century a.c.; the alleged reforms of Servius Tullius in early Rome and the subsequent con stitutional struggle between the patricians and plebeians; and the breakdown of Teutonic tri bal society and the establishment of political relations in the interval between Arminius and Alaric — the transition which Paul Vinogradoff has called "one of the most momentous turning points in the history of the race.* Important as were the city-states of antiquity as a stage in political and social evolution, they were soon submerged in the great patriarchal empires which arose in the astate-making age* through the superior force and aggressiveness of one of these cities which compelled the submission and enforced the subjection of others. The ancient Egyptian Empire was a product of the forcible subjugation of the numerous city-states of the Nile Valley; the Babylonian, Assyrian and Per sian empires were built up out of the progres sive amalgamation of the city-states of the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates and the coast of Asia Minor. Only the cities of an cient Hellas retained their independence long enough during the historical period to give any adequate conception of the type of cultural soli darity and political reactions which character ized the antique city-state. Here personal and kinship relations had been replaced by the in stitution of citizenship, based upon residence and naturalization instead of blood-relationship or elaborate initiation ceremonies designed to confer the sanction of artificial relationship. Groups were generally more populous and civil ization more advanced than in tribal society. Most of the psychic characteristics of tribal life, however, were, if in a modified degree, present in the civilization of Athens, which may be taken as the most advanced product of the ancient city-state civilization. Group solidarity was still intense. The elements of common culture were prized even to the extent of being vested with a sacred significance. Ceremonies, costumes, legal and political forms and prac tices, moral codes, religious festivities, and even amusements were tinged with the divinity of their alleged origin. The gods were limited to the group and were regarded as wholly solici tous for the welfare of the particular political and social entity. The attitude toward for eigners was well exemplified by the well-known contrast between °Greek and Barbarian,* in which Aristotle was able to find a justification for the subjection of inferior peoples to the Greek °genius* for governing. The group leaders passed after their death into the realm of the gods or supermen and their magnified and exaggerated prowess became a most highly prized group possession. In addition to these phases of group solidarity and symbolic unity, which had their roots in tribal psychic life, a new attachment to territorial possessions arose when fixity of habitat had become the rule. Not only were particular sacred places, such as Olympus and Delphi, prized and venerated, but the whole habitat of the group was valued as a special gift from the gods. Aristotle found that the fortunate situation of the Greeks in their geographical habitat served sufficiently to explain the "superiority" of Greek genius. The ancient city-states seemed well on the way to ward transforming group life from the tribal to the modern national basis and had made notable advances in that direction. Had their progress not been arrested by the development of the great patriarchal empires, mentioned above, the national state in its completeness might have been a product of antiquity. For better or worse, however, this was not to be, and even Athens itself was swallowed up in the imperial domains of the Macedonian con queror after its African and Asiatic prototypes had long before bowed to the might of Thebes, Memphis, Babylon, Nineveh, Ecbatana, Sardis and Susa. James Bryce has admirably de scribed the general absence of anything ap proaching a national cultural or political union before the conquests of Rome: "Men with little knowledge of each other, with no experi ence of wide political union, held differences of race to be natural and irremovable barriers. Similarly, religion appeared to them a matter purely local; and as there were gods of the hills and gods of the valleys, of the land and of the sea, so each tribe rejoiced in its peculiar deities, looking on the natives of other coun tries who worshipped other gods as Gentiles, natural foes, unclean beings. Such feelings, if keenest in the East, frequently show themselves in the early records of Greece and Italy; in Homer the hero who wanders over the unfruit ful sea glories in sacking the cities of the stran ger; the primitive Latins have the same word for a foreigner and an enemy; the exclusive systems of Egypt, Hindostan, China are only the more vehement expressions of the be lief which made Athenian philosophers look upon a state of war between Greeks and bar barians as natural, and defend slavery on the same ground of the original diversity of the races that rule and the races that serve." 3. The Patriarchal Empires of Antiquity. —The formation of the extensive and auto cratic patriarchal empires in what Bagehot has somewhat loosely called "the nation-making age" was one of the most important and sweeping transformations in the political and social evolu tion of humanity. Paradoxical as it may seem. they both stifled and promoted the growth of nations and nationalism. Their development was invariably brought about by the cumulative extension of the power and prestige of some more powerful and aggressive city-state at the expense of its neighbors. This very process naturally produced an enormous inflation of group pride and egotism on the part of the conquering city. Also, while subject cities were severely treated and their national culture sternly repressed, nothing makes a group so proud and tenacious of its cultural characteris tics and possessions as persecution, and the con querors unwittingly only intensified the particu larism and local pride of such subject communi ties as maintained and preserved their corporate existence. The history of the ancient empires is little more than a record of constant war fare produced by the attempt of the ruling city and dynasty to repel and sUppress the revolts of subject cultural groups. This process of an cient empire-building culminated in the expan sion of imperial Rome, in its task of absorbing most of the then-known world and of bringing into existence the ideal "reign of universal peace" and uniform law. It is probable that
the process of Roman expansion marked the nearest approximation to the spirit and methods of aggressive nationalism that was witnessed before the dynastic wars surrounding and ac companying the development of the modern national states. The crude and almost tribal expression of collective egotism in 'interna tional" policy; the public theory that all her wars were "defensive" and that Rome was al ways threatened by aggressive states; the alleged conviction that the gods were always favorable to these defensive wars; the control of diplomatic and military policy by the landed "Junker" aristocracy — the Senate: the ambi tion for private or family glory in war, as mani fested by Claudius in the first Punic War and by Flaminius ih the second Macedonian War; the "surplus population" argument for expan sion; the "scrap of paper" attitude toward treaties as evidenced in the second Samnite War; the harsh and brutal treatment of con quered populations, extending to the devasta tion of fields, the burning of cities and the enslaving of populations; the insatiable greed for further expansion; the disregard of the "rights of small nationalities"— all of these as pects of Roman expansion, which are so famil iar to students, sound exceedingly modern and seem quite capable, with some few changes of names, of furnishing the proper categories for the analysis of the development of the German Empire from the acquisition of Brandenburg in 1415 to the present momentous collapse of 1918. While this process of the formation of empires was most influential in creating the tradition of the glory of territorial expansion which was to serve as an important impulse to the aggressive ness of the modern national and territorial state, it should not be forgotten that there was a most radical difference between the political and cul tural basis of such a political entity as the Ro man Empire and the German Empire of the present day. Though there was a uniform and universal political system, there was no cultural homogeneity or common sentiment of loyalty, which are the indispensable foundations of the national state. Only the citizens of Italian Rome felt any emotional thrills of patriotic re action at the triumphal processions of the con quering emperors or generals and at the recita tion of the Virgilian epic of the growth of the Pax Romano. Though the subject peoples might formally acquiesce in the apotheosis of the Roman emperor and render a hp reverence and allegiance they preserved openly or secretly their admiration for their own heroes and leaders and retained their deeper loyalty and allegiance to their own pantheon. A common spontaneous patriotism and a general loyalty to the sovereign imperial state was quite unknown in the ancient empires, and the cultural homo geneity which must precede the political expres sion of national life was as remote from reali zation. Even the prevailing political philosophy Stoicism — decried the sentiment of nationalism and patriotism, and lauded the notion of the brotherhood of man and the cosmopolitanism of world-citizenship. Mr. Bryce thus depicts the nature and operation of the Roman imperial system, so different from the modern political order based on the national state: °No quarrels of race or religion disturbed that calm, for all national distinctions were becoming merged in the idea of a common Empire. The gradual extension of Roman citizenship through the colonic, the working of the equalized and equal izing Roman law, the even pressure of the government on all subjects, the movement of population caused by commerce and the slave traffic, were steadily assimilating the various peoples. . . . From RomeCame the laws and language that had overspread the world; at her feet the nations laid the offerings of their labor: she was the head of the Empire and of civili zation, and in riches, fame and splendor 'far outshone, as well the cities of that time as the fabled glories of Babylon or Persepolis? Had Rome continued to exist with an improved method of imperial administration and eco nomics for 2,000 years after her °fall," it might have been possible for her to have welded her diverse subject populations into a single loyal and unified national unit, but the experiment was not allowed. In 378 A.D., the Teutonic barbarians from the North, who had been grad ually filtering into the empire for three cen turies, broke their leashes and started on their migrations, which submerged the ancient world in the return of pre-classical barbarism and produced a Clovis, a Charlemagne and an Otto the Great to repeat the tasks of an Agamemnon, an Alexander and an Augustus. The ancient world, then, passed without producing the com plete parallel of the modern national state, but it laid the psychological and political basis upon which it could develop, though it must not be forgotten that the growth of the modern na tional state has been to a large degree a progress sui generis, primarily independent of ancient impulses, even if influenced by ancient models. The psychological contributions of Rome to modern
and the continuity of Roman egotism and jingoism with modern mili tarism and patriotism have been eloquently stated by Professor Muzzey in the following citation: '
Not only were these local units of the medieval period ill-adapted to the creation of nations and national states, but there operated from the other extreme powerful forces and institutions making for a continuance of that universalism which Thad characterized the Roman Empire. - Indeed, it has usually been held that uni r lism and c smo olitanism were the dominant ideals of t e i e ges —a sentiment best summed, up in Dante's