POSITION IN THE WEST 167 



effect of the concentration of power in a few hands. 

 The fact has great significance in the future of 

 democracy. For it is in such conditions of power, 

 even where they prevail in institutions outwardly 

 representative in character, that the primitive in- 

 born heredity of the fight in the individual struggles 

 with and, in the end, completely dominates the 

 cultural heredity which is imposed on the individual 

 by civilization. 



After Christianity, nationality has been the 

 principal institution through which the West has 

 sought to apply the emotion of the ideal on a col- 

 lective scale in the service of civilization. But the 

 inborn heredity of the fight in vast strength has 

 everywhere throughout the West carried the ex- 

 pressions of nationality into similar forms of 

 combativeness. 



In the result we see nearly every function of 

 nationality amongst Western peoples diverted, just 

 as in the pagan world, to some expression of ex- 

 clusiveness, with the ultimate fact of war in the 

 background. The appeal to the emotion of the 

 ideal through nationality in the West has, in short, 

 ever been an appeal to the instinct of combative- 

 ness, and nearly always with the conception of war 

 in the background. Every living nation idealizes 

 itself. But throughout the West the idealization 



