Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
    I see the lords of human kind pass by.

Michelet found in England ‘human pride personified in a people,’ at a time when the characteristic of Germany was ‘a profound impersonality.’  It may be doubted whether even the arrogant brutality of the modern Prussian is more offensive to foreigners than was the calm and haughty assumption of superiority by our countrymen at this time.  Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were quite of Milton’s opinion, that, when the Almighty wishes something unusually great and difficult to be done, He entrusts it to His Englishmen.  This unamiable characteristic was probably much more the result of insular ignorance than of a deep-seated pride.  ‘A generation or two ago,’ said Mr. Asquith lately, ’patriotism was largely fed and fostered upon reciprocal ignorance and contempt.’  The Englishman seriously believed that the French subsisted mainly upon frogs, while the Frenchman was equally convinced that the sale of wives at Smithfield was one of our national institutions.  This fruitful source of international misunderstanding has become less dangerous since the facilities of foreign travel have been increased.  But in the relations of Europe with alien and independent civilisations, such as that of China, we still see brutal arrogance and vulgar ignorance producing their natural results.

Another cause of perverted patriotism is the inborn pugnacity of the bete humaine.  Our species is the most cruel and destructive of all that inhabit this planet.  If the lower animals, as we call them, were able to formulate a religion, they might differ greatly as to the shape of the beneficent Creator, but they would nearly all agree that the devil must be very like a big white man.  Mr. McDougall[8] has lately raised the question whether civilised man is less pugnacious than the savage; and he answers it in the negative.  The Europeans, he thinks, are among the most combative of the human race.  We are not allowed to knock each other on the head during peace; but our civilisation is based on cut-throat competition; our favourite games are mimic battles, which I suppose effect for us a ‘purgation of the emotions’ similar to that which Aristotle attributed to witnessing the performance of a tragedy:  and, when the fit seizes us, we are ready to engage in wars which cannot fail to be disastrous to both combatants.  Mr. McDougall does not regret this disposition, irrational though it is.  He thinks that it tends to the survival of the fittest, and that, if we substitute emulation for pugnacity, which on other grounds might seem an unmixed advantage, we shall have to call in the science of eugenics to save us from becoming as sheeplike as the Chinese.  There is, however, another side to this question, as we shall see presently.