Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/309

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POLITICAL INTEGRATION.
295

some common ancestor if he had died in their lifetime." So that political integration, while furthered by that likeness of nature which identity of descent involves, is again furthered by that likeness of religion simultaneously arising from this identity of descent.

Thus is it, too, at a later stage, with that less pronounced likeness of nature characterizing men of the same race who have multiplied and spread in such ways as to form adjacent small societies. Coöperation among them continues to be furthered, though less effectually, by the community of their natures, by the community of their traditions, ideas, and sentiments, as well as by their community of language. Among men of diverse types, coöperation is necessarily hindered not only by that absence of mutual comprehension caused by ignorance of one another's words, but also by unlikenesses in their ways of thinking and feeling. It needs but to remember how often, even among those who speak the same language, quarrels arise from misinterpretations of things said, to see what fertile sources of confusion and antagonism must be the partial or complete differences of speech which habitually accompany differences of race. Similarly, those who are widely unlike in their emotional natures, or in their intellectual natures, perplex one another by unexpected conduct—a fact on which travelers habitually remark. Hence a further obstacle to combined action. Diversities of custom, too, become causes of dissension. Where a food eaten by one people is regarded by another with disgust, where an animal held sacred by the one is by the other treated with contempt, where a salute which the one expects is never made by the other, there must be continually generated alienations which hinder joint efforts. Other things equal, facility of coöperation will be proportionate to the amount of fellow-feeling; the fellow-feeling is prevented by whatever prevents men from behaving in the same ways under the same conditions. The working together of the original and derived factors above enumerated is well exhibited in the following passage from Grote: "The Hellens were all of common blood and parentage—were all descendants of the common patriarch Hellen. In treating of the historical Greeks, we have to accept this as a datum: it represents the sentiment under the influence of which they moved and acted. It is placed by Herodotus in the front rank, as the chief of those four ties which bound together the Hellenic aggregate: 1. Fellowship of blood; 2. Fellowship of language; 3. Fixed domiciles of gods, and sacrifices common to all; 4. Like manners and dispositions."

Influential as we thus find to be the likeness of nature which is insured by common descent, the implication is that, in the absence of considerable likeness, the larger political aggregates formed are unstable, and can be maintained only by a coercion which, some time or other, is sure to fail. Though other causes have conspired, yet this has doubtless been a part cause of the dissolution of great empires in past ages. At the present time the decay of the Turkish Empire is