e excitement, and the attitude of such an assembly
in London is good-tempered and lethargic. A crowd in a narrow street is
more likely to get 'out of hand,' and one may see a few thousand men in
a large hall reach a state approaching genuine pathological exaltation
on an exciting occasion, and when they are in the hands of a practised
speaker. But as they go out of the hall they drop into the cool ocean of
London, and their mood is dissipated in a moment. The mob that took the
Bastille would not seem or feel an overwhelming force in one of the
business streets of Manchester. Yet such facts vary greatly among
different races, and the exaggeration which one seems to notice when
reading the French sociologists on this point may be due to their
observations having been made among a Latin and not a Northern race.

So far I have dealt with the impulses illustrated by the internal
politics of a modern State. But perhaps the most important section in
the whole psychology of political impulse is that which is concerned not
with the emotional effect of the citizens of any state upon each other,
but with those racial feelings which reveal themselves in international
politics. The future peace of the world largely turns on the question
whether we have, as is sometimes said and often assumed, an instinctive
affection for those human beings whose features and colour are like our
own, combined with an instinctive hatred for those who are unlike us. On
this point, pending a careful examination of the evidence by the
psychologists, it is difficult to dogmatise. But I am inclined to think
that those strong and apparently simple cases of racial hatred and
affection which can certainly be found, are not instances of a specific
and universal instinct but the result of several distinct and
comparatively weak instincts combined and heightened by habit and
association. I have already argued that the instinct of political
affection is stimulated by the vivid realisation of its object. Since
therefore it is easier, at least for uneducated men, to realise the
existence of beings like than of beings unlike themselves, affection for
one's like would appear to have a natural basis, but one likely to be
modified as our powers of realisation are stimulated by education.
Again, since most men live, especially in childhood, among persons
belonging to the same race as themselves, any markedly unusual face or
dress may excite the instinct of fear of that w