42 Nineteenth Century Peace Congresses
of social control of individuals which have been building
from the earliest days of human society. The ancient world
knew either tribes which were regularly at war with all alien
tribes and which were not limited by any such modern inven-
tions as definite territorial limits or frontiers, or else it knew
great empires which united all these racial groups by mili-
tary prowess and by the fiction of common heritage. The
intense rivalry of wandering tribes reappeared in the Middle
Ages, and seemed to swallow all there was of civilization in
the devouring flood of their invasions. The old idea of unity
still lived on in theory in the Holy Roman Empire, whose
essential qualities were best described in the famous sarcasm
of Voltaire. But order reappeared only when tribes had
succumbed to those warlike rulers, the nobles, and these in
turn had been united by the prowess and the paid armies of
the kings, the real founders of that very modern human
institution which we call the State. A state, in the sense of
a group of people living together within a definite territory,
having an orderly civilization, and bound together by the
invisible bond of a common allegiance and a common loy-
alty, certainly did not exist on the face of the earth much
before the beginning of the seventeenth century. There
were, of course, groups of people who already had many of
the marks of the state, but in a general sense it is safe to say
that men knew kings, and churches, and families, and tribes,
and empires long before they knew states ; and even in the
sixteenth century no amount of explanation could really have
made a man understand what we now mean by patriotism,
nor why the Englishman stands with uncovered head at the
strains of his national anthem, nor what the Stars and Stripes
means to an American. For these are ideas which belong to
the realm of deep feeling rather than of pure reason, and
are not to be reduced to the cold limits of a syllogism.