But outside these conquests of personal genius the broad streams of national influence and achievement which might have fertilised the wide plains of the intellectual world have been confined within their narrow national channels. Nationalism as a restrictive and exclusive force, fostering political and industrial enmities and keeping down the competition of nationalities and races to the low level of military strife, has everywhere checked the free intercourse requisite for the higher kinds of competition, the struggle of languages, literatures, scientific theories, religious, political, and social institutions, and all the arts and crafts which are the highest and most important expressions of national as of individual life.
VII
This thought unearths the lowest root fallacy of the crude biological sociology, the assumption that there is one sort of national efficiency and that it is tested by a contest of military or commercial power. The only meaning that can be given to the “social efficiency” of a nation identifies it with the power it displays of adapting itself to its physical environment and of altering that environment to help the adaptation; the attainments in religion, law, politics, intellectual life, industry, &c., are the expressions of this social efficiency. Bearing this in mind, it is evident that for concrete purposes of comparison there are many kinds of social efficiency, and that the notion that civilisation is a single beaten track, upon which every nation must march, and that social efficiency, or extent of civilisation, can be measured by the respective distances the nations have gone, is a mischievous delusion.