Reflect a little on these facts vouched for by General Sir Ian Hamilton. No soldier of the Japanese army, none even of the coolies, would accept anything in the shape of a tip even for honest services rendered, lest the purity of his motives should be sullied; and each man always went into action not merely prepared to die if necessary, but actually prepared and expecting to conquer and to die for the good and glory of his nation. He writes "Japanese officers have constantly to explain to their men that they must not consider the main object of the battle is to get killed[87]." And he goes on to show that they are not fanatics, are not inspired by any idea of the supernatural or by any hope of rewards after death, as is usually the case of the Moslem soldier who displays an equal recklessness of life. Surely, if in any nation the national consciousness could inspire and maintain all classes of its people in all relations of life to this high level of strenuous self-sacrifice for the welfare of the nation, that nation would soon predominate over all others, and be impregnably strong, no matter what defects of individual and national character it might display.
The idea of the nation is, then, a bond between its members over and above all those bonds of custom, of habit, of economic interdependence, of law and of self-interest, of sympathy, of imitation, of collective emotion and thought, which inevitably arise among a homogeneous people occupying any defined area; and it is the most powerful and essential of them all. As Fouillée put it, the essential characteristic of human society is that "it is an organism which realises itself in conceiving and in willing its own existence. Any collection of men becomes a society in the only true sense of the word, when all the men conceive more or less clearly the type of organic whole which they can form by uniting themselves and when they effectively unite themselves under the determining influence of this conception. Society is then an organism which exists because it has been thought and willed, it is an organism born of an idea[88]." In this sense Society has never yet been perfectly realized, but it is the ideal towards which social evolution tends.