Suppose that all those conditions making for national unity which we have considered in the foregoing chapters were realised, but that nevertheless all men continued to be moved only by self-regarding motives, or by those which have reference to the welfare of themselves and their family circle or to any ends less comprehensive than the welfare of the whole nation. We could not then properly speak of the tendencies resulting from the interplay and the conflict of all these individual wills as expressions of the general will, as Bosanquet and others have done, even though the organic unity of the whole secured a harmonious resultant national activity, if such a thing were possible. But there is no reason to suppose that such a thing is possible.
I think we may say that it is only in so far as the idea of the people or nation as a whole is present to the consciousness of individuals and determines their actions that a nation in the proper sense of the word can exist or ever has existed. Without this factor any population inhabiting a given territory remains either a mere horde or a population of slaves under a despotism. Neither can be called a nation; wherever a nation has appeared in the history of the world, the consciousness of itself as a nation has been an essential condition of its existence and still more of its progress.
We may see this, even more clearly, in the case of the smaller aggregations of men, the smaller social units, the family, the clan, the tribe. The family is a family only so long as it is conscious of itself as a family, and only in virtue of that self-consciousness and of the part which this idea and the sentiments gathered about it play in determining the actions of each member. How carefully such family consciousness is sometimes fostered and how great a part it plays in social life is common knowledge. In the early stages of Greek and Roman history, the family consciousness was the dominant social force which long succeeded in overriding and preventing the development of any larger social consciousness. Just as the _gens_ played this part in early Rome, so the clan has played a similar part elsewhere, for example in the highlands of Scotland. Such peoples form the strongest nations.