Littell's Living Age/Volume 137/Issue 1764/The Hatred of Individuals for Nations
THE HATRED OF INDIVIDUALS FOR NATIONS.
People begin to hate nations just as they begin to hate individuals, but the progress of their hatred is so different as to deserve a moment's study. A man hates another usually for some reason, producible, at all events, to his own mind, either because he has suffered from his enemy, or because he is in his way, or because he is insolent towards him, or because, for some reason not quite clear even to himself, he entertains a secret fear of his adversary's possible action. There are, no doubt, what we may call sympathetic hatreds, aversions springing from no known or recognized cause, born instantly on contact, and really produced by a perceived conflict of natures, temperaments, or sometimes aspirations. It is the hatred of a horse for a camel, of an ichneumon for a snake, of a Chinaman for a negro, and inexplicable by mere reasoning. Such cases do occur, just as love at first sight does occur, but they are rare, and as a rule a hater requires provocation from the object of his hatred, though, of course, the provocation may occasionally be found merely in the fact of the provokers existence. Kings have hated their heirs very bitterly for no better reason than that, and hatred to a man who stands between yourself and a pleasant life, though he may be standing there quite innocently, is among the commonest of social phenomena. The hatred, however, commonly begins with a reason, is exasperated by a series of actual or supposed events, and then, in Christian society and in our modern world, receives a check. We cannot, indeed, quite agree with Bulwer, who maintained in one of his novels that hatred was an extinct motor, for we see murders committed every day for which we can perceive no other motive, and hear perpetually of social quarrels in which hatred has at last moved two men to violent and hostile action, but it is true, we think, that modern hatred is subject to checks. Not only is the hater subject to those influences from the variety and complexity of modern life of which Bulwer speaks, from the number of the interests which necessarily press upon his mind and prevent him from brooding over the villanies, real or imaginary, of any individual, but he is almost sure at some step in the progress of his malady to pull himself sharply up. He recognizes that his mind has been dram-drinking. Either he is a reasonable human being, and suddenly appreciates the humor of his own exaggerated view, or he is a Christian, and is shocked at the impulses of his own mind, or he is under the influence of the Christian atmosphere, and recoils before the first suggestion of an act which would cause suffering, that is, from any approach towards making his hatred active. “After all,” he says to himself, “perhaps I mistake the fellow, or perhaps he has mistaken me;” or, “He may be only acting after his nature,” or, “He has a right, annoying as he is in the exercise of it.” At all events, he reflects, and reflection is nearly sure to be as fatal to hatred as it is to that form of rage which carries a man out of himself, and ends in a burst of destructiveness, only innocent when confined to his own china. The man who hates a nation rarely feels this check. He never pulls himself up, for he never perceives that such a process is obligatory on the conscience of a Christian human being. On the contrary, when he lets himself go full swing, he exults over himself for the moral virtue shown in the pace he has attained. It is immoral to hate an individual, but patriotic to hate a nation. It is foolish to be eternally suspecting a personal enemy, but politic to regard every national act as deserving of suspicion. To grudge your cousin his luck is mean, so basely mean, that most men would deny it; but to detest France, or Germany, or Russia for getting a new estate, even by legacy, is positively virtuous. It is feeble to be moved by taunts from an adversary, but if he has a few million heads it is only proper pride, a duty you owe to your country, to be very wrath with his most meaningless impertinence. It is wicked to desire to kill a rival merely because, he has succeeded, but to desire to kill a nation for succeeding is an emotion to be avowed and to be proud of. “I would give a finger if I could kill him,” says the angry man, and the bystanders pronounce him, in their hearts, a malignant fool; but if he says, “I would give my life if only I could destroy the Russian army,” they think the sentiment quite creditable, and describe him ever after as a little violent, but frank and patriotic. If he invents ingenious methods of killing, he is a man deserving of honor; and if he kills in heaps, he is a hero. The hater's very virtues, his love for his country, his desire for the national honor, his indignation at wrong, are all called in to foster his rancor, until moderation seems to himself scarcely less than a crime, and he talks, and especially writes, as if he were bereft of reason. In modern life, hereditary hatred, the active dislike of a man because his grandfather was a brute, is considered foolish, and is disowned though few men are entirely free from unconscious antipathies of the kind, or could conceive of a Lord Ruthven as a benevolent philanthropist but where a nation is the subject of hatred, distance of time matters nothing. Half Europe hates the Jews of to-day, because their remote ancestors executed Christ; the Greeks, who have not held Byzantium for four hundred years, still suffer from the opprobrium attaching to the word Byzantine; and educated men to this hour hate Russians hard, because Russian proprietors, like English proprietors in the West Indies, were occasionally frightfully cruel to their serfs. Nothing the serf-owners ever did surpasses the deeds narrated before the last committee of inquiry into slavery in the West Indies, but what then? So strong, indeed, is this cause of hatred, that we question whether if a people arose who called themselves Carthaginians, English educated men would ever quite overcome an inclination to believe that they were abnormally cruel. Men who hate nations actually read themselves into blazing fury by studying their history, and are ready to refuse votes to Irishmen because their fathers passed a confiscating act, and delight in Dutch defeats before Acheen because of the massacre of Amboyna. It is just the same about evidence. An Englishman believes a man a fool who is always worrying himself about things his adversary says, who listens to every morsel of tittle-tattle about epigrams against him which his adversary has made, or who greedily receives stories of insults offered by the enemy's hangers-on to his servants. He quotes all manner of proverbs about listeners, asks how society is to go on if everybody “repeats,” and is positively angry if malicious gossip is traced to inferior servants. If, however, the enemy is a nation, all these rules are discarded. It is absurd to believe that John contemplates stealing your cabbages, particularly as, if the gout were away, you could kick John off the premises, but to believe that the nation called "John" would not steal your mortgages is suicidal trustfulness. You are besotted to think that Brown, who is half insolvent, wants a law-suit with you, who have the bank of England in your breeches-pocket, but to suppose that Czar Alexander wants a war with England is only far-seeing and wise. If your coachman tells you that your groom tells him that your enemy's stable-boy was heard to say he should like to duck the said groom, you smile, and bid him be silent; but if a telegram-maker reports that Count Ignatieff said jestingly that a dragoman in English service ought to be shot, it is proper to massacre armies to wipe that insult out. A merchant who believed about a rival half the rubbish that England has believed for the past fortnight about Russia would be regarded as out of his mind, but the rival being a nation, he who believed most was regarded as necessarily the acutest man. In private life, and as regards individuals, even Dr. Johnson, who loved a good hater, would have asked on what authority statements justifying hatred were made; but in international life any authority is good enough, and a story utterly improbable in itself is swallowed down on the authority of a perfectly anonymous bulletin-maker, who may, for aught that appears, have been paid to invent it, or may be gratifying a sardonic humor at the expense of the credulous, because irritated Englishman. The hatred, in fact, being supposed to be virtuous, is fostered until it becomes a passion, and rejects all control from either reason or experience. Othello's mind about Desdemona was a judicial mind when compared with the mind of a good many Englishmen about Count Ignatieff, and Dissenting ministers are hardly more credulous about General Bex than English Tories about Prince Gortschakoff. And finally, the man who hates a nation, with reason or without, always desires to transmute his hatred into an act. At the exact point where the hater hating an individual usually stops, the hater hating a nation usually boils over. The individual must not only hate very hard but be very bad, who throws vitriol at his foe, but if the foe is a nation, that is the first thing he thinks of. He thinks it actually noble to let loose barbarism at him, and counts up the Kurds or the Arabs he might employ with a glow of gratified pride, in which he perceives no wickedness whatever. Only an oppressive man relies on his wealth to ruin his opponent by taking him from court to court, but if the opponent is a nation, kindly men will wag their purses, and exult in the number of times they can commence a new campaign. Of course, the real origin of all this rancor is ignorance, an inability on the part of the hater to recognize that he is hating persons, and not merely a force like a flood or a stream, which he has to dam up; but that excuse is valid only at the price of the haters reputation for knowledge and discernment. He ought to know what he is hating, ought to attribute sane motives, ought to be self-controlled enough to test evidence and distinguish among informants. That he is not so, that an imaginary story of insult to an envoy can make a nation rush to war, is one of the many evils which attend the progress of the world towards democracy, and one of the many which impose day by day heavier responsibilities on those who guide. We think they are being felt, and that within a few years the statesman who can madly hate a nation will be regarded as society now regards the man who can madly hate an individual, as a little mad, very bad, and dangerous to know. Fifty years hence statesmen will regard nations as leading counsel regard opponents at the bar, as persons they may quarrel with if provoked, and must contend with in business, but for the rest, as human beings exactly in essentials like themselves. Whether average men, however, will attain that amount of wisdom, we doubt. They will hardly in any reasonable time become wiser than the politicians who let loose out of rancor Red Indians on people of their own race, creed, and language, or the peers who to-day would declare war on Russia because they say Russia is ambitious, tricky, and strong.