Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/176

160 to one. And then he extends the use of this concept, which is really quite particular and derived from personal experience, to collectivities of the most varied kinds. For Cæsar the Arverni were a "civitas" for us the Chinese are a "nation." On this basis, it was the Athenians and not the Greeks who constituted a nation, and in fact there were only a few individuals who, like Isocrates, felt themselves primarily as Hellenes. On this basis, one of two brothers may call himself a Swiss and the other, with equal right, a German. These are not philosophical concepts, but historical facts. A people is an aggregate of men which feels itself a unit. The Spartiates felt themselves a people in this sense; the "Dorians" of 1100, too, probably, but those of 400 certainly not. The Crusaders became genuinely a people in taking the oath of Clermont; the Mormons in their expulsion from Missouri, in 1839; the Mamertines by their need of winning for themselves a stronghold of refuge. Was the formative principle very different with the Jacobins and Hyksos? How many peoples may have originated in a chief's following or a band of fugitives? Such a group can change race, like the Osmanli, who appeared in Asia Minor as Mongols; or language, like the Sicilian Normans; or name, like Achæans and Danaoi. So long as the common feeling is there, the people as such is there.

We have to distinguish the destiny of a people from its name. The latter is often the only thing about which information remains to us; but can we fairly conclude from a name anything about the history, the descent, the language, or even merely the identity of those who bore it? Here again the historical researcher is to blame, in that, whatever his theory may have been, he has in practice treated the relation between name and bearer as simply as he would treat, say, the personal names of to-day. Have we any conception of the number of unexplored possibilities in this field? To begin with, the very act of name-giving is of enormous importance in early associations. For with a name the human group consciously sets itself up with a sort of sacral dignity. But, here, cult- and war-names may exist side by side; others the land or the heritage may provide; the tribal name may be exchanged for that of an eponymous hero, as with the Osmanli; lastly, an unlimited number of alien names can be applied along the frontiers of a group without more than a part of the community ever hearing them at all. If only such names as these be handed