Nationality as an isolating force is new in the world, an artificial, after-Christian growth, dating from the break-up of Christendom at the so-called Reformation in the sixteenth century. Mutual hostility between races—as opposed to conflicts between a prince and his followers of one State, and a prince of another State and his followers—is not new, but a relapse into fore-Christian barbarism, when the cult of local deities, little knowledge of each other, and total inexperience of political union, led men to regard differences of race as natural and insurmountable barriers, when to be a stranger, a man of another race and creed, was—as it has since become—to be necessarily an enemy, so that the same word—hostis—once did for both. This idea of war between races as natural— , says Plato in Book I of his Laws—was gradually checked politically by the rise of the Roman Empire and the permanence of the Imperial idea, and, on the religious side, by Christianity with its doctrine of the unity of God and of the unity of man made to His Image and equal before Him. Thus with the of Plato we may contrast St. Paul’s ‘.There is neither Jew nor Greek : there is neither bond nor free. . . . For you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal. iii. 28).”

Is this a wholly wild and quite untrue presentation of history? Such measure of truth as it may be found to contain will perhaps emerge as we proceed with our enquiry.