National Characten and the factors in its formation

THIS book is based upon a course of ten lectures on Citizenship, delivered, under the terms of the Stevenson Foundation, in the University and the City of Glasgow during the latter part of 1925 and the beginning of 1926. The lectures were delivered from notes which I have done my best to shape into a written text during the year of grace permitted to me, by the terms of my appointment, after the conclusion of the course. I have done what I could in such periods of leisure as I could command. But it has been difficult to reconcile the just claims of scholarship with the demands of other duties; and if the basis of induction is sometimes narrow, and the ultima lima is here and there missing, I can only the indulgence of my readers.

The theme of the courses of lectures delivered on the Stevenson Foundation is Citizenship, or some branch of the subject. I have some times asked myself, in the course of preparing these lectures and writing this book, whether I was actually dealing with citizenship or a branch of citizenship, or whether I was not rather attempting a series of historical observations on the making of England and the English type. I have comforted myself, when I have fallen into such moods of doubt, by the reflection that teachers are generally agreed that civics is best handled not as the an abstract subject, but as something involved and immersed in stream of historical processes. Our citizenship is a historical forma tion; and we shall best understand its nature and its obligations if we study its growth and examine its history. To see how nations have become what they are may be the best way of discovering how they can make themselves other than what they are; and to know the instruments and the processes of our making during the past may throw some light upon the problems of our development in the future.