The occurrence of war between nations renders obvious certain manifestations of the social instinct which are apt to escape notice at other times. So marked is this that a certain faint interest in the biology of gre­gar­i­ous­ness has been aroused during the present war, and has led to some speculation but no very radical examination of the facts or explanation of their meaning. Expression, of course, has been found for the usual view that primitive instincts normally vestigial or dormant are aroused into activity by the stress of war, and that there is a process of rejuvenation of “lower” instincts at the expense of “higher.” All such views, apart {140} from their theoretical unsoundness, are uninteresting because they are of no practical value.

It will be convenient to mention some of the more obvious psychological phenomena of a state of war before dealing with the underlying instinctive processes which produce them.

The war that began in August 1914 was of a kind peculiarly suitable to produce the most marked and typical psychological effects. It had long been foreseen as no more than a mere possibility of immense disaster—of disaster so outrageous that by that very fact it had come to be regarded with a passionate incredulity. It had loomed before the people, at any rate of England, as an event almost equivalent to the ultimate overthrow of all things. It had been led up to by years of doubt and anxiety, sometimes rising to apprehension, sometimes lapsing into unbelief, and culminating in an agonized period of suspense, while the avalanche tottered and muttered on its base before the final and still incredible catastrophe. Such were the circumstances which no doubt led to the actual outbreak producing a remarkable series of typical psychological reactions.

The first feeling of the ordinary citizen was fear—an immense, vague, aching anxiety, perhaps typically vague and unfocused, but naturally tending soon to localize itself in channels customary to the individual and leading to fears for his future, his food supply, his family, his trade, and so forth. Side by side with fear there was a heightening of the normal intolerance of isolation. Loneliness became an urgently unpleasant feeling, and the individual experienced an intense and active desire for the company and even physical contact of his fellows. In such company he was aware of a great accession of confidence, courage, and moral power. It was possible for an observant person to trace the actual {141} influence of his circumstances upon his judgment, and to notice that isolation tended to depress his confidence while company fortified it. The necessity for companionship was strong enough to break down the distinctions of class, and dissipate the reserve between strangers which is to some extent a concomitant mechanism. The change in the customary frigid atmosphere of the railway train, the omnibus, and all such meeting-places was a most interesting experience to the psychologist, and he could scarcely fail to be struck by its obvious biological meaning. Perhaps the most striking of all these early phenomena was the strength and vitality of rumour, probably because it afforded by far the most startling evidence that some other and stronger force than reason was at work in the formation of opinion. It was, of course, in no sense an unusual fact that non-rational opinion should be so widespread; the new feature was that such opinion should be able to spread so rapidly and become established so firmly altogether regardless of the limits within which a given opinion tends to remain localized in times of peace. Non-rational opinion under normal conditions is as a rule limited in its extent by a very strict kind of segregation; the successful rumours of the early periods of the war invaded all classes and showed a capacity to overcome prejudice, education, or scepticism. The observer, clearly conscious as he might be of the mechanisms at work, found himself irresistibly drawn to the acceptance of the more popular beliefs; and even the most convinced believer in the normal prevalence of non-rational belief could scarcely have exaggerated the actual state of affairs. Closely allied with this accessibility to rumour was the readiness with which suspicions of treachery and active hostility grew and flourished about any one of even foreign appearance or origin. It is not intended to {142} attempt to discuss the origin and meaning of the various types of fable which have been epidemic in opinion; the fact we are concerned with here is their immense vitality and power of growth.

We may now turn to some consideration of the psychological significance of these phenomena of a state of war.

The characteristic feature of a really dangerous national struggle for existence is the intensity of the stimulus it applies to the social instinct. It is not that it arouses “dormant” or decayed instincts, but simply that it applies maximal stimulation to instinctive mechanisms which are more or less constantly in action in normal times. In most of his reactions as a gregarious animal in times of peace, man is acting as a member of one or another class upon which the stimulus acts. War acts upon him as a member of the greater herd, the nation, or, in other words, the true major unit. As I have repeatedly pointed out, the cardinal mental characteristic of the gregarious animal is his sensitiveness to his fellow-members of the herd. Without them his personality is, so to say, incomplete; only in relation to them can he attain satisfaction and personal stability. Corresponding with his dependence on them is his openness towards them, his specific accessibility to stimuli coming from the herd.

A threat directed towards the whole herd is the intensest stimulus to these potentialities, and the individual reacts towards it in the most vigorous way.15 The first response is a thrill of alarm which {143} passes through the herd from one member to another with magic rapidity. It puts him on the alert, sets him looking for guidance, prepares him to receive commands, but above all draws him to the herd in the first instinctive concentration against the enemy. In the presence of this stimulus even such partial and temporary isolation as was possible without it becomes intolerable. The physical presence of the herd, the actual contact and recognition of its members, becomes indispensable. This is no mere functionless desire, for re-embodiment in the herd at once fortifies courage and fills the individual with moral power, enthusiasm, and fortitude. The meaning that mere physical contact with his fellows still has for man is conclusively shown in the use that has been made of attacks in close formation in the German armies. It is perfectly clear that a densely crowded formation has psychological advantages in the face of danger, which enable quite ordinary beings to perform what are in fact prodigies of valour. Even undisciplined civil mobs have, on occasion, proved wonderfully valorous, though their absence of unity often causes their enterprise to alternate with panic. A disciplined mob—if one may use that word merely as a physical expression, without any derogatory meaning—has been shown in this war on innumerable occasions to be capable of facing dangers the facing of which by isolated individuals would be feats of fabulous bravery. {144}

The psychological significance of the enormous activity of rumour in this war is fairly plain. That rumours spread readily and are tenacious of life is evidence of the sensitiveness to herd opinion which is so characteristic of the social instinct. The gravity of a threat to the herd is shown by nothing better than by the activity of rumour. The strong stimulus to herd instinct produces the characteristic response in the individual of a maximal sensitiveness to his fellows—to their presence or absence, their alarms and braveries, and in no less degree to their opinions. With the establishment of this state of mind the spread and survival of rumours become inevitable, and will vary directly with the seriousness of the external danger. Into the actual genesis of the individual rumours and the meaning of their tendency to take a stereotyped form we cannot enter here.

The potency of rumour in bearing down rational scepticism displays unmistakably the importance of the instinctive processes on which it rests. It is also one of the many evidences that homogeneity within the herd is a deeply rooted necessity for gregarious animals and is elaborately provided for by char­ac­ter­is­tics of the gregarious mind.

The establishment of homogeneity in the herd is the basis of morale. From homogeneity proceed moral power, enthusiasm, courage, endurance, enterprise, and all the virtues of the warrior. The peace of mind, happiness, and energy of the soldier come from his feeling himself to be a member in a body solidly united for a single purpose. The impulse towards unity that was so pronounced and universal at the beginning of the war was, then, a true and sound instinctive movement of defence. It was prepared to sacrifice all social distinctions and local prejudices if it could liberate by doing so Nature’s inexhaustible stores of moral power for the defence {145} of the herd. Naturally enough its significance was misunderstood, and a great deal of its beneficent magic was wasted by the good intentions which man is so touchingly ready to accept as a substitute for knowledge. Even the functional value of unity was, and still is, for the most part ignored. We are told to weariness that the great objection to disunion is that it encourages the enemy. According to this view, apparent disunion is as serious as real; whereas it must be perfectly obvious that anything which leads our enemy to under-estimate our strength, as does the belief that we are disunited when we are not, is of much more service to us than is neutralized by any more or less visionary disservice we do ourselves by fortifying his morale. The morale of a nation at war proceeds from within itself, and the mere pharisaism and conceit that come from the contemplation of another’s misfortunes are of no moral value. Modern civilians in general are much too self-conscious to conduct the grave tragedy of war with the high, preoccupied composure it demands. They are apt to think too much of what sort of a figure they are making before the world, to waste energy in superfluous explanations of themselves, in flustered and voluble attempts to make friends with bystanders, in posing to the enemy, and imagining they can seriously influence him by grimaces and gesticulations. As a matter of fact, it must be confessed that if such manœuvres could be conducted with a deliberate and purposeful levity which few would now have the fortitude to employ, there would be a certain satisfaction to be obtained in this particular war by the knowledge of our adversary conscientiously, perhaps a little heavily, and with immense resources of learning “investigating our psychology” upon materials of a wholly fantastic kind. Such a design, however, is very far from being the intention of {146} our interpreters to the world, and as long as they cannot keep the earnest and hysterical note out of their exposition it were much better for us that they were totally dumb.

To the psychologist it is plain that the seriousness of disunion is the discouragement to ourselves it necessarily involves. In this lies its single and its immense importance. Every note of disunion is a loss of moral power of incalculable influence; every evidence of union is an equally incalculable gain of moral power. Both halves of this statement deserve consideration, but the latter is incomparably the more important. If disunion were the more potent influence, a great deal might be done for national morale by the forcible control of opinion and expression. That, however, could yield nothing positive, and we must rely upon voluntary unity as the only source of all the higher developments of moral power.

It was towards this object that we dimly groped when we felt in the early weeks of the war the impulses of friendliness, tolerance, and goodwill towards our fellow-citizens, and the readiness to sacrifice what privileges the social system had endowed us with in order to enjoy the power which a perfect homogeneity of the herd would have given us.

A very small amount of conscious, authoritative direction at that time, a very little actual sacrifice of privilege at that psychological moment, a series of small, carefully selected concessions none of which need have been actually subversive of prescriptive right, a slight relaxation in the vast inhumanity of the social machine would have given the needed readjustment out of which a true national homogeneity would necessarily have grown.

The psychological moment was allowed to pass, and the country was spared the shock of seeing its {147} moral strength, which should of course be left to luck, fortified by the hand of science. The history of England during the first fourteen months of the war was thus left to pursue its char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly English course. The social system of class segregation soon repented of its momentary softness and resumed its customary rigidity. More than that, it decided that, far from the war being a special occasion which should penetrate with a transforming influence the whole of society from top to bottom, as the common people were at first inclined to think, the proper pose before the enemy was to be that it made no difference at all. We were to continue imperturbably with the conduct of our business, and to awe the Continent with a supreme exhibition of British phlegm. The national consciousness of the working-man was to be stimulated by his continuing to supply us with our dividends, and ours by continuing to receive them. It is not necessary to pursue the history of this new substitute for unity. It is open to doubt whether our enemies were greatly appalled by the spectacle, or more so than our friends; it is certain that the stimulant supplied to the working-man proved to be inadequate and had to be supplemented by others. . . .

The problem of the function of the common citizen in war was of course left unsolved. It was accepted that if a man were unfit for service and not a skilled worker, he himself was a mere dead weight, and his intense longing for direct service, of however humble a kind, a by-product of which the State could make no use.

That the working classes have to a certain extent failed to develop a complete sense of national unity is obvious enough. It is contended here that what would have been easy in the early days of the war and actually inexpensive to prescriptive right, has steadily become more and more costly to effect {148} and less and less efficiently done. We are already faced with the possibility of having to make profound changes in the social system to convince the working-man effectually that his interests and ours in this war are one.

That a very large class of common citizens, incapable of direct military work, has been left morally derelict during all these agonizing months of war has probably not been any less serious a fact, although the recognition of it has not been forced unavoidably on public notice. It must surely be clear that in a nation engaged in an urgent struggle for existence, the presence of a large class who are as sensitive as any to the call of the herd, and yet cannot respond in any active way, contains very grave possibilities. The only response to that relentless calling that can give peace is in service; if that be denied, restlessness, uneasiness, and anxiety must necessarily follow. To such a mental state are very easily added impatience, discontent, exaggerated fears, pessimism, and irritability. It must be remembered that large numbers of such individuals were persons of importance in peace time and retain a great deal of their prestige under the social system we have decided to maintain, although in war time they are obviously without function. This group of idle and flustered parasites has formed a nucleus from which have proceeded some of the many outbursts of disunion which have done so much to prevent this country from developing her resources with smoothness and continuity. It is not suggested that these eruptions of discontent are due to any kind of disloyalty; they are the result of defective morale, and bear all the evidences of coming from persons whose instinctive response to the call of the herd has been frustrated and who, therefore, lack the strength and composure of those whose souls are uplifted by a satisfactory {149} instinctive activity. Moral instability has been characteristic of all the phenomena of disunion we are now considering, such as recrudescences of political animus, attacks on individual members of the Government, outbursts of spy mania, campaigns of incitement against aliens and of blustering about reprisals. Similar though less conspicuous manifestations are the delighted circulation of rumours, the wild scandalmongering, the eager dissemination of pessimistic inventions which are the pleasure of the smaller amongst these moral waifs. Of all the evidences of defective morale, however, undoubtedly the most general has yet to be mentioned, and that is the proffering of technical advice and exhortation. If we are to judge by what we read, there are few more urgent temptations than this, and yet it is easy to see that there are few enterprises which demand a more complete abrogation of reason. It is almost always the case that the subject of advice is one upon which all detailed knowledge is withheld by the authorities. This restriction of materials, however, seems generally to be regarded by the volunteer critic as giving him greater scope and freedom rather than as a reason for silence or even modesty.

It is interesting to notice in this connection what those who have the ear of the public have conceived to be their duty towards the nation and to try to estimate its value from the point of view of morale. It is clear that they have in general very rightly understood that one of their prime functions should be to keep the Government working in the interests of the nation to the fullest stretch of its energy and resources. Criticism is another function, and advice and instruction a third which have also been regarded as important.

The third of these activities is, no doubt, that which has been most abused and is least important. {150} It tends on the one hand to get involved in technical military matters and consequent absurdity, and on the other hand, in civil matters, to fall back into the bad old ways of politics. Criticism is obviously a perfectly legitimate function, and one of value as long as it keeps to the field of civil questions, and can free itself of the moral failure of being acrimonious in tone. In a government machine engaged upon the largest of tasks there will always be enough injustice and inhumanity, fraud and foolishness to keep temperate critics beneficially employed.

It is in the matter of stimulating the energy and resolution of the Government that the psychologist might perhaps differ to some extent from the popular guides of opinion. In getting work out of a living organism it is necessary to determine what is the most efficient stimulus. One can make a man’s muscles contract by stimulating them with an electric battery, but one can never get so energetic a contraction with however strong a current as can be got by the natural stimulus sent out from the man’s brain. Rising to a more complex level, we find that a man does not do work by order so well or so thoroughly as he does work that he desires to do voluntarily. The best way to get our work done is to get the worker to want to do it. The most urgent and potent of all stimuli, then, are those that come from within the man’s soul. It is plain, therefore, that the best way to extract the maximum amount of work from members of a Government—and it is to yield this, at whatever cost to themselves, that they are there—is not by the use of threats and objurgations, by talk of impeachment or dismissal, or by hints of a day of reckoning after the war, but by keeping their souls full of a burning passion of service. Such a supply of mental energy can issue only from a {151} truly homogeneous herd, and it is therefore to the production of such a homogeneity of feeling that we come once more as the one unmistakable responsibility of the civilian.

We have seen reason to believe that there was a comparatively favourable opportunity of establishing such a national unity in the early phases of the war, and that the attainment of the same result at this late period is likely to be less easy and more costly of disturbance to the social structure.

The simplest basis of unity is equality, and this has been an important factor in the unity which in the past has produced the classically successful manifestations of moral and military power, as for example in the cases of Puritan England and Revolutionary France. Such equality as obtained in these cases was doubtless chiefly moral rather than material, and it can scarcely be questioned that equality of consideration and of fundamental moral estimation is a far more efficient factor than would be equality of material possessions. The fact that it is difficult to persuade a man with thirty shillings a week that he has as much to lose by the loss of national independence as a man with thirty thousand a year, is merely evidence that the imagination of the former is somewhat restricted by his type of education, and that we habitually attach an absurd moral significance to material advantages. It seems certain that it would still be possible to attain a very fair approximation to a real moral equality without any necessary disturbance of the extreme degree of material inequality which our elaborate class segregation has imposed upon us.

A serious and practical attempt to secure a true moral unity of the nation would render necessary a general understanding that the state to be striven for was something different, not only in degree but also in quality, from anything which has yet {152} been regarded as satisfactory. A mere intellectual unanimity in the need for prosecuting the war with all vigour, we may be said actually to possess, but its moral value is not very great. A state of mind directed more to the nation and less immediately to the war is what is needed; the good soldier absorbed in his regiment has little inclination to concern himself with the way the war is going, and the civilian should be similarly absorbed in the nation. To attain this he must feel that he belongs to the country and to his fellow-citizens, and that it and they also belong to him. The established social system sets itself steadily to deny these propositions, and not so much by its abounding material inequalities as by the moral inequalities that correspond with them. The hierarchies of rank, prestige, and consideration, at all times showing serious inconsistencies with functional value, and in war doing so more than ever, are denials of the essential propositions of perfect citizenship, not, curiously enough, through their arbitrary distribution of wealth, comfort, and leisure, but through their persistent, assured, and even unconscious assumption that there exists a graduation of moral values equally real and, to men of inferior station, equally arbitrary. To a gregarious species at war the only tolerable claim to any kind of superiority must be based on leadership. Any other affectation of superiority, whether it be based on prescriptive right, on tradition, on custom, on wealth, on birth, or on mere age, arrogance, or fussiness, and not on real functional value to the State, is, however much a matter of course it may seem, however blandly it may be asserted or picturesquely displayed, an obstacle to true national unity.

Psychological considerations thus appear to indicate a very plain duty for a large class of civilians who have complained of and suffered patriotically {153} from the fact that the Government has found nothing for them to do. Let all those of superior and assured station make it a point of honour and duty to abrogate the privileges of consideration and prestige with which they are arbitrarily endowed. Let them persuade the common man that they also are, in the face of national necessity, common men. The searching test of war has shown that a proportion of the population, serious enough in mere numbers, but doubly serious in view of its power and influence, has led an existence which may fairly be described as in some degree parasitic. That is to say, what they have drawn from the common stock in wealth and prestige has been immensely larger than what they have contributed of useful activity in return. Now, in time of war, they have still less to give proportionally to what they have received. Their deplorably good bargain was in no way of their making; no one has the slightest right to attack their honour or good faith; they are as patriotically minded as any class, and have contributed their fighting men to the Army as generously as the day labourer and the tradesman. It is therefore not altogether impossible that they might come to understand the immense opportunity that is given them by fate to promote a true, deep, and irresistibly potent national unity.

A further contribution to the establishment of a national unity of this truly Utopian degree might come from a changed attitude of mind towards his fellows in the individual. There would have to be an increased kindliness, generosity, patience, and tolerance in all his relations with others, a deliberate attempt to conquer prejudice, irritability, impatience, and self-assertiveness, a deliberate encouragement of cheerfulness, composure, and fortitude. All these would be tasks for the individual {154} to carry out for himself alone; there would be no campaign-making, no direct exhortation, no appeals. Towards the Army and the Navy the central fact of each man’s attitude would be the question, “Am I worth dying for?” and his strongest effort would be the attempt to make himself so.

That question may perhaps make one wonder why it has not been heard more often during the war as a text of the Church. There is little doubt that very many men whose feeling towards the Church is in no way disrespectful or hostile are conscious of a certain uneasiness in hearing her vigorously defending the prosecution of the war and demonstrating its righteousness. They feel, in spite of however conclusive demonstrations to the contrary, that there is a deep-seated inconsistency between war for whatever object and the Sermon on the Mount, and they cannot but remember, when they are told that this is a holy war, that that also the Germans say. They perhaps feel that the justification of the war is, after all, a matter for politicians and statesmen, and that the Church would be more appropriately employed in making it as far as she can a vehicle of good, rather than trying to justify superfluously its existence. A people already awed by the self-sacrifice of its armies may be supposed to be capable of profiting by the exhortations of a Church whose cardinal doctrine is concerned with the responsibility that attaches to those for whose sake life has voluntarily been given up. One cannot imagine an institution more perfectly qualified by its faith and its power to bring home to this people the solemnity of the sanction under which they lie to make themselves worthy of the price that is still being unreservedly paid. If it were consciously the determination of every citizen to make himself worth dying for, who can doubt that a national unity of the sublimest kind would be within reach? {155}

Of all the influences which tend to rob the citizen of the sense of his birthright, perhaps one of the strongest, and yet the most subtle, is that of officialism. It seems inevitable that the enormously complex public services which are necessary in the modern State should set up a barrier between the private citizen and the official, whereby the true relation between them is obscured. The official loses his grasp of the fact that the mechanism of the State is established in the interests of the citizen; the citizen comes to regard the State as a hostile institution, against which he has to defend himself, although it was made for his defence. It is a crime for him to cheat the State in the matter of tax-paying, it is no crime for the State to defraud him in excessive charges. Considered in the light of the fundamental relation of citizen and State, it seems incredible that in a democratic country it is possible for flourishing establishments to exist the sole business of which is to save the private individual from being defrauded by the tax-gathering bureaucracy. This is but a single and rather extreme example of the far-stretching segregation effected by the official machine. The slighter kinds of aloofness, of inhuman etiquette, of legalism and senseless dignity, of indifference to the individual, of devotion to formulæ and routine are no less powerful agents in depriving the common man of the sense of intimate reality in his citizenship which might be so valuable a source of national unity. If the official machine through its utmost parts were animated by an even moderately human spirit and used as a means of binding together the people, instead of as an engine of moral disruption, it might be of incalculable value in the strengthening of morale. {156}