groups, each constituting in itself a small herd, and dispensing to its members the moral energy that in a fully organized society would come from the nation as a whole. Of such minor herds some are much more distinct from the common body than others. Some engage a part only of the life of their members, so that the individual citizen may belong to a number of groups and derive such moral energy as he possesses from a variety of sources. Thus in a fully segregated society in time of peace the moral support of the citizen comes from his social class and his immediate circle, his professional associations, his church, his chapel, his trade union and his clubs, rather than directly from the nation in which he is a unit. Indeed, so far from looking to the nation at large for the fulfilment of its natural function of providing “all hope, all sustainment, all reward,” he is apt to regard it as embodied by the tax-gatherer, the policeman, and the bureaucrat, at its best remote and indifferent, at its worst hostile and oppressive.
The more distinct of these intra-national groups may not only be very fully isolated from the common body, but may be the seat of an actual corporate hostility to it, or rather to the aggregated minor groups which have come officially to represent it. When war breaks upon a society thus constituted {216} the intense stimulation of herd instinct that results tends to break down the moral restrictions set up by segregation, to throw back the individual citizen on to the nation at large for the satisfaction of his moral needs, and to replace class feeling by national feeling. The apprehended danger of the given war is the measure of the completeness with which occurs such a solution of minor groups into the national body. The extent of such solution and the consequently increased homogeneity it effects in the nation will determine the extent to which national feeling develops, the degree to which it approaches unanimity, and consequently the vigour with which the war is defended and conducted. If a minor group has already developed a certain hostility to the common body and resists the solvent effect of the outbreak of war, it becomes a potential source of anti-national feeling and of opposition