from habit, it is already almost dry. There is doubtless a tendency among responsible personages to persuade themselves that it still flows with all the power that made the war a veritable golden age of government. Such a persuasion is natural and fully to be expected. It would be difficult for those who have directed with whatever want of skill a power so great to avoid coming in time to be a little confused between the direction of power and the production of it, and to think that they still command the moral resources which war gave so abundantly. Such a mistake is likely to prove one of the elements of danger, though perhaps only a minor one, in the present situation.
Western society, with perhaps even Western civilization, is in a situation of great interest to the sociologist, and probably also of some considerable {237} danger. There are certain chief elements of danger which we may attempt to define.
First, with the end of the war the mental orientation of the individual has undergone a great change. National feeling is no longer able to supply him with moral vigour and interest. He must turn once more to his class for what the nation as a whole has been so much more efficiently supplying. Life has regained for him much of its old tameness, the nation in which he has lived vividly during the war is resuming its vagueness and becoming once more merely the state, remote and quasi-hostile. But the war has shown him what interest and moral vigour are in life, and he will not easily accept the absence of these; he has acquired the appetite for them, he has, so to speak, tasted blood. The tasteless social dietary of pre-war England is not likely to satisfy his invigorated palate.
Secondly, the transition from war to peace is in an imperfectly organized society a process necessarily dangerous because it involves the change from a condition of relative moral stability to one of relative moral instability. To get back to the precise state of delicately balanced but essentially insecure equilibrium of society before the war would seem, in