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nydus/Instincts of the Herd in Peace and WarPublic
Page 283 of 306
Table of Contents

POSTSCRIPT OF 1919

which, in those rough waters, it jostled as mercilessly and as effectually as did the brass pot the earthen crock in the fable.

During the war itself the submission to leadership that England showed was characteristic of the socialized type. It was to a great extent spontaneous, voluntary, and undisciplined, and gave repeated evidence that the passage of inspiration was essentially from the common people to its leaders rather than from the leaders to the common people. When the current of inspiration sets persistently in this direction, as it unquestionably did in England, it is very plain that the primitive type of leadership that has led so many civilizations to disaster is no longer in unmodified action.

Germany has provided the most complete example of a culture of leadership that has ever been recorded, and has gone through the phases of her evolution with a precision which should make her case an illustration classical for all history. With a people showing strongly the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the aggressive social type, and a social structure deeply and rigidly segregated, the nation was ideally {250} susceptible to discipline and leadership, and a leading class was available which possessed an almost superhuman prestige. The opportunity given to leadership was exploited with great energy and thoroughness and with an intelligence that by its intensity almost made up for being nowhere really profound. With all these advantages and the full uses of the huge resources science has made available to intelligently concerted effort, an extremely formidable power was created. The peoples of the socialized type towards whom from the first its hostility was scarcely veiled were under obvious disadvantages in rivalry with it. Their social type made it impossible for them to combine and organize themselves against what was to them no more than a vaguely hypothetical danger. Against peaceful conquest by Germany in the industrial sphere England was therefore practically helpless, and to it would probably in time have succumbed. Paradox as it may seem, there can be no doubt that it was in

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