18 The use of this adjective may perhaps call to mind how often the wolf has appeared in fable in just this mood. Usually, however, the fabulist—being of the unsympathetic socialized type—has ascribed the poor creature’s yearnings to hypocrisy.

19 Pp. 137, 138 supra.

20 It is important that it should be quite clear that we have been speaking here of the reaction of the general body of a nation to the occurrence of war, and not of the reasons for which a given war was undertaken. In England and in Germany the feeling of the people that the late war was just and necessary was equally intense and equally a direct consequence of the danger to the herd it represented. It was therefore a non-rational instinctive response without reference to objective justice in either case. Had the threat to the herd on either side seemed less grave, opinion as to the justice of the war would in that country have been cor­res­pon­ding­ly more divided. By her calculated truculence in the years before the war Germany—intending doubtless to intimidate a decaying people—had made it certain that when the threat to this country did come it should be apprehended at once as dangerous to the last degree, and had thus herself organized the practical unanimity of her chief enemy. All such reactions upon the outbreak of war are instinctively determined. It is the burden of the statesman that his decision in a crisis in favour of war automatically renders impossible rational confirmation by the people.