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 to the national policy. Surrounded as it necessarily will be by an atmosphere of hostility, its character as a herd becomes hardened and invigorated, and it can endow its members with all the gifts of moral vigour and resistiveness a herd can give. Thus we may say, that in a country at war every citizen is exposed to the extremely powerful stimulation of herd instinct characteristic of that state. In the individual who follows in feeling the general body of his fellows, and in him who belongs to a dissentient minority, the reactions peculiar to the gregarious animal will be energetically manifested. Of such reactions, that which interests us particularly at the moment is the moulding of opinion in accordance with instinctive pressure, and we arrive at the conclusion that our citizen of the majority is no more—if no less—liable to the distortion of opinion than our citizen of the minority. Whence we conclude that in a country at war all opinion is necessarily more or less subject to prejudice, and that this liability to {217} bias is a herd mechanism, and owes its vigour to that potent instinct.
It is undoubtedly depressing to have to recognize this universality of prejudice and to have to abandon the opinion sometimes held that the characteristics of herd belief are limited to the judgments of the vulgar. The selectness of a minority in no way guarantees it against the fallacies of the mob. A minority sufficiently unpopular is, in a sense, a mob in which smallness is compensated for by density. The moral vigour and fortitude which unpopular minorities enjoy are evidences of herd instinct in vigorous action; the less admirable liability to prejudice being a part of the same instinctive process is a necessary accompaniment. We may lay it down, then, as fundamental that all opinion among the members of a nation at war is liable to prejudice, and when we remember with what vehemence such opinion is pronounced and with what fortitude it is defended we may regard as at least highly probable that such opinion always actually is prejudiced—rests, that is to say, on instinct rather than reason. Now, it is common knowledge that in the present state of society opinion in a given country is always divided as to the justice of an actual war. All of it sharing the common characteristic of war opinion in being prejudiced, some will pronounce more or less clearly that the war is just and necessary, some will pronounce more or less clearly against that view; there will be a division into what we may call pro-national and anti-national currents of opinion, each accompanied respectively by its counterpart of what we may call anti-hostile and pro-hostile opinion. It is a significant fact that the relative development of pro-national and anti-national feeling varies according to the degree in which the given war is apprehended as dangerous. A {218} war apprehended as dangerous produces a more complete solution of the minor herds of society into the common body than does a war not so regarded; in consequence there is a nearer approach to homogeneity, and pro-national opinion is far in excess of anti-national opinion, which, if recognizable, is confined to insignificant minorities. A war regarded as not dangerous produces a less complete solution in the common body, a less degree of homogeneity, and allows anti-national opinion, that is, doubt of the justice of the war and opposition to the national policy, to develop on a large scale. These phenomena have been clearly visible in the history of recent wars. The South African War of 1899–1902 was not apprehended as dangerous in this country, and in consequence, though pro-national opinion prevailed among the majority, anti-national opinion was current in a large and respectable minority. The war of 1914–1918, regarded from the first as of the greatest gravity, gave to pro-national opinion an enormous preponderance, and restricted anti-national opinion within very narrow limits. The Russo-Japanese War provided an excellent double illustration of these mechanisms. On the Russian side regarded as not dangerous, it left national opinion greatly divided, and made the conduct of the war confused and languid; on the Japanese side apprehended as highly dangerous, it produced an enormous preponderance of pro-national opinion, and made the conduct of the war correspondingly vigorous. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 a further point is illustrated. The essential factor in the stimulation of herd instinct by war is not the actual danger of a given war, but the apprehended danger of it. The Prussians were dangerous enough to France, but were not generally regarded as such by the French, and in consequence national {219} homogeneity did not develop as it did on a later occasion in face of the same menace.
If pro-national and anti-national opinion, if belief and doubt in the justice of a given war, vary in relation to a single predominantly important psychological factor—the apprehended danger to the nation of the war in question—it is obvious that the ostensible and proclaimed grounds upon which such opinion is founded are less decisive than is commonly supposed. Finding, as we do, that the way in which a people responds to the outbreak of war depends certainly in the main and probably altogether on a condition not necessarily dependent on the causes of the war, it is obvious that the moral justifications which are usually regarded as so important in determining the people’s response are in fact comparatively insignificant. This conclusion agrees with the observed fact that no nation at war ever lacks the conviction that its cause is just. In the war of 1914–1918 each of the belligerents was animated by a passion of certainty that its participation was unavoidable and its purpose good and noble; each side defended its cause with arguments perfectly convincing and unanswerable to itself and wholly without effect on the enemy. Such passion, such certitude, such impenetrability were obviously products of something other than reason, and do not in themselves and directly give us any information as to the objective realities of the distribution of justice between the two sides. The sense of rectitude is in fact and manifestly a product of mere belligerency, and one which a nation at war may confidently expect to possess, no matter how nefarious its objects may ultimately appear to be in the eyes of general justice. The fact that such a sense of rectitude is a universal and inevitable accompaniment of war, and as strong in a predatory and {220} criminal belligerent as in a generally pacific one, gives us a convenient measure of the extent to which prejudice must prevail in warfare.[20]
[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.
We thus arrive at the discouraging conclusion that in a belligerent country all opinion in any way connected with the war is subject to prejudice, either pro-national or anti-national, and is very likely in consequence to be of impaired validity. Must we then conclude further that speculation upon war themes is so liable to distortion that reasoned judgments of any practical value are impossible? Now, it is guidance in just such a difficulty as this that a psychology having any pretensions to be called practical may fairly be expected to yield, and psychology does in fact provide certain broad precautionary principles, which, although by no means infallible guides, do profess to be able to keep within bounds the disturbing effects of prejudice on judgment and so render possible the not wholly unprofitable discussion even of matters the most deeply implicated by war-time passion.
First among such principles is the recognition of the fact that prejudice does not display itself as such to direct introspection. One who is being {221} influenced by prejudice will never be able to detect his biassed judgments by an apparent defect in their plausibility or by any characteristic logical weakness. Agreement or disagreement with common opinion will as such be no help, since prejudice infests minorities no less than majorities. To suppose that when one has admitted the liability to prejudice one can free oneself from it by a direct voluntary effort is a common belief and an entirely fallacious one. Such a task is far beyond the powers of the most fully instructed mind, and is not likely to be undertaken except by those who have least chance of success. Prejudice, in fact, is for the individual like the ether of the physicist, infinitely pervasive and potent, but insusceptible of direct detection; its presence is to be assumed as general, but it escapes before immediate search by introspection as the ether eludes the balance and the test-tube.
Secondly, it is possible for the investigator, having admitted the existence of prejudice as a condition of thought, to recognize the general direction of its action in his own mind, to recognize, that is to say, whether the tone of it is pro-national or anti-national, and thus to obtain a certain orientation for his efforts to neutralize it. Having frankly recognized this general tendency in his thinking, he will be able to do something towards correcting it by making allowance for it in his conclusion as a whole. If his tendency of feeling is pro-national, he will say to himself of any judgment favourable to his country, “This is a conclusion likely to have been influenced by prejudice, therefore for all the precautions I may have taken in forming it, and whatever scientific care and caution I may have used, in spite even of its agreeable appearance of self-evident truth, I must regard its validity as subject to some subtraction before it {222} can safely be made the basis for further speculation.” If his tendency of feeling is anti-national, he will have a similar task of attenuation to carry out upon the conclusions unfavourable to his country that he may reach, and will be prudent to make very drastic deductions in view of the supposed immunity to prejudice with which minorities are rather apt to assume the absence of vulgar approval endows them.[21]
[21] It is perhaps of interest to note in passing that war-time opinion and prejudice are characteristically pro-national and anti-national, rather than anti-hostile and pro-hostile respectively. The impulse that might have led an isolated German to defend the English at the expense of his countrymen, or an isolated Englishman to defend the Germans at the expense of his countrymen, was in its psychological essence anti-national and animated by no love of the enemy; it was an instinctive revolt against his country, or rather the groups which in the process of social segregation had come to represent it. Such terms, therefore, as pro-German, and in another association pro-Boer, though doubtless convenient implements of abuse, were inexactly descriptive psychologically. “Anti-English” would have been more just, but immensely less effective, as vituperation, for the prejudice it was desired to decry was for the most part a hostility not to the nation, but to its official embodiment. Probably, however, it was the very element of injustice in the term pro-German that made it so satisfactory a vehicle for exasperated feeling.
Finally, one who attempts to deal usefully with matters in which strong feeling is inevitable will do well, however thoroughly he may try to guard himself from the effects of prejudice, to bring his speculative conclusions into such form that they are automatically tested by the progress of events. Symmetry and internal consistency are unfortunately but too often accepted as evidences of objective validity. That the items of a series of conclusions fit into one another neatly and compose a system logically sound and attractive to the intellect gives us practically no information of their truth. For this a frequently repeated contact with external reality is necessary, and of such contacts the most thoroughly satisfactory one is the power to foretell the course of events. Foresight is the supreme {223} test of scientific validity, and the more a line of argument is liable to deflection by non-rational processes the more urgent is the need for it constantly to be put into forms which will allow its capacity for foresight to be tested. This was the one great advantage amongst heavy handicaps enjoyed by those who ventured into speculation upon the international situation during the late war. Events were moving so quickly from crisis to crisis that it was possible for the psychologist to see his judgments confirmed or corrected almost from day to day, to see in the authentic fabric of reality as it left the loom where he had had any kind of foreknowledge, where he had been altogether unprepared, and where he had failed in foresight of some development that should have been within his powers.
These three principles were those in accordance with which it was attempted to conduct the discussion in this book of topics connected with the war. The writer was aware that neither was he by nature or art immune to prejudice nor able by some miracle of will power to lay down passion when he took up the pen, and he admitted to himself with what frankness he could command the liability under which his conclusions would lie of having been arrived at under the influence of pro-national prejudice. He hoped, however, that a liberal allowance for the direction of his instinctive bias and a grateful use of the diurnal corrective of events might enable him to reach at any rate some conclusions not altogether without a useful tincture of validity.