It is natural that the citizens of a country should be thus habituated. In fact, in large measure, they habituate themselves. The basis of it is first of all that men are alike, and are faced with similar problems. The fact that men have like instincts, instincts, moreover, that have to adjust themselves to identical life conditions, makes it easy to assimilate them to one another and to the group. Suggestibility is one of these dispositions of human nature. McDougall defines it as “a process of communication resulting in the acceptance with conviction of the communicated proposition in the absence of logically adequate grounds for its acceptance.”[50] Suggestion, of course, is not omnipotent. There is, for one thing, what is known as a contra-suggestion, that is, behavior in which people do just the opposite to what one tries to persuade them to do. Early in the regime of Mr. Herbert Hoover as food administrator one butcher reported that his customers wanted meat more on meatless than on any other days. And there is always the possibility that suggestion may be disregarded altogether. But human beings are interdependent, and are open to guidance through suggestions from the ideas and practices of their fellows. An individual cannot think everything out for himself. Some hardly ever do any serious thinking and even the more serious take the bulk of their thoughts, at least in other fields than their own special one, upon suggestion. Choice is exhausting. It is hard business thinking, and we are likely to shirk the irksomeness of it if we can. “Either to be exceptional or to appreciate the exceptional requires a considerable expenditure of energy, and no one can afford this in many directions.”[51] The chances are, then, that except in such cases as where for some reason we are specially critical, an idea suggested will find lodgement in the mind and tend to issue in action; and this fact is tremendously important in the understanding of a social phenomenon such as patriotism. It is rather ominous that today political thought does not seem to be as active as it once was. “My own impression,” says Graham Wallas, “formed after questioning a good many people in different parts of England is that, in our country, the quantity of such discussion [serious discussion on public questions] which takes place ... is diminishing.”[52] The great cause of this is the modern industrial system, and it is likely that what is true of England is true also of America. And if serious _discussion_ is diminishing it means probably that men are doing less serious _thinking_ on political subjects, and that they are likely to become more suggestible with regard to them. The application to the subject of patriotism is obvious.