PUGNACITY AS A BENEFICENT SOCIAL FORCE. While the power of pugnacity and its easy stimulation makes this instinct a peculiarly inflammable and dangerous motive force in civilized society, it is, on the other hand, an indispensable source of social progress. Many psychologists and sociologists, such as McDougall, Bagehot, and Lang, attribute the superiority in culture and social organization of the European races over, say, the Chinese and East Indians, to the fighting instinct. In the long series of wars that for centuries constituted much of the history of Europe, those nations which survived, as in earlier times those tribes which survived combat, were those which displayed marked qualities of superiority in allegiance, fidelity, and social cooeperation. The intensity and effectiveness of social cooeperation in our own country was never so well illustrated as during the Great War. In combat between groups those groups survive which do stand out in these respects. William James in a famous essay[1] recognizes clearly the enormous value of the fighting instinct in stimulating action to an intense effectiveness exhibited under no other circumstances, and proposes a "moral equivalent for war"--an army devoted to constructive enterprises, reclaiming the waste places of the land, warring against poverty and disease and the like. Certainly every great reform movement has been intensely stimulated and has gathered about it the energies of men when it has become a "crusade for righteousness." Part of Theodore Roosevelt's power was in his picturesque phrasing of political issues as if they were great moral struggles. No one could forget, or fail to have his heart beat a trifle faster at Roosevelt's trumpet call in the 1912 campaign: "We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord." His "Big Stick" became a potent political symbol. Astute political leaders have not failed to capitalize the fighting instinct, and any social project will enlist the wider enthusiasm and the more energetic support if it is hailed as a battle or fight against somebody or something. [Footnote 1: "A Moral Equivalent of War," in _Memories and Studies_.]