A serious and practical attempt to secure a true moral unity of the nation would render necessary a general understanding that the state to be striven for was something different, not only in degree but also in quality, from anything which has yet {152} been regarded as satisfactory. A mere intellectual unanimity in the need for prosecuting the war with all vigour, we may be said actually to possess, but its moral value is not very great. A state of mind directed more to the nation and less immediately to the war is what is needed; the good soldier absorbed in his regiment has little inclination to concern himself with the way the war is going, and the civilian should be similarly absorbed in the nation. To attain this he must feel that he belongs to the country and to his fellow-citizens, and that it and they also belong to him. The established social system sets itself steadily to deny these propositions, and not so much by its abounding material inequalities as by the moral inequalities that correspond with them. The hierarchies of rank, prestige, and consideration, at all times showing serious inconsistencies with functional value, and in war doing so more than ever, are denials of the essential propositions of perfect citizenship, not, curiously enough, through their arbitrary distribution of wealth, comfort, and leisure, but through their persistent, assured, and even unconscious assumption that there exists a graduation of moral values equally real and, to men of inferior station, equally arbitrary. To a gregarious species at war the only tolerable claim to any kind of superiority must be based on leadership. Any other affectation of superiority, whether it be based on prescriptive right, on tradition, on custom, on wealth, on birth, or on mere age, arrogance, or fussiness, and not on real functional value to the State, is, however much a matter of course it may seem, however blandly it may be asserted or picturesquely displayed, an obstacle to true national unity.