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. It was possible, moreover, to put certain conclusions in a form which the development of the war must confirm or disprove, and it may be interesting as a test of what was put forward as an essay in an essentially practical psychology briefly {224} to review these theoretical anticipations in the light of what actually has happened. PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTICIPATIONS The hypothesis was put forward that in the German people the reactions in which the herd instinct was manifesting itself were in accordance with the type to be seen in the predaceous social animals rather than the type which seems to be characteristic of modern Western civilizations. The next step was naturally to inquire whether the known characters of what we called aggressive gregariousness were able to account for the observed German peculiarities in reaction, and then to indicate what special features we might expect to appear in Germany under the developing stress of war if our hypothesis was sound.