This great experiment was conducted under the very eyes of humanity, and the conditions were unique in this that they would have permitted the effective intervention of the conscious human will. As it happened the evolution of society had not reached a stage at which an informed and scientific statecraft was possible. The experiment, therefore, went through without any general view of the whole situation being attained. Had such been possible, there can be no doubt at all that the war could have been shortened enough to keep the world back from the neighbourhood of spiritual and even material bankruptcy in which it finds itself to-day. The armed confrontation of the two types, while it has yielded a result that may well fill us with hope, took place at a moment of human evolution when it was bound to be immensely expensive. Material development had far exceeded social development, mankind, so to say, had become clever without becoming wise, and the war had to be fought as a purely destructive effort. Had it come at a later stage of evolution, so great a mobilization of social power as the war caused might have been taken advantage of to unify the nation to a completely coherent structure which the cessation of {235} the external stimulating pressure would have left firmly and nobly established. AFTER THE WAR. The psychological situation left by the conclusion of the war is likely to attract an increasing amount of attention as time passes, and it may be of interest to examine it in the light of the principles that we have been making use of in dealing with the war. It is a fact fundamental in psychology that the state of war furnishes the most powerful of all stimuli to the social instinct. It sets in motion a tide of common feeling by the power of which union and energy of purpose and self-sacrifice for the good of the social unit become possible to a degree unknown under any other circumstances. The war furnished many instances of the almost miraculous efficacy of this stimulus. Perhaps the most effective example of all, even by the side of the steely fortitude of France and the adventurous desperation of England, was the fact that the dying Austrian Empire could be galvanized for four years into aggressive gestures lifelike beyond simulation.