The effect of this great liberation of feeling was to supersede the precarious equilibrium of society by a state very much more stable. Before the war moral power had come to the individual chiefly from the lesser herds in which he took part, and but little from the nation as a whole. Society had the appearance of stability because the forces at work were relatively small in proportion to the inertia of the whole fabric. But the actual firmness of the structure was small, and the individual led a life emotionally thin and tame because the social feelings were localized and faint. With the outbreak of war the national unit became the source of moral power, social feeling became wide in its {236} basis and strong in intensity. To the individual life became more intense and more significant, and in essence, in spite of horror and pain, better worth living; the social fabric, moreover, displayed a new stability and a capacity for resisting disturbances that would have effectually upset its equilibrium in time of peace. The art of government, in fact, became actually easier to practise, though it had a superficial appearance of being more difficult from the comparative rapidity with which the progress of events unmasked the quack. Successful practitioners were, it will be remembered, always ready to call attention to the unprecedented difficulty of their labours, while shrewdly enough profiting by the fact that in the actual tasks of government—the creation of interest, the development of unity and the nourishing of impulse—their difficulties had wholly disappeared. With the cessation of war this great stream of moral power began rapidly to dry up at its source. Thinly continuing to trickle for a time as it were from habit, it is already almost dry. There is doubtless a tendency among responsible personages to persuade themselves that it still flows with all the power that made the war a veritable golden age of government. Such a persuasion is natural and fully to be expected. It would be difficult for those who have directed with whatever want of skill a power so great to avoid coming in time to be a little confused between the direction of power and the production of it, and to think that they still command the moral resources which war gave so abundantly. Such a mistake is likely to prove one of the elements of danger, though perhaps only a minor one, in the present situation. Western society, with perhaps even Western civilization, is in a situation of great interest to the sociologist, and probably also of some considerable {237} danger. There are certain chief elements of danger which we may attempt to define.