First, with the end of the war the mental orientation of the individual has undergone a great change. National feeling is no longer able to supply him with moral vigour and interest. He must turn once more to his class for what the nation as a whole has been so much more efficiently supplying. Life has regained for him much of its old tameness, the nation in which he has lived vividly during the war is resuming its vagueness and becoming once more merely the state, remote and quasi-hostile. But the war has shown him what interest and moral vigour are in life, and he will not easily accept the absence of these; he has acquired the appetite for them, he has, so to speak, tasted blood. The tasteless social dietary of pre-war England is not likely to satisfy his invigorated palate. Secondly, the transition from war to peace is in an imperfectly organized society a process necessarily dangerous because it involves the change from a condition of relative moral stability to one of relative moral instability. To get back to the precise state of delicately balanced but essentially insecure equilibrium of society before the war would seem, in fact, already shown to be impossible. The war ran its course without any attempt being made to replace the system of class segregation, through which the social instinct works in our society, by any more satisfactory mechanism. Before the war class segregation had reached a condition in which the individual had ceased to be conscious of the national unit as possessing any practical significance for himself while his class was the largest unit he was capable of recognizing as a source of moral power and an object of effort. There was no class which as such and {238} in relation to other classes was capable of submitting to any restraint or self-sacrifice in the interests of the nation as a whole. Of course, in each case it was possible for a class by a very easy process of rationalization to show that its interests were those of the nation at large, but this was merely the effect of the moral blindness to which class segregation inevitably leads. Since every one of us is classified somehow, it is not easy to grasp how completely class segregation obtains throughout our society, and how fully in times of peace it replaces national unity. Those occupying the lower social strata may be very fully aware of the intensity of class feeling and how complete a substitute for national feeling it affords at the upper end of the social scale, just as those in the upper strata may be very much alive to the class bitterness of their inferiors; but it is difficult for both to believe how complete are segregation and its consequences throughout the whole social gamut.