It is to this state of society that the return from the relative unity of war must be. The few conventional restraints upon the extremity of class feeling that were in any kind of activity before the war have been very greatly weakened. Change has become familiar, violence has been glorified in theory and shown to be effective in practice, the prestige of age has been undermined, and the sanctity of established things defied. It would, indeed, seem that to re-establish a society based solely on class segregation, and relying upon the maintenance by it of a state of equilibrium, will be a matter of some difficulty, and it will probably be a mistake to depend altogether on fatigue, on the relaxation of feeling, and on the celebration of victory as stabilizing forces. Thirdly, there is no reason to suppose that the {239} tendencies of society which made possible so huge a disaster as the war have been in any way corrected by it. Great efforts are being made at present to establish conditions which will prevent future wars. Such efforts are entirely admirable, but it must be remembered that after all war is no more than a symptom of social defects. If, therefore, war as a symptom is merely suppressed, valuable as that will be in controlling the waste and destruction of life and effort, indeed indispensable to any kind of vigorous mental life, it may leave untouched potentialities of disaster comparable even with war itself. It was pointed out many years ago in the essays incorporated in this book that human society tends to restrict influence and leadership to minds of a certain type, and that these minds tend to have special and characteristic defects. Thus human affairs are in general under the direction of a class of thought that is not merely not the best of which the mind is capable, but tends to certain characteristic fallacies and to certain characteristic kinds of blindness and incapacity. The class of mind to which power in society gravitates I have ventured to describe as the stable type. Its characteristic virtues and deficiencies have been described more than once in this book, and we need do no more here than recall its vigour and resistiveness, its accessibility to the voice of the herd and its resistiveness to and even horror of the new in feeling and experience. The predominance of this type has been rigorously maintained throughout the war. This is why the war has been fought with a mere modicum of help from the human intellect, and why the result must be regarded as a triumph for the common man rather than for the ruling classes. The war was won by the inflexible resolution of the common citizen and the common soldier. No {240} country has shown itself to be directed by the higher powers of the intellect, and nowhere has the continued action of clear, temperate, vigorous, and comprehensive thought made itself manifest, because even the utmost urgency of warfare failed