War brought Germany into contact with the, to her, inexplicable ferocity of peoples of the socialized type under attack, and it was by this disappointment that the first blow to her morale was struck. The wastage of modern warfare must very soon have begun to impair the isolation and prestige of the officer class through increasingly free importation from without the pale. With this necessarily began to be sapped the absolute and rigid segregation on which leadership of the type we are considering so largely depends. At the same time, the general tendency of the increasing pressure of war is to wear down class segregation over the whole social field. This tendency which intensified {251} and invigorated the morale of her enemies would work steadily against the leadership morale of Germany. These factors must no doubt be added to the moral need for aggression, the exhaustion consequent upon forced offensives, and the specific intolerance of failure and retreat that combined to bring down the strongest example of the predaceous led society that history records. SOME CHARACTERS OF A RATIONAL STATECRAFT. If the foregoing discussion has been sound, we may attribute the impermanence of all civilizations of which we have knowledge to the failure of society to preserve with increasing magnitude of its communities a true homogeneity and a progressive integration of its elements. We have seen that there is a type of society—distinguished here as the socialized type—in which a trace of this integrative tendency can be detected at work. Under the threat of war this tendency is accelerated in its action, and can attain a moderate, though very far indeed from a complete, degree of development. In the absence of such a powerful stimulus to homogeneity, however, segregation reasserts itself, and the society, necessarily deprived by its type of the advantages of leadership, becomes confused, disunited, and threatened with disruption. It seems probable, indeed, that the integrative tendency unaided and uncontrolled is too weak to surmount the obstacles with which it has to contend, and to anticipate disruption by welding the elements of society into a common life and common purpose. It has already been repeatedly suggested that these difficulties, due as they are to the human power of various reaction, can be met only by the interposition of the intellect as an active factor in the problem of the direction of society. In other words, the progressive evolution of society has reached a point where the {252} construction and use of a scientific statecraft will become an indispensable factor in further development and the only means of arresting the dreary oscillations between progress and relapse which have been so ominous a feature in human history. We are perhaps in a position to-day to suggest tentatively some of the principles on which such a statecraft might be built.