The study of man as a gregarious animal has not been pursued with the thoroughness and objectivity it deserves and must receive if it is to yield its full value in illuminating his status and in the management of society. The explanation of this comparative neglect is to be found in the complex irregularity which obscures the social habit as manifested by man. Thus it comes to be believed that gregariousness is no longer a fully functional and indispensable inheritance, but survives at the present day merely in a vestigial form as an interesting but quite unimportant relic of primitive activities. We have already shown that man is ruled by instinctive impulses just as imperative and just as {133} characteristically social as those of any other gregarious animal. A further argument that he is to-day as actively and essentially a social animal as ever is furnished by the fact that he suffers from the disadvantages of such an animal to a more marked degree perhaps than any other. In physical matters he owes to his gregariousness and its uncontrolled tendency to the formation of crowded communities with enclosed dwellings, the seriousness of many of his worst diseases, such as tuberculosis, typhus, and plague; there is no evidence that these diseases effect anything but an absolutely indiscriminate destruction, killing the strong and the weakly, the socially useful and the socially useless, with equal readiness, so that they cannot be regarded as even of the least selective value to man. The only other animal which is well known to suffer seriously from disease as a direct consequence of its social habit is the honey bee—as has been demonstrated by recent epidemics of exterminating severity. In mental affairs, as I have tried to show, man owes to the social habit his inveterate resistiveness to new ideas, his submission to tradition and precedent, and the very serious fact that governing power in his communities tends to pass into the hands of what I have called the stable-minded—a class the members of which are characteristically insensitive to experience, closed to the entry of new ideas, and obsessed with the satisfactoriness of things as they are. At the time when this corollary of gregariousness was first pointed out—some ten years ago—it was noted as a serious flaw in the stability of civilization. The suggestion was made that as long as the great expert tasks of government necessarily gravitated into the hands of a class which characteristically lacked the greater developments of mental capacity and efficiency, the course of {134} civilization must continue to be at the mercy of accident and disaster. The present European war—doubtless in the actual state of affairs a remedy no less necessary because of its dreadfulness—is an example on the greatest possible scale of the kind of price the race has to pay for the way in which minds and temperaments are selected by its society.