The life of any socially upright individual is organized around only a few basic loyalties and the degree of satisfaction which he derives from existence can usually be measured in terms of his service to them. He is loyal first to himself, for failing that, he fails in loyalty to all else. If he cannot acquit himself ably for his own sake, he cannot do honor to anything less personal. Along with loyalty to self come loyalty to our beliefs, loyalty to family, loyalty to country, loyalty to friends, and loyalty to humanity in general. Stated as a factual and not as an ideal matter, the interesting and important thing that happens to a man when he enters military service is that, the moment he takes the oath, loyalty to the arms he bears ranks first on the list, above all other loyalties. To get ahead, to serve himself well, he must persevere in ways that are most useful to the organization. If the circumstances of his family are reduced because of this new loyalty, his means of compensating them is to strive for such honor as may come to him through service to the United States. In his life, service to country is no longer a beautiful abstraction; it is the sternly concrete and unremitting obligation of service to the regiment, the group or the ship's company. He parts with old friends and finds new ones. In this radical reorientation of the individual life and the arbitrary imposition of a commanding loyalty is to be found the key to the esprit of any military organization. Too long esprit has been regarded as something bequeathed to the unit by the dead hand of tradition. There is nothing moribund about it. It is a dynamic and vital substance conducted to the living by the living. We can banish from our minds the idea that esprit is what the regiment, the ship or the company gives the man because of some spark which its past deeds and the legends thereof have lighted in him. Esprit, at all times, is what the unit gives the man, in terms of spiritual force translated into constructive good. Considering what the unit has taken from him initially, its obligation is great indeed. To see this clearly, we need to look once again at what happens to the individual when he puts on the uniform. The basis of his life changes in broad and fundamental ways. His legal status is changed; the extent and intensity of his obligations are magnified. He puts aside the banner of individualism for that of obedience. Yet in the words of Chester Barnard: "Scarcely a man, I think, who has felt the annihilation of his personality in some organized system, has not also felt that the same system belonged to him because of his own free will he chose to make it so."