We may here find an explanation of what seems otherwise a moral enigma: that just _after a war_, universally lauded as a means of national unity, 'bringing all classes together,' the country is distraught by bitter social chaos, amounting to revolutionary menace; and that after the war which was to wipe out at last all the old differences which divided the Allies, their relations are worse than before the War (as in the case of Britain and America and Britain and France). Why should the fashionable lady, capable of sincere self-sacrifice (scrubbing hospital floors and tending canteens) for her countrymen when they are soldiers, become completely indifferent to the same countrymen when they have returned to civil life (often dangerous and hard, as in mining and fishing)? In the latter case there is no common enmity uniting duchess and miner. Another enigma may be solved in the same way: why military terrorism, unprovoked war, secret diplomacy, autocratic tyranny, violation of nationality, which genuinely appal us when committed by the enemy, leave us unmoved when political necessity' provokes very similar conduct on our part; why the ideals for which we went to war become matters of indifference to us when we have achieved victory. Gregariousness, which has become intense partisanship, makes right that which our side does or desires; wrong that which the other side does. This is fatal, not merely to justice, but to sincerity, to intellectual rectitude, to the capacity to see the truth objectively. It explains why we can, at the end of a war, excuse or espouse the very policies which the war was waged to make impossible. CHAPTER VI (pp. 169-198) THE ALTERNATIVE RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT Instinct, being co-terminous with all animal life, is a motive of conduct immeasurably older and more deeply rooted than reasoning based on experience. So long as the instinctive, 'natural' action succeeds, or appears to succeed in its object, we do not trouble to examine the results of instinct or to reason. Only failure causes us to do that. We have seen that the pugnacities, gregariousness, group partisanship embodied in patriotism, give a strong emotional push to domination, the assertion of our power over others as a means of settling our relations with them. Physical coercion marks all the early methods in politics (as in autocracy and feudalism), in economics (as in slavery), and even in the relations of the sexes. But we try other methods (and manage to restrain our impulse sufficiently) when we really discover that force won't work. When we find we cannot coerce a man but still need his service, we offer him inducements, bargain with him, enter a contract. This is the result of realising that we really need him, and cannot compel him. That is the history of the development from status to contract.