In the first place they affect a large number of men they never before affected. When, for example, we study the civil wars which convulsed France in the sixteenth century, and even those at the end of the eighteenth century, we are struck by the small number of persons whose minds were really disturbed by these events. While history, up to the nineteenth century, is filled with long European wars which left the great majority of people completely indifferent, apart from the material losses they themselves suffered,[1] it may be said that to-day there is scarcely a mind in Europe which is not affected--or thinks itself affected--by a racial or class or national passion, and most often by all three. The same progress seems to have taken place in the New World, while immense bodies of men in the Far East, who seemed to be free from these impulses, are awakening to social hatred, the party system, and the national spirit insofar as it implies the will to humiliate other men. To-day political passions have attained a _universality_ never before known. They have also attained _coherence_. Thanks to the progress of communication and, still more, to the group spirit, it is clear that the holders of the same political hatred now form a compact impassioned mass, every individual of which feels himself in touch with the infinite numbers of others, whereas a century ago such people were comparatively out of touch with each other and hated in a ‘scattered’ way. This is singularly striking with respect to the working classes who, even in the middle of the nineteenth century, felt only a scattered hostility for the opposing class, attempted only dispersed efforts at war (such as striking in one town, or one union), whereas to-day they form a closely-woven fabric of hatred from one end of Europe to the other. It may be asserted that these coherences will tend to develop still further, for the will to group is one of the most profound characteristics of the modern world, which even in the most unexpected domains (for instance, the domain of thought) is more and more becoming the world of leagues, of ‘unions’ and of ‘groups’. Is it necessary to say that the passion of the individual is strengthened by feeling itself in proximity to these thousands of similar passions? Let me add that the individual bestows a mystic personality on the association of which he feels himself a member, and gives it a religious adoration, which is simply the deification of his own passion, and no small stimulus to its intensity.