The importance of these different types of volition was abundantly illustrated by the incidents of the Boer war and of the Russo-Japanese war. That the success of its undertaking shall be strongly willed by all is perhaps the most important factor contributing to the success of an army; and if also the army exercises a true collective volition, in the sense defined above, it becomes irresistible. Though it is questionable whether the Boer armies can be said to have exercised a collective volition, it is at least certain that individually the Boers strongly willed their common end, the defeat of the British. On the other hand, the British armies were defective in these respects. The motives of those who fought in the British armies against the Boers were very diverse. The pay of the regulars, the five shillings a day of the volunteers, the desire to live for a time an adventurous exciting life, the desire to get home again on the sick-list as soon as possible, the desire for personal distinction; all these and other motives were in many minds mixed in various proportions with the desire to assert the supremacy of the British rule and support the honour of the flag. This difference between the Boer and British armies was undoubtedly a main cause of many of the surprising successes of the former. In the Russo-Japanese war the opposed armies probably differed even more widely in this respect. The Japanese soldiers not only willed intensely the common end, but their armies would appear to have exercised truly collective volition. Many of the several regiments also, being recruited on the territorial system, were animated by collective sentiments rooted in local patriotism. The Russian armies on the other hand were largely composed of peasants drawn from widely separated regions of the Russian empire, knowing little or nothing of the grounds of quarrel or of the ends to be achieved by their efforts, caring nothing individually for those ends, and having but little patriotic sentiment and still less sentiment for the army. It would, then, be a grave mistake to infer from the course of events in these two wars that the British soldier was individually inferior to the Boer, or the Russian to the Japanese; in both cases the principal psychological condition of successful collective action—namely, a common end intensely desired and strongly willed, individually or collectively—was present in high degree on the one side, because the preservation of the national existence was the end in view; while it was lacking or comparatively deficient on the other side. As Sir Ian Hamilton, a close observer of both these wars, has said—“the army that will not surrender under any circumstances will always vanquish the army whose units are prepared to do so under sufficient pressure.”