Even if this race-discrimination that calls itself scientific were well established and agreed upon by experts, it could not protect our self-respect against calamities that came to it directly from the War. For the nature of governmental propaganda was found out. Citizens learned that they had been deliberately, systematically, and grossly deceived by their own virtue-professing governments. This of itself would have been sufficient to take away both the glamour of our assumed superiority and the hideousness of the enemy’s depravity. But this revelation of the real nature of the modern state was only one of several experiences that focussed at the same point. Dissatisfaction with the terms of the peace and with the post-bellum tactics of our allies; the realization that more wars are now in the making, and that even one more war may wreck civilization; the financial costs and the financial entanglements entailed by our martial exploit; revelations concerning the profits of patriotism; finally, analyses of the intelligence tests that were given to our soldiers--all these worked directly against the high-flown self-esteem that buoyed us up during the clash of arms. But the bursting of the bubble has not produced the humility of the penitent or of the learner. Instead of being stimulated to a reasonable re-assessment of our national needs, we are irritated, we fall a-scrambling among ourselves, our life as a people lacks meaning to us ourselves--unless, indeed, this meaning be economic imperialism, of which more later. Thus it is that, in the by and large, our estimate of the motives of men, our own motives included, has shifted by reason of our war-experience in the direction of what we believed the enemy to be while we were fighting him in the field. It is true that our estimate of him has been modified, for the most part grudgingly, yet “In the War you see what human nature really is” comes painfully close to being the net average judgment of the whole psychic tragedy. It is not only the cynic who says this; it is not only an occasional psychologist who thinks that man is by nature a fighting animal; the statesman, the financier, the industrialist, and the “man in the street” are more on guard against man as such.