That, however, the "herd instinct," or the social feeling or the cohesive force in groups, whatever it may be, is exceedingly strong and persistent is shown by the recent war. We see a world highly differentiated, and with wide associations which seemed to have become permanent becoming at once a world in which the lines of cleavage are based upon propinquity and political organization. All ties, except national ties, were broken up. The nation, conscious of itself, becomes a unit or personality, and the sense of personality of a nation becomes greatly intensified in time of war. The individual becomes unimportant, both in his own estimation and in the eye of the law. It is the life of the nation as a whole that is felt to be threatened and under this threat the group as a whole becomes an object of devotion and solicitude. Nicolai (79) comments upon this _Massengefuehl_ and says that, when not counterbalanced by higher elements of social consciousness, it may be a low and dangerous element in the consciousness of groups. Sumner (70) also speaks of the extraordinary power of gregariousness, and says that when the movement is upon a vast scale, the numbers engaged being very large, there is always an exhilaration connected with the movement, and that if the causes involved are believed to be deep and holy, the force of this gregarious mood may become demoniacal. There are two especially remarkable changes that take place in the social life in war or in the act of going to war, and which represent the social instinct or feeling at its highest point. These phenomena are types of social reaction, but the question may be raised whether they do not represent something more than reactions in the ordinary sense. We see in times of war, first, a greatly increased sensitiveness to leadership, a craving for devotion to a leader, indeed, which is sometimes pathetic in its effort to transform really commonplace men into religious objects. The leader as a concept and an ideal is a product of the social mood itself, which does for him precisely what romantic love does for its object, exerts a creative effect upon him. The leader is magnified to heroic size and held up before the enemy as a threat. It is plain to be seen that this devotion to leader and imaginative treatment of him is in part a defensive reaction. The individual hides behind this colossal figure, and thus feels himself safe. But this protective impulse that creates the invincible leader is not the only motive; at least it is probably not the only one. The leader represents the ideals and the ambitions of the people, and his prestige and the forms that surround him, especially everything that is aesthetic or suggests the heroic, symbolize the craving for power in a people. The strength and the peculiar abandon and perversity, one may say, of the affections of a nation toward the leader in time of war make the rise of such a leader dreaded by the political powers in every country.