ross national boundaries and knit into groups
similarly interested persons all over the world. Groups may,
again, be formed through common economic interests, as in
the case of labor unions, or employers' associations. Groups
may be knit and strengthened through law and custom. And
all these factors play a smaller or larger part in any important
grouping of men in contemporary society. But unless there
is, on the part of the members of the group, a deep-seated
emotional attachment to the group itself, solidarity will be
very precarious. The intensity and solidarity, of feeling
exhibited so markedly during war-time is made possible by
the intense excitability of this instinct when the group is
under conditions of stress or danger. Any scheme for enlisting
a great number of individuals in modern society in a
scheme of social reform or improvement, must and does,
when it is successful, arouse in him a heightened sense of loyalty
to a group more than reasoned approval of a cause.
Effective recruiting posters more often told the passer-by,
"Your country needs you," than they attempted to convince
him in black-and-white logic of the justice of his country's
aims.

[Footnote 1: McDougall: _Social Psychology_, p. 301.]

GREGARIOUSNESS MAY HINDER THE SOLIDARITY OF LARGE GROUPS.
While gregariousness is the foundation of group solidarity, it
also interferes with the solidarity of large groups, and not
infrequently brings about conflicts between them, and within
groups themselves. Within even so small a community as
a college class, cliques may form; and so in a country,
attachment to the smaller group may inhibit attachment to
the larger. An individual may be vaguely patriotic, but
instinctively aroused more by his own economic or local or
racial group than by the country as a whole. A man may at
heart be more devoted to his town or home than to the United
States. (Not infrequently his town or home is what the
United States means to the citizen.) Even to-day the sectional
feeling that exists in many parts of the country cannot
be completely explained as occurring through separate economic
interests. The division of classes within a country is
largely an economic matter, but even in such a situation a
loyalty develops to the class as a class or group.

Again, the same instinct to herd with his fellows that makes
a man intensely loyal to his own group may operate to make
him indifferent to the difficulties or jealous and sus