us demeanor so that
his followers may also be joyous or hopeful and thus be energized to
their best. Morale is the state of emotion of a group; it is raised when
joyous, energizing emotions are set working in the group and is lowered
when pessimistic deenergizing emotions become dominant. A city or a
nation becomes energized with good news and success and deenergized when
the battle seems lost.

The spread of emotion from person to person by sympathetic feeling or
the reverse (as when we get depressed because our enemy is happy) is a
social fact of incalculable importance. The problem of the nervous
housewife is a problem of society because she gives her mood over to her
family or else intensely dissatisfies its members so that the home ties
are greatly weakened.

This spread of emotion was happily portrayed by a motion picture I
recently saw. Old Grouchy Moneybags, wealthy beyond measure and
afflicted with gout, is seated at his breakfast table. In the next room,
seen with the all-seeing eye of the movie, the butler makes love to the
very willing maid. In the kitchen the fat cook is feeding the ever
hungry butcher's boy with gingerbread and cake, and on the back steps
the household cat is purring gently in contentment. Happiness is the
predominant note.

Then Old Moneybags savagely rings the bell. Enters the butler,
obsequious and solicitous. "The coffee is bad, the toast is vile,
everything is wrong. You are a _deleted deleted deleted deleted_
rascal." Exit the butler, outwardly humble, inwardly a raging flood of
anger, and he meets the maid, who archly invites his attentions. She
gets them, only they are in the form of an angry shove and an oath.
White with indignation, she stamps her foot and runs into the kitchen,
bursting into tears. The cook, solicitous, receives a slap in the face,
and as the maid bounces out, the cook, seeking a victim, grabs away the
gingerbread from the butcher's boy. And that still hungry juvenile
slams the door as he leaves and kicks the slumbering cat off the back
doorstep.

Unfortunately the film did not show what the outraged cat did. Possibly
it started a devastation that reached back into Moneybags' career; at
any rate the unusual little picture (which later went on to the usual
happy ending) showed how emotion spreads through the world, just as
disease does. The infection that starts in the hovel finally strikes
down the rich man's child, enthroned in the palace. The mood engende