SOURCE: “Some Principles of A Rational Statecraft,” in Leviathan in Crisis, edited by Waldo R. Browne, The Viking Press, 1919, pp. 363-69.

In this excerpt from The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, Trotter examines man's social instincts in contemporary society.

If our foregoing discussion has been sound, we may attribute the impermanence of all civilizations of which we have knowledge to the failure of society to preserve with increasing magnitude of its communities a true homogeneity and a progressive integration of its elements.¹ We have seen that there is a type of society—distinguished here as the socialized type—in which a trace of this integrative tendency can be detected at work. Under the threat of war this tendency is accelerated in its action, and can attain a moderate, though very far indeed from a complete, degree of development. In the absence of such a powerful...