the striking and irrefutable example. The vivisection of war reveals
such examples, but it does not make them out of nothing. In a more
normal public life, symbolic pictures are no less governant of
behavior, but each symbol is far less inclusive because there are so
many competing ones. Not only is each symbol charged with less feeling
because at most it represents only a part of the population, but even
within that part there is infinitely less suppression of individual
difference. The symbols of public opinion, in times of moderate
security, are subject to check and comparison and argument. They come
and go, coalesce and are forgotten, never organizing perfectly the
emotion of the whole group. There is, after all, just one human
activity left in which whole populations accomplish the union sacrée.
It occurs in those middle phases of a war when fear, pugnacity, and
hatred have secured complete dominion of the spirit, either to crush
every other instinct or to enlist it, and before weariness is felt.

At almost all other times, and even in war when it is deadlocked, a
sufficiently greater range of feelings is aroused to establish
conflict, choice, hesitation, and compromise. The symbolism of public
opinion usually bears, as we shall see, [Footnote: Part V.] the marks
of this balancing of interest. Think, for example, of how rapidly,
after the armistice, the precarious and by no means successfully
established symbol of Allied Unity disappeared, how it was followed
almost immediately by the breakdown of each nation's symbolic picture
of the other: Britain the Defender of Public Law, France watching at
the Frontier of Freedom, America the Crusader. And think then of how
within each nation the symbolic picture of itself frayed out, as party
and class conflict and personal ambition began to stir postponed
issues. And then of how the symbolic pictures of the leaders gave way,
as one by one, Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, ceased to be the