Note 21 — POSTSCRIPT OF 1919

It is perhaps of interest to note in passing that war-time opinion and prejudice are char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly pro-national and anti-national, rather than anti-hostile and pro-hostile respectively. The impulse that might have led an isolated German to defend the English at the expense of his countrymen, or an isolated Englishman to defend the Germans at the expense of his countrymen, was in its psychological essence anti-national and animated by no love of the enemy; it was an instinctive revolt against his country, or rather the groups which in the process of social segregation had come to represent it. Such terms, therefore, as pro-German, and in another association pro-Boer, though doubtless convenient implements of abuse, were inexactly descriptive psychologically. “Anti-English” would have been more just, but immensely less effective, as vituperation, for the prejudice it was desired to decry was for the most part a hostility not to the nation, but to its official embodiment. Probably, however, it was the very element of injustice in the term pro-German that made it so satisfactory a vehicle for exasperated feeling.