ample,
of national honor, the individual life and possession may come
to be reckoned as naught. Man's gregariousness and his
instinctive sympathy with his own kind make it easy for the
individual to identify his own life with that of the group.
What threatens or endangers the group will in consequence
arouse in him the same emotions as are aroused by threats or
dangers that concern his own personality. An insult to the
flag may send a thrill of danger through the millions who
read about it, just as would an insult to themselves or their
families.

Group feeling may exist on various levels. It may be
nothing more momentous than local pride, having the tallest
tower, the finest amusement park, the best baseball team, or
being the "sixth largest city." It may be a belligerent
imperialism, a "desire for a place in the sun." It may be a
desire for independence and an autonomous group life,
manifested so strikingly recently by such small nationalities as
Poland and Czecho-Slovakia and influential in keeping Switzerland
alive as a nationality through hundreds of years,
though surrounded by powerful neighbors.[1] While a group
does not exist save as an abstraction, looked at as a whole it
may exhibit the same outstanding traits, or the same types
of selfhood as an individual. It may be fiercely belligerent
and dogmatic; it may, like literary exponents of the German
ideal, desire to spread its own conception of Kultur throughout
the world.[2] It may be insistent on its own position, or
its own possessions or its own glory. It may be fanatic in
aggrandizement. It may be interested in the welfare of other
groups, as in the case of large nationalities championing and
protecting the causes of small or oppressed ones, such an ideal
as was expressed, for example, by President Wilson in his
address to Congress on the entrance of America into the
Great War:

[Footnote 1: Group feeling may be displayed under the most
disadvantageous conditions, as in the strong sentiment for
nationalism current among the Jews, even through all the
centuries of dispersion.]

[Footnote 2: Thorstein Veblen has pointed out how the "common man"
comes to identify his interest with that of the group: "The common
man who so lends himself to the aggressive enhancement of the
national Culture and its prestige has nothing of a material kind
to gain from the increase of renown that comes to his sovereign,
his language, his countrymen's art or science, his d