those just in front showed him that now was the time and the
opportunity. The physical link, if there was one, properly speaking,
between one movement and another was something like this: A wave of light,
reflected from the body of the man in front, entered the eye of the man
just behind, where it was transformed into a nerve impulse that readied
the brain through the optic nerve. Here it underwent complicated
transformations and reactions whose nature we can but surmise, until it
left the brain as a motor impulse and caused the leg muscles to contract,
moving their owner forward. All this may or may not have taken place
within the sphere of consciousness; in the most cases it had happened so
often that it had been relegated to that of unconscious cerebration.

I have entered into so much detail because I want to make it clear that a
connection may be established between members of a group, even so casual a
group as that of persons who happen to cross on the same ferry boat, that
is so real and compelling, that its results simulate those of physical
forces. In thin case the results were dependent on the existence in the
crowd of one common bond of interest. They all wanted to leave the ferry
boat as soon as possible, and by its bow. If some of them had wanted to
stay on the boat and go back with it, or if it had been a river steamboat
where landings were made from several gangways in different parts of the
boat the simple wave of compression that I saw would not have been set up.
In like manner the ordinary influences that act on men's minds tend in all
sorts of directions and their results are not easily traced. Occasionally,
however, there occurs some event so great that it turns us all in the same
direction and establishes a common network of psychical connections. Such
an event fosters community education.

We have lately witnessed such a phenomenon in the sudden outbreak of the
great European War. Probably no person in the community as we librarians
know it remained unaffected by this event. In most it aroused some kind of
a desire to know what was going on. It was necessary that most of us
should know a little more than we did of the differences in racial
temperament and aim among the inhabitants of the warring nations, of such
movements as Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism, of the recent political
history of Europe, of modern military tactics and strategy, of
international law, of geography, of the pronunciation of f