GREGARIOUSNESS IMPORTANT FOR SOCIAL SOLIDARITY. The gregarious instinct, powerful as it is, is of the greatest significance for social solidarity, and, if misdirected, for seriously limiting it. It is, in the first place, the trait without which social solidarity would be almost impossible. "In early times when population was scanty, it must have played an important part in social evolution by keeping men together, and thereby occasioning the need for social laws and institutions."[1] The coherence of national, political, or religious groups depends primarily on the extent to which the gregarious instinct may be aroused. Allegiance to a group may, of course, be secured through participation in common ideals. This is illustrated in the case of the numerous literary and scientific associations that cut across national boundaries and knit into groups similarly interested persons all over the world. Groups may, again, be formed through common economic interests, as in the case of labor unions, or employers' associations. Groups may be knit and strengthened through law and custom. And all these factors play a smaller or larger part in any important grouping of men in contemporary society. But unless there is, on the part of the members of the group, a deep-seated emotional attachment to the group itself, solidarity will be very precarious. The intensity and solidarity, of feeling exhibited so markedly during war-time is made possible by the intense excitability of this instinct when the group is under conditions of stress or danger. Any scheme for enlisting a great number of individuals in modern society in a scheme of social reform or improvement, must and does, when it is successful, arouse in him a heightened sense of loyalty to a group more than reasoned approval of a cause. Effective recruiting posters more often told the passer-by, "Your country needs you," than they attempted to convince him in black-and-white logic of the justice of his country's aims.
[Footnote 1: McDougall: _Social Psychology_, p. 301.]
GREGARIOUSNESS MAY HINDER THE SOLIDARITY OF LARGE GROUPS. While gregariousness is the foundation of group solidarity, it also interferes with the solidarity of large groups, and not infrequently brings about conflicts between them, and within groups themselves. Within even so small a community as a college class, cliques may form; and so in a country, attachment to the smaller group may inhibit attachment to the larger. An individual may be vaguely patriotic, but instinctively aroused more by his own economic or local or racial group than by the country as a whole. A man may at heart be more devoted to his town or home than to the United States. (Not infrequently his town or home is what the United States means to the citizen.) Even to-day the sectional feeling that exists in many parts of the country cannot be completely explained as occurring through separate economic interests. The division of classes within a country is largely an economic matter, but even in such a situation a loyalty develops to the class as a class or group.