Illustration: a First World War field-intelligence collage of trench maps, wireless transmission logs and aerial reconnaissance photographs.

Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War

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Wilfred Trotter, a London surgeon, published these essays on the gregarious instinct in 1908-09 and as a book in 1916; the archive's page on Bernays names Trotter among the crowd and group psychologists whose work Propaganda draws on. Two of the long chapters, on England and Germany at war, apply the argument to the First World War. The text is the 1919 second edition, with the postscript of 1919.

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Provenance and rights

Edition
Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. London: T. Fisher Unwin, first published February 1916; this text is the second edition of November 1919 with its postscript of 1919 (Project Gutenberg's proofread transcription)
Text source
Project Gutenberg, ebook #53453
Text basis
Proofread transcription by Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders, from Internet Archive images. The transcribers relabelled the author's footnotes A to W and moved them to just after the paragraph they belong to, and corrected a few printer's errors; the book's own page numbers, which they marked in braces, are removed.
Rights
Published in Britain in 1916 (second edition 1919), so in the public domain in the United States (published before 1931); Project Gutenberg marks the ebook public domain in the USA. Trotter died in 1939, so the British term ended in 2010, before the 1996 date that would have triggered US restoration. Checked October 2, 2026.
Changes made
Line wraps rejoined and headings set in title case; the Project Gutenberg licence header and footer removed. Wording, spelling and punctuation are the source's own. The contents list and the index are left out, and the printed page numbers (shown in braces in the Gutenberg text) removed. The essays and the postscript are divided into chapters at their own headings.
Source file checksum
0b46406c26845cc1… (SHA-256 of the download this text was made from)

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