At the same time these spiritual assets, being of the nature of habit, are also bound to change character more or less radically, by insensible shifting of ground, but
incontinently,—provided only that the conditions of life, and therefore the discipline of experience, undergo any substantial change. So the immediate interest shifts to the presumptive rate and character of those changes that are in prospect, due to the unremitting change of circumstances under which these modern peoples live and to the discipline of which they are unavoidably exposed. For the present and for the immediate future the current state of things is a sufficiently stable basis of argument; but assurance as to the sufficiency of the premises afforded by the current state of things thins out in proportion as the perspective of the argument runs out into the succeeding years. The bearing of it all is two-fold, of course. This progressive, cumulative habituation under changing circumstances affects the case both of those democratic peoples whose fortunes are in the hazard, and also of those dynastic States by whom the projected enterprise in dominion is to be carried into effect.
The case of the two formidable dynastic States whose names have been coupled together in what has already been said is perhaps the more immediately interesting in the present connection. As matters stand, and in the measure in which they continue so to stand, the case of these is in no degree equivocal. The two dynastic establishments seek dominion, and indeed they seek nothing else, except incidentally to and in furtherance of the main quest. As has been remarked before, it lies in the nature of a dynastic State to seek dominion, that being the whole of its nature in so far as it runs true to form. But a dynastic State, like any other settled, institutionalised community of men, rests on and draws its effectual driving force from the habit of mind of its underlying community,
the common man in the aggregate, his preconceptions and ideals as to what things are worth while. Without a suitable spiritual ground of this kind such a dynastic State passes out of the category of formidable Powers and into that of precarious despotism.
In both of the two States here in question the dynastic establishment and its bodyguard of officials and gentlefolk may be counted on to persevere in the faith that now animates them, until an uneasy displacement of sentiment among the underlying populace may in time induce them judiciously to shift their footing. Like the ruling classes elsewhere, they are of a conservative temper and may be counted on so to continue. They are also not greatly exposed to the discipline of experience that makes for adaptive change in habits of life, and therefore in the correlated habits of thought. It is always the common man that is effectually reached by any exacting or wide-reaching change in the conditions of life. He is relatively unsheltered from any forces that make for adaptive change, as contrasted with the case of his betters; and however sluggish and reluctant may be his response to such discipline as makes for a displacement of outworn preconceptions, yet it is always out of the mass of this common humanity that those movements of disaffection and protest arise, which lead, on occasion, to any material realignment of the institutional fabric or to any substantial shift in the line of policy to be pursued under the guidance of their betters.
The common mass of humanity, it may be said in parenthesis, is of course not a homogeneous body. Uncommon men, in point of native gifts of intelligence, sensibility, or personal force, will occur as frequently, in proportion to the aggregate numbers, among the common
mass as among their betters. Since in any one of these nations of Christendom, with their all-inclusive hybridisation, the range, frequency and amplitude of variations in hereditary endowment is the same throughout all classes. Class differentiation is a matter of habit and convention; and in distinction from his betters the common man is common only in point of numbers and in point of the more general and more exacting conditions to which he is exposed. He is in a position to be more hardly ridden by the discipline of experience, and is at the same time held more consistently to such a body of preconceptions, and to such changes only in this body of preconceptions, as fall in with the drift of things in a larger mass of humanity. But all the while it is the discipline which impinges on the sensibilities of this common mass that shapes the spiritual attitude and temper of the community and so defines what may and what may not be undertaken by the constituted leaders. So that, in a way, these dynastic States are at the mercy of that popular sentiment whose creatures they are, and are subject to undesired changes of direction and efficiency in their endeavors, contingent on changes in the popular temper; over which they have only a partial, and on the whole a superficial control.
A relatively powerful control and energetic direction of the popular temper is and has been exercised by these dynastic establishments, with a view to its utilisation in the pursuit of the dynastic enterprise; and much has visibly been accomplished in that way; chiefly, perhaps, by military discipline in subordination to personal authority, and also by an unsparing surveillance of popular education, with a view to fortify the preconceptions handed down from the passing order as well as to eliminate all subversive innovation. Yet in spite of all the well-con
ceived and shrewdly managed endeavors of the German Imperial system in this direction, e.g., there has been evidence of an obscurely growing uneasiness, not to say disaffection, among the underlying mass. So much so that hasty observers, and perhaps biased, have reached the inference that one of the immediate contributory causes that led to the present war was the need of a heroic remedy to correct this untoward drift of sentiment.