has brought them some net gain in the way of human dignity and neighbourly tolerance, such as to offset any loss incurred on the heroic and invidious side of life. Such is the tempering force of habit. Whereas, e.g., on the other hand, the peoples of these surviving dynastic States, to which it is necessary continually to recur, who have not yet moved out of that realm of heroics, find themselves unable to see anything in such a prospective shift but net loss and headlong decay of the spirit; that modicum of forbearance and equity that is requisite to the conduct of life in a community of ungraded masterless men is seen by these stouter stomachs as a loosening of the moral fiber and a loss of nerve.
What is here tentatively projected under the phrase, "neutralization of citizenship," is only something a little more and farther along the same general line of movement which these more modern peoples have been following in all that sequence of institutional changes that has given them their present distinctive character of commonwealths, as contrasted with the dynastic States of the mediaeval order. What may be in prospect—if such a further move away from the mediaeval landmarks is to take effect—may best be seen in the light of the later moves in the same direction hitherto, more particularly as regards the moral and aesthetic merits at large of such an institutional mutation. As touches this last previous shifting of ground along this line, just spoken of, the case stands in this singular but significant posture, in respect of the spiritual values and valuations involved: These peoples who have, even in a doubtful measure, made this transition from the archaic institutional scheme, of fealty and dynastic exploit and coercion, to the newer scheme of
the ungraded commonwealth, are convinced, to the point of martyrdom, that anything like a return to the old order is morally impossible as well as insufferably shameful and irksome; whereas those people, of the retarded division of the race, who have had no experience of this new order, are equally convinced that it is all quite incompatible with a worthy life.
Evidently, there should be no disputing about tastes. Evidently, too, these retarded others will not move on into the later institutional phase, of the ungraded commonwealth, by preconceived choice; but only, if at all, by such schooling of experience as will bring them insensibly to that frame of mind out of which the ideal of the ungraded commonwealth emerges by easy generalisation of workday practice. Meantime, having not yet experienced that phase of sentiment and opinion on civic rights and immunities that is now occupied by their institutionally maturer neighbours, the subjects of the Imperial Fatherland, e.g., in spite of the most laudable intentions and the best endeavour, are, by failure of this experience, unable to comprehend either the ground of opposition to their well-meaning projects of dominion or the futility of trying to convert these their elder brothers to their own prescriptive acceptation of what is worth while. In time, and with experience, this retarded division of Christendom may come to the same perspective on matters of national usage and ideals as has been enforced on the more modern peoples by farther habituation. So, also, in time and with experience, if the drift of circumstance shall turn out to set that way, the further move away from mediaeval discriminations and constraint and into the unspectacular scheme of neutralisation may come to seem as right, good and beautiful as the democratic common
wealth now seems to the English-speaking peoples, or as the Hohenzollern Imperial State now seems to the subjects of the Fatherland. There is, in effect, no disputing about tastes.
There is little that is novel, and nothing that is to be rated as constructive innovation, in this sketch of what might not inaptly be called peace by neglect. The legal mind, which commonly takes the initiative in counsels on what to do, should scarcely be expected to look in that direction for a way out, or to see its way out in that direction in any case; so that it need occasion no surprise if the many current projects of pacification turn on ingenious and elaborate provisions of apparatus and procedure, rather than on that simpler line of expedients which the drift of circumstance, being not possessed of a legal mind, has employed in the sequence of institutional change hitherto. The legal mind that dominates in the current deliberations on peace is at home in exhaustive specifications and meticulous demarkations, and it is therefore prone to seek a remedy for the burden of supernumerary devices by recourse to further excesses of regulation.
This trait of the legal mind is not a bad fault at the worst, and the quality in which this defect inheres is of the greatest moment in any project of constructive engineering on the legal and political plane. But it is less to the purpose, indeed it is at cross purposes, in such a conjuncture as the present; when the nations are held up in their quest of peace chiefly by an accumulation of institutional apparatus that has out-stayed its usefulness. It is the fortune even of good institutions to become imbecile with the change of conditioning circumstances, and it then becomes a question of their disestablishment, not
of their rehabilitation. If there is anywhere a safe negative conclusion, it is that an institution grown mischievous by obsolescence need not be replaced by a substitute.
Instances of such mischievous institutional arrangements, obsolete or in process of obsolescence, would be, e.g., the French monarchy of the ancient régime, the Spanish Inquisition, the British corn laws and the "rotten boroughs," the Barbary pirates, the Turkish rule in Armenia, the British crown, the German Imperial Dynasty, the European balance of powers, the Monroe Doctrine. In some sense, at least in the sense and degree implied in their selective survival, these various articles of institutional furniture, and many like them, have once presumably been suitable to some end, in the days of their origin and vigorous growth; and they have at least in some passable fashion met some felt want; but if they ever had a place and use in the human economy they have in time grown imbecile and mischievous by force of changing circumstances, and the question is not how to replace them with something else to the same purpose after their purpose is outworn. A man who loses a wart off the end of his nose does not apply to the Ersatz bureau for a convenient substitute.