n
sense.

Such an article of institutional furniture is an outcome of usage, not
of reflection or deliberate choice; and it has consequently a character
of self-legitimation, so that it stands in the accredited scheme of
things as intrinsically right and good, and not merely as a shrewdly
chosen expedient _ad interim_. It affords a norm of life, inosculating
with a multiplicity of other norms, with which it goes to make up a
balanced scheme of ends, ways and means governing human conduct; and no
one such institutional item, therefore, is materially to be disturbed,
discarded or abated except at the cost of serious derangement to the
balanced scheme of things in which it belongs as an integral
constituent. Nor can such a detail norm of conduct and habitual
propensity come into bearing and hold its place, except by force of
habituation which is at the same time consonant with the common run of
habituation to which the given community is subject. It follows that
the more rigorous, comprehensive, unremitting and long-continued the
habituation to which a given institutional principle owes its vogue, the
more intimately and definitively will it be embedded in the common sense
of the community, the less chance is there of its intrinsic necessity
being effectually questioned or doubted, and the less chance is there of
correcting it or abating its force in case circumstances should so
change as to make its continued rule visibly inexpedient. Its abatement
will be a work not of deliberation and design, but of defection through
disuse.

Not that reflection and sane counsel will count for nothing in these
premises, but only that these exertions of intelligence will count for
relatively very little by comparison with the run of habituation as
enforced by the circumstances conditioning any given case; and further,
that wise counsel and good resolutions can take effect in the way of
amending any untoward institutional bent only by way of suitable
habituation, and only at such a rate of change as the circumstances
governing habituation will allow. It is, at the best, slow work to shift
the settled lines of any community's scheme of common sense. Now,
national solidarity, and more particularly an unquestioning loyalty to
the sovereign and the dynasty, is a matter of course and of commonsense
necessity with the German people. It is not necessary to call to mind
that the Japanese nation, which has here been coupled with the German,
are