r their coercion or inhibition at the discretion
of an irresponsible authority.

Neither the sound intelligence nor the good faith of these Intellectuals
of the Fatherland is to be impugned. That the--necessarily vague and
circumlocutory--expositions of civic institutions and popular liberty
which they have so often and so largely promulgated should have been
used as a serviceable blind of dynastic statecraft is not to be set down
to their discredit. Circumstances over which they could have no control,
since they were circumstances that shaped their own habits of thought,
have placed it beyond their competence to apprehend or to formulate
these alien principles (habits of thought) concretely in those alien
institutional details and by the alien logic with which they could have
no working acquaintance.

To one and another this conception of cultural solidarity within the
nation, and consequent cultural aliency between nations, due to the
different habits of life and of thought enforced by the two diverse
institutional systems, may be so far unfamiliar as to carry no
conviction. It may accordingly not seem out of place to recall that the
institutional system of any given community, particularly for any
community living under a home-bred and time-tried system of its own,
will necessarily be a balanced system of interdependent and mutually
concordant parts working together in one comprehensive plan of law and
order. Through such an institutional system, as, e.g., the German
Imperial organisation, there will run a degree of logical consistency,
consonant with itself throughout, and exerting a consistent discipline
throughout the community; whereby there is enforced a consistent drift
or bent in the prevalent habits of life, and a correlative bent in the
resulting habits of thought prevalent in the community. It is, in fact,
this possession of a common scheme of use and wont, and a consequent
common outlook and manner of thinking, that constitutes the most
intrinsic bond of solidarity in any nationality, and that finally marks
it off from any other.

It is equally a matter of course that any other given community, living
under the rule of a substantially different, or divergent, system of
institutions, will be exposed to a course of workday discipline running
to a different, perhaps divergent, effect; and that this other community
will accordingly come in for a characteristically different discipline
and fall under the rul