ence, or with due
disregard, of those classes, families and individuals whose pecuniary or
invidious gain is dependent on or furthered by the existing division of
these peoples.

The projected defensive league of neutrals is, in effect, an inchoate
coalescence of the kind. Its purpose is the safeguarding of the common
peace and freedom, which is also the avowed purpose and justification of
all those modern nations that have outlived the regime of dynastic
ambition and so of enterprise in dominion for dominion's sake, and have
passed into the neutral phase of nationality; or it should perhaps
rather be said that such is the end of endeavour and the warrant of
existence and power for these modern national establishments in so far
as they have outlived and repudiated such ambitions of a dynastic or a
quasi-dynastic order, and so have taken their place as intrinsically
neutral commonwealths.

It is only in the common defense (or in the defense of the like
conditions of life for their fellowmen elsewhere) that the citizens of
such a commonwealth can without shame entertain or put in evidence a
spirit of patriotic solidarity; and it is only by specious and
sophistical appeal to the national honour--a conceit surviving out of
the dynastic past--that the populace of such a commonwealth can be
stirred to anything beyond a defense of their own proper liberties or
the liberties of like-minded men elsewhere, in so far as they are not
still imbued with something of the dynastic animus and the chauvinistic
animosities which they have formally repudiated in repudiating the
feudalistic principles of the dynastic State.

The "nation," without the bond of dynastic loyalty, is after all a
make-shift idea, an episodic half-way station in the sequence, and
loyalty, in any proper sense, to the nation as such is so much of a
make-believe, that in the absence of a common defense to be safeguarded
any such patriotic conceit must lose popular assurance and, with the
passing of generations, fall insensibly into abeyance as an archaic
affectation. The pressure of danger from without is necessary to keep
the national spirit alert and stubborn, in case the pressure from
within, that comes of dynastic usufruct working for dominion, has been
withdrawn. With further extension of the national boundaries, such that
the danger of gratuitous infraction from without grows constantly less
menacing, while the traditional regime of international animosities