falls more and more remotely into the background, the spirit of
nationalism is fairly on the way to obsolescence through disuse. In
other words, the nation, as a commonwealth, being a partisan
organisation for a defensive purpose, becomes _functa officio_ in
respect of its nationalism and its patriotic ties in somewhat the same
measure as the national coalition grows to such a size that partisanship
is displaced by a cosmopolitan security.

Doubtless the falling into abeyance through disuse of so pleasing a
virtue as patriotic devotion will seem an impossibly distasteful
consummation; and about tastes there is no disputing, but tastes are
mainly creations of habit. Except for the disquieting name of the thing,
there is today little stands in the way of a cosmopolitan order of
human intercourse unobtrusively displacing national allegiance; except
for vested interests in national offices and international
discriminations, and except for those peoples among whom national life
still is sufficiently bound up with dynastic ambition.

In an earlier passage the patriotic spirit has been defined as a sense
of partisan solidarity in point of prestige, and sufficient argument has
been spent in confirming the definition and showing its implications.
With the passing of all occasion for a partisan spirit as touches the
common good, through coalescence of the parts between which partisan
discrepancies have hitherto been kept up, there would also have passed
all legitimate occasion for or provocation to an intoxication of
invidious prestige on national lines,--and there is no prestige that is
not of an invidious nature, that being, indeed, the whole of its nature.
He would have to be a person of praeternatural patriotic sensibilities
who could fall into an emotional state by reason of the national
prestige of such a coalition commonwealth as would be made up, e.g., of
the French and English-speaking peoples, together with those other
neutrally and peaceably inclined European communities that are of a
sufficiently mature order to have abjured dynastic ambitions of
dominion, and perhaps including the Chinese people as well. Such a
coalition may now fairly be said to be within speaking distance, and
with its consummation, even in the inchoate shape of a defensive league
of neutrals, the eventual abeyance of that national allegiance and
national honour that bulks so large in the repertory of current
eloquence would also come in prospec