t.

All this is by no means saying that love of country, and of use and wont
as it runs in one's home area and among one's own people, would suffer
decay, or even abatement. The provocation to nostalgia would presumably
be as good as ever. It is even conceivable that under such a
(contemplated) regime of unconditional security, attachment to one's own
habitat and social circumstances might grow to something more than is
commonly seen in the precarious situation in which the chances of a
quiet life are placed today. But nostalgia is not a bellicose distemper,
nor does it make for gratuitous disturbance of peaceable alien peoples;
neither is it the spirit in which men lend themselves to warlike
enterprise looking to profitless dominion abroad. Men make patriotic
sacrifices of life and substance in spite of home-sickness rather than
by virtue of it.

* * * * *

The aim of this long digression has been to show that patriotism, of
that bellicose kind that seeks satisfaction in inflicting damage and
discomfort on the people of other nations, is not of the essence of
human life; that it is of the nature of habit, induced by circumstances
in the past and handed on by tradition and institutional arrangements
into the present; and that men can, without mutilation, divest
themselves of it, or perhaps rather be divested of it by force of
circumstances which will set the current of habituation the contrary
way.

The change of habituation necessary to bring about such a decay of the
bellicose national spirit would appear to be of a negative order, at
least in the main. It would be an habituation to unconditional peace and
security; in other words, to the absence of provocation, rather than a
coercive training away from the bellicose temper. This bellicose temper,
as it affects men collectively, appears to be an acquired trait; and it
should logically disappear in time in the absence of those conditions by
impact of which it has been acquired. Such obsolescence of patriotism,
however, would not therefore come about abruptly or swiftly, since the
patriotic spirit has by past use and wont, and by past indoctrination,
been so thoroughly worked into the texture of the institutional fabric
and into the commonsense taste and morality, that its effectual
obsolescence will involve a somewhat comprehensive displacement and
mutation throughout the range of institutions and popular conceits that
have been hand