ed down. And institutional changes take time, being
creations of habit. Yet, again, there is the qualification to this last,
that since the change in question appears to be a matter, not of
acquiring a habit and confirming it in the shape of an article of
general use and wont, but of forgetting what once was learned, the time
and experience to be allowed for its decay need logically not equal that
required for its acquirement, either in point of duration or in point of
the strictness of discipline necessary to inculcate it.

While the spirit of nationalism is such an acquired trait, and while it
should therefore follow that the chief agency in divesting men of it
must be disuse of the discipline out of which it has arisen, yet a
positive, and even something of a drastic discipline to the contrary
effect need not be altogether ineffectual in bringing about its
obsolescence. The case of the Chinese people seems to argue something of
the sort. Not that the Chinese are simply and neutrally unpatriotic;
they appear also to be well charged with disloyalty to their alien
rulers. But along with a sense of being on the defensive in their common
concerns, there is also the fact that they appear not to be appreciably
patriotic in the proper sense; they are not greatly moved by a spirit
of nationality. And this failure of the national spirit among them can
scarcely be set down to a neutral disuse of that discipline which has on
the other hand induced a militant nationalism in the peoples of
Christendom; it should seem more probable, at least, that this relative
absence of a national ambition is traceable in good part to its having
been positively bred out of them by the stern repression of all such
aspirations under the autocratic rule of their alien masters.

* * * * *

Peace on terms of submission and non-resistance to the ordinary
exactions and rulings of those Imperial authorities to whom such
submission may become necessary, then, will be contingent on the virtual
abeyance of the spirit of national pride in the peoples who so are to
come under Imperial rule. A sufficient, by no means necessarily a total,
elimination or decadence of this proclivity will be the condition
precedent of any practicable scheme for a general peace on this footing.
How large an allowance of such animus these prospectively subject
peoples might still carry, without thereby assuring the defeat of any
such plan, would in