ays this refractory residue of
terms not open to negotiation or compromise. Now it also happens, also
by historical accident, that these residual principles of civil liberty
have come to blend and coalesce with a stubborn preconception of
national integrity and national prestige. So that in the workday
apprehension of the common man, not given to analytic excursions, any
infraction of the national integrity or any abatement of the national
prestige has come to figure as an insufferable infringement on his
personal liberty and on those principles of humanity that make up the
categorical articles of the secular creed of Christendom. The fact may
be patent on reflection that the common man's substantial interest in
the national integrity is slight and elusive, and that in sober common
sense the national prestige has something less than a neutral value to
him; but this state of the substantially pertinent facts is not greatly
of the essence of the case, since his preconceptions in these premises
do not run to that effect, and since they are of too hard and fast a
texture to suffer any serious abatement within such a space of time as
can come in question here and now.

* * * * *

The outlook for a speedy settlement of the world's peace on a plan of
unconditional surrender to the projected Imperial dominion seems
unpromisingly dubious, in view of the stubborn temper shown by these
modern peoples wherever their preconceived ideas of right and honest
living appear to be in jeopardy; and the expediency of entering into any
negotiated compact of diplomatic engagements and assurances designed to
serve as groundwork to an eventual enterprise of that kind must
therefore also be questionable in a high degree. It is even doubtful if
any allowance of time can be counted on to bring these modern peoples to
a more reasonable, more worldly-wise, frame of mind; so that they would
come to see their interest in such an arrangement, or would divest
themselves of their present stubborn and perhaps fantastic prejudice
against an autocratic regime of the kind spoken for. At least for the
present any such hope of a peaceable settlement seems illusive. What
may be practicable in this way in the course of time is of course still
more obscure; but argument on the premises which the present affords
does not point to a substantially different outcome in the calculable
future.

For the immediate future--say, within the