sis, is of course
not a homogeneous body. Uncommon men, in point of native gifts of
intelligence, sensibility, or personal force, will occur as frequently,
in proportion to the aggregate numbers, among the common mass as among
their betters. Since in any one of these nations of Christendom, with
their all-inclusive hybridisation, the range, frequency and amplitude of
variations in hereditary endowment is the same throughout all classes.
Class differentiation is a matter of habit and convention; and in
distinction from his betters the common man is common only in point of
numbers and in point of the more general and more exacting conditions to
which he is exposed. He is in a position to be more hardly ridden by the
discipline of experience, and is at the same time held more consistently
to such a body of preconceptions, and to such changes only in this body
of preconceptions, as fall in with the drift of things in a larger mass
of humanity. But all the while it is the discipline which impinges on
the sensibilities of this common mass that shapes the spiritual attitude
and temper of the community and so defines what may and what may not be
undertaken by the constituted leaders. So that, in a way, these dynastic
States are at the mercy of that popular sentiment whose creatures they
are, and are subject to undesired changes of direction and efficiency in
their endeavors, contingent on changes in the popular temper; over which
they have only a partial, and on the whole a superficial control.

A relatively powerful control and energetic direction of the popular
temper is and has been exercised by these dynastic establishments, with
a view to its utilisation in the pursuit of the dynastic enterprise; and
much has visibly been accomplished in that way; chiefly, perhaps, by
military discipline in subordination to personal authority, and also by
an unsparing surveillance of popular education, with a view to fortify
the preconceptions handed down from the passing order as well as to
eliminate all subversive innovation. Yet in spite of all the
well-conceived and shrewdly managed endeavors of the German Imperial
system in this direction, e.g., there has been evidence of an obscurely
growing uneasiness, not to say disaffection, among the underlying mass.
So much so that hasty observers, and perhaps biased, have reached the
inference that one of the immediate contributory causes that led to the
present war was the need of a heroic reme