me to
the same perspective on matters of national usage and ideals as has been
enforced on the more modern peoples by farther habituation. So, also, in
time and with experience, if the drift of circumstance shall turn out to
set that way, the further move away from mediaeval discriminations and
constraint and into the unspectacular scheme of neutralisation may come
to seem as right, good and beautiful as the democratic commonwealth now
seems to the English-speaking peoples, or as the Hohenzollern Imperial
State now seems to the subjects of the Fatherland. There is, in effect,
no disputing about tastes.

There is little that is novel, and nothing that is to be rated as
constructive innovation, in this sketch of what might not inaptly be
called peace by neglect. The legal mind, which commonly takes the
initiative in counsels on what to do, should scarcely be expected to
look in that direction for a way out, or to see its way out in that
direction in any case; so that it need occasion no surprise if the many
current projects of pacification turn on ingenious and elaborate
provisions of apparatus and procedure, rather than on that simpler line
of expedients which the drift of circumstance, being not possessed of a
legal mind, has employed in the sequence of institutional change
hitherto. The legal mind that dominates in the current deliberations on
peace is at home in exhaustive specifications and meticulous
demarkations, and it is therefore prone to seek a remedy for the burden
of supernumerary devices by recourse to further excesses of regulation.

This trait of the legal mind is not a bad fault at the worst, and the
quality in which this defect inheres is of the greatest moment in any
project of constructive engineering on the legal and political plane.
But it is less to the purpose, indeed it is at cross purposes, in such a
conjuncture as the present; when the nations are held up in their quest
of peace chiefly by an accumulation of institutional apparatus that has
out-stayed its usefulness. It is the fortune even of good institutions
to become imbecile with the change of conditioning circumstances, and it
then becomes a question of their disestablishment, not of their
rehabilitation. If there is anywhere a safe negative conclusion, it is
that an institution grown mischievous by obsolescence need not be
replaced by a substitute.

Instances of such mischievous institutional arrangements, obsolete or in
process of obso