sher experience, perhaps, than one
likes to contemplate.

Most men, therefore, would scarcely rate the chance of such an outcome
at all high. And yet it is to be called to mind that the war has lasted
long and the effect of its demands and its experience has already gone
far, and that the longer it lasts the greater are the chances of its
prolongation and of its continued hardships, at least to the extent that
with every month of war that passes the prospect of the allied nations
making peace on any terms short of unconditional surrender grows less.
And unconditional surrender is the first step in the direction of an
unconditional dispossession of the Imperial establishment and its war
prophets,--depending primarily on the state of mind of the British
people at the time. And however unlikely, it is also always possible, as
some contend, that in the course of further war experience the common
man in the Fatherland may come to reflect on the use and value of the
Imperial establishment, with the result of discarding and disowning it
and all its works. Such an expectation would doubtless underrate the
force of ancient habit, and would also involve a misapprehension of the
psychological incidence of a warlike experience. The German people have
substantially none of those preconceptions of independence and
self-direction to go on, in the absence of which an effectual revulsion
against dynastic rule can not come to pass.

Embedded in the common sense of the British population at large is a
certain large and somewhat sullen sense of fair dealing. In this they
are not greatly different from their neighbours, if at all, except that
the body of common sense in which this British sense of fair dealing
lies embedded is a maturer fashion of common sense than that which
serves to guide the workday life of many of their neighbours. And the
maturity in question appears to be chiefly a matter of their having
unlearned, divested themselves of, or been by force of disuse divested
of, an exceptionally large proportion of that burden of untoward
conceits which western Europe, and more particularly middle Europe, at
large has carried over from the Middle Ages. They have had time and
occasion to forget more of what the exigencies of modern life make it
expedient to have forgotten. And yet they are reputed slow,
conservative. But they have been well placed for losing much of what
would be well lost.

Among other things, their preconception o