rangements.

Now, the means of warlike enterprise, as well as of unadvised
embroilment, is always in the last analysis the patriotic spirit of the
nation. Given this patriotic spirit in sufficient measure, both the
material equipment and the provocation to hostilities will easily be
found. It should accordingly appear to be the first care of such a
pacific league to reduce the sources of patriotic incitement to the
practicable minimum. This can be done, in such measure as it can be done
at all, by neutralisation of national pretensions. The finished outcome
in this respect, such as would assure perpetual peace among the peoples
concerned, would of course be an unconditional neutralisation of
citizenship, as has already been indicated before. The question which,
in effect, the spokesmen for a pacific league have to face is as to how
nearly that outcome can be brought to pass. The rest of what they may
undertake, or may come to by way of compromise and stipulation, is
relatively immaterial and of relatively transient consequence.

A neutralisation of citizenship has of course been afloat in a somewhat
loose way in the projects of socialistic and other "undesirable"
agitators, but nothing much has come of it. Nor have specific projects
for its realisation been set afoot. That anything conclusive along that
line could now be reached would seem extremely doubtful, in view of the
ardent patriotic temper of all these peoples, heightened just now by the
experience of war. Still, an undesigned and unguided drift in that
direction has been visible in all those nations that are accounted the
vanguard among modern civilised peoples, ever since the dynastic rule
among them began to be displaced by a growth of "free" institutions,
that is to say institutions resting on an accepted ground of
insubordination and free initiative.

The patriotism of these peoples, or their national spirit, is after all
and at the best an attenuated and impersonalised remnant of dynastic
loyalty, and it amounts after all, in effect, to nothing much else than
a residual curtailment or partial atrophy of that democratic habit of
mind that embodies itself in the formula: Live and let live. It is, no
doubt, both an ancient and a very meritorious habit. It is easily
acquired and hard to put away. The patriotic spirit and the national
life (prestige) on which it centers are the subject of untiring eulogy;
but hitherto its encomiasts have shown no cause and pu