character
exercised by the training in technological methods and in self-reliance,
with which this discipline of the service has been accompanied. As to
the case of the British population, under arms or under compulsion of
necessity at home, something has already been said in an earlier
passage; and much will apparently depend, in their case, on the further
duration of the war. The case of the other nationalities involved, both
neutrals and belligerents, is even more obscure in this bearing, but it
is also of less immediate consequence for the present argument.

* * * * *

The essentially feudal virtues of loyalty and bellicose patriotism would
appear to have gained their great ascendency over all men's spirit
within the Western civilisation by force of the peculiarly consistent
character of the discipline of life under feudal conditions, whether in
war or peace; and to the same uniformity of these forces that shaped the
workday habits of thought among the feudal nations is apparently due
that profound institutionalisation of the preconceptions of patriotism
and loyalty, by force of which these preconceptions still hold the
modern peoples in an unbreakable web of prejudice, after the conditions
favoring their acquirement have in great part ceased to operate. These
preconceptions of national solidarity and international enmity have come
down from the past as an integral part of the unwritten constitution
underlying all these modern nations, even those which have departed most
widely from the manner of life to which the peoples owe these ancient
preconceptions. Hitherto, or rather until recent times, the workday
experience of these peoples has not seriously worked at cross purposes
with the patriotic spirit and its bias of national animosity; and what
discrepancy there has effectively been between the discipline of workday
life and the received institutional preconceptions on this head, has
hitherto been overborne by the unremitting inculcation of these virtues
by interested politicians, priests and publicists, who speak habitually
for the received order of things.

That order of things which is known on its political and civil side as
the feudal system, together with that era of the dynastic States which
succeeds the feudal age technically so called, was, on its industrial or
technological side, a system of trained man-power organised on a plan of
subordination of man to man. On the whol