is that of a
return to, or a continuance of, the state of things before the great war
came on, with peace and national security added, or with the danger of
war eliminated. Nothing appreciable in the way of consequent innovation,
certainly nothing of a serious character, is contemplated as being among
the necessary consequences of such a move into peace and security.
National integrity and autonomy are to be preserved on the received
lines, and international division and discrimination is to be managed as
before, and with the accustomed incidents of punctilio and pecuniary
equilibration. Internationally speaking, there is to dawn an era of
diplomacy without afterthought, whatever that might conceivably mean.

There is much in the present situation that speaks for such an
arrangement, particularly as an initial phase of the perpetual peace
that is aimed at, whatever excursive variations might befall presently,
in the course of years. The war experience in the belligerent countries
and the alarm that has disturbed the neutral nations have visibly raised
the pitch of patriotic solidarity in all these countries; and patriotism
greatly favors the conservation of established use and wont; more
particularly is it favorable to the established powers and policies of
the national government. The patriotic spirit is not a spirit of
innovation. The chances of survival, and indeed of stabilisation, for
the accepted use and wont and for the traditional distinctions of class
and prescriptive rights, should therefore seem favorable, at any rate in
the first instance.

Presuming, therefore, as the spokesmen of such a peace-compact are
singularly ready to presume, that the era of peace and good-will which
they have in view is to be of a piece with the most tranquil decades of
the recent past, only more of the same kind, it becomes a question of
immediate interest to the common man, as well as to all students of
human culture, how the common man is to fare under this regime of law
and order,--the mass of the population whose place it is to do what is
to be done, and thereby to carry forward the civilisation of these
pacific nations. It may not be out of place to recall, by way of
parenthesis, that it is here taken for granted as a matter of course
that all governmental establishments are necessarily conservative in all
their dealings with this heritage of culture, except so far as they may
be reactionary. Their office is the stabilisatio