It will be evident from beforehand that the grave difficulty to be met in any advocacy of peace on terms of non-resistant subjection to an alien dynastic rule--"peace at any price"--is a difficulty of the psychological order. Whatever may be conceived to hold true for the Chinese people, such submission is repugnant to the sentiments of the Western peoples. Which in turn evidently is due to the prevalence of certain habitual preconceptions among modern civilised men,--certain acquired traits of temper and bias, of the nature of fixed ideas. That something in the way of a reasonably contented and useful life is possible under such a regime as is held in prospect, and even some tolerable degree of well-being, is made evident in the Chinese case. But the Chinese tolerance of such a regime goes to argue that they are charged with fewer preconceptions at variance with the exigencies of life under these conditions. So, it is commonly accepted, and presumably to be accepted, that the Chinese people at large have little if any effectual sense of nationality; their patriotism appears to be nearly a negligible quantity. This would appear to an outsider to have been their besetting weakness, to which their successful subjection by various and sundry ambitious aliens has been due. But it appears also to have been the infirmity by grace of which this people have been obliged to learn the ways of submission, and so have had the fortune to outlive their alien masters, all and sundry, and to occupy the land and save the uncontaminated integrity of their long-lived civilisation. * * * * * Some account of the nature and uses of this spirit of patriotism that is held of so great account among Western nations has already been set out in an earlier passage. One or two points in the case, that bear on the argument here, may profitably be recalled. The patriotic spirit, or the tie of nationalism, is evidently of the nature of habit, whatever proclivity to the formation of such a habit may be native to mankind. More particularly is it a matter of habit--it might even be called a matter of fortuitous habit--what particular national establishment a given human subject will become attached to on reaching what is called "years of discretion" and so becoming a patriotic citizen.