In an earlier passage the patriotic spirit has been defined as a sense of partisan solidarity in point of prestige, and sufficient argument has been spent in confirming the definition and showing its implications. With the passing of all occasion for a partisan spirit as touches the common good, through coalescence of the parts between which partisan discrepancies have hitherto been kept up, there would also have passed all legitimate occasion for or provocation to an intoxication of invidious prestige on national lines,--and there is no prestige that is not of an invidious nature, that being, indeed, the whole of its nature. He would have to be a person of praeternatural patriotic sensibilities who could fall into an emotional state by reason of the national prestige of such a coalition commonwealth as would be made up, e.g., of the French and English-speaking peoples, together with those other neutrally and peaceably inclined European communities that are of a sufficiently mature order to have abjured dynastic ambitions of dominion, and perhaps including the Chinese people as well. Such a coalition may now fairly be said to be within speaking distance, and with its consummation, even in the inchoate shape of a defensive league of neutrals, the eventual abeyance of that national allegiance and national honour that bulks so large in the repertory of current eloquence would also come in prospect. All this is by no means saying that love of country, and of use and wont as it runs in one's home area and among one's own people, would suffer decay, or even abatement. The provocation to nostalgia would presumably be as good as ever. It is even conceivable that under such a (contemplated) regime of unconditional security, attachment to one's own habitat and social circumstances might grow to something more than is commonly seen in the precarious situation in which the chances of a quiet life are placed today. But nostalgia is not a bellicose distemper, nor does it make for gratuitous disturbance of peaceable alien peoples; neither is it the spirit in which men lend themselves to warlike enterprise looking to profitless dominion abroad. Men make patriotic sacrifices of life and substance in spite of home-sickness rather than by virtue of it. * * * * * The aim of this long digression has been to show that patriotism, of that bellicose kind that seeks satisfaction in inflicting damage and discomfort on the people of other nations, is not of the essence of human life; that it is of the nature of habit, induced by circumstances in the past and handed on by tradition and institutional arrangements into the present; and that men can, without mutilation, divest themselves of it, or perhaps rather be divested of it by force of circumstances which will set the current of habituation the contrary way.