The change of habituation necessary to bring about such a decay of the bellicose national spirit would appear to be of a negative order, at least in the main. It would be an habituation to unconditional peace and security; in other words, to the absence of provocation, rather than a coercive training away from the bellicose temper. This bellicose temper, as it affects men collectively, appears to be an acquired trait; and it should logically disappear in time in the absence of those conditions by impact of which it has been acquired. Such obsolescence of patriotism, however, would not therefore come about abruptly or swiftly, since the patriotic spirit has by past use and wont, and by past indoctrination, been so thoroughly worked into the texture of the institutional fabric and into the commonsense taste and morality, that its effectual obsolescence will involve a somewhat comprehensive displacement and mutation throughout the range of institutions and popular conceits that have been handed down. And institutional changes take time, being creations of habit. Yet, again, there is the qualification to this last, that since the change in question appears to be a matter, not of acquiring a habit and confirming it in the shape of an article of general use and wont, but of forgetting what once was learned, the time and experience to be allowed for its decay need logically not equal that required for its acquirement, either in point of duration or in point of the strictness of discipline necessary to inculcate it. While the spirit of nationalism is such an acquired trait, and while it should therefore follow that the chief agency in divesting men of it must be disuse of the discipline out of which it has arisen, yet a positive, and even something of a drastic discipline to the contrary effect need not be altogether ineffectual in bringing about its obsolescence. The case of the Chinese people seems to argue something of the sort. Not that the Chinese are simply and neutrally unpatriotic; they appear also to be well charged with disloyalty to their alien rulers. But along with a sense of being on the defensive in their common concerns, there is also the fact that they appear not to be appreciably patriotic in the proper sense; they are not greatly moved by a spirit of nationality. And this failure of the national spirit among them can scarcely be set down to a neutral disuse of that discipline which has on the other hand induced a militant nationalism in the peoples of Christendom; it should seem more probable, at least, that this relative absence of a national ambition is traceable in good part to its having been positively bred out of them by the stern repression of all such aspirations under the autocratic rule of their alien masters. * * * * *