In those nations that have made up the advance guard of Western civilisation in its movement out of feudalism, the disintegrating effect of this matter-of-fact animus inculcated by the later state of the industrial arts has apparently acted effectively, in some degree, to discredit those preconceptions of personal discrimination on which dynastic rule is founded. But in no case has the discipline of this mechanistic technology yet wrought its perfect work or come to a definitive conclusion. Meantime war and politics have on the whole continued on the ancient plane; it may perhaps be fair to say that politics has so continued because warlike enterprise has continued still to be a matter of such personal forces as skill, dexterity and judgment, valor and cunning, personal force and fraud. Latterly, gradually, but increasingly, the technology of war, too, has been shifting to the mechanistic plane; until in the latest phases of it, somewhere about the turn of the century, it is evident that the logic of warfare too has come to be the same mechanistic logic that makes the modern state of the industrial arts. What, if anything, is due by consequence to overtake the political strategy and the political preconceptions of the new century, is a question that will obtrude itself, though with scant hope of finding a ready answer. It may even seem a rash, as well as an ungraceful, undertaking to inquire into the possible manner and degree of prospective decay to which the received political ideals and virtues would appear to be exposed by consequence of this derangement of the ancient discipline to which men have been subjected. So much, however, would seem evident, that the received virtues and ideals of patriotic animosity and national jealousy can best be guarded against untimely decay by resolutely holding to the formal observance of all outworn punctilios of national integrity and discrimination, in spite of their increasing disserviceability,--as would be done, e.g., or at least sought to be done, in the installation of a league of neutral nations to keep the peace and at the same time to safeguard those "national interests" whose only use is to divide these nations and keep them in a state of mutual envy and distrust. * * * * * Those peoples who are subject to the constraining governance of this modern state of the industrial arts, as all modern peoples are in much the same measure in which they are "modern," are, therefore, exposed to a workday discipline running at cross purposes with the received law and order as it takes effect in national affairs; and to this is to be added that, with warlike enterprise also shifted to this same mechanistic-technological ground, war can no longer be counted on so confidently as before to correct all the consequent drift away from the ancient landmarks of dynastic, pseudo-dynastic, and national enterprise in dominion.