These adjacent nationalities are racially identical with the German people, but they do not show the same warlike abandon in nearly the same degree.
But for all that, it is a national trait, not to be acquired or put away by taking thought.

It is just here that the line of definition runs: it is a national trait, not a racial one.

It is not Nature, but it is Second Nature.

But a national trait, while it is not heritable in the simple sense of that term, has the same semblance, or the same degree, of hereditary persistence that belongs to the national institutions, usages, conventionalities, beliefs, which distinguish the given nation from its neighbors.

In this instance it may be said more specifically that this eager loyalty is a heritage of the German people at large in the same sense and with the same degree of permanence as the institution of an autocratic royalty has among them, or a privileged nobility.
Indeed, it is the institutional counterfoil of these establishments.