It follows that the more rigorous, comprehensive, unremitting and long-continued the habituation to which a given institutional principle owes its vogue, the more intimately and definitively will it be embedded in the common sense of the community, the less chance is there of its intrinsic necessity being effectually questioned or doubted, and the less chance is there of correcting it or abating its force in case circumstances should so change as to make its continued rule visibly inexpedient.

Its abatement will be a work not of deliberation and design, but of defection through disuse.
Not that reflection and sane counsel will count for nothing in these premises, but only that these exertions of intelligence will count for relatively very little by comparison with the run of habituation as enforced by the circumstances conditioning any given case; and further, that wise counsel and good resolutions can take effect in the way of amending any untoward institutional bent only by way of suitable habituation, and only at such a rate of change as the circumstances governing habituation will allow.

It is, at the best, slow work to shift the settled lines of any community's scheme of common sense.

Now, national solidarity, and more particularly an unquestioning loyalty to the sovereign and the dynasty, is a matter of course and of commonsense necessity with the German people.

It is not necessary to call to mind that the Japanese nation, which has here been coupled with the German, are in the same case, only more so.
Doubtless it would be exceeding the premises to claim that it should necessarily take the German people as long-continued and as harsh a schooling to unlearn their excess of chauvinism, their servile stooping to gratuitous authority, and their eager subservience to the dynastic ambitions of their masters, as that which has in the course of history induced these habits in them.