But it would seem reasonable to expect that there should have to be some measure of proportion between what it has cost them in time and experience to achieve their current frame of mind in this bearing and what it would cost to divest themselves of it.
It is a question of how long a time and how exacting a discipline would be required so far to displace the current scheme of commonsense values and convictions in force in the Fatherland as to neutralise their current high-wrought principles of servility, loyalty and national animosity; and on the solution of this difficulty appear to depend the chances of success for any proposed peace compact to which the German nation shall be made a party, on terms of what is called an "honorable peace." The national, or rather the dynastic and warlike, animus of this people is of the essence of their social and political institutions.

Without such a groundwork of popular sentiment neither the national establishment, nor the social order on which it rests and through which it works, could endure.

And with this underlying national sentiment intact nothing but a dynastic establishment of a somewhat ruthless order, and no enduring system of law and order not based on universal submission to personal rule, could be installed.

Both the popular animus and the correlative coercive scheme of law and order are of historical growth.

Both have been learned, acquired, and are in no cogent sense original with the German people.