Where the forms of self-government or of individual self-direction have concessively been installed, under the Imperial rule, they have turned out to be an imitative structure with some shrewd provision for their coercion or inhibition at the discretion of an irresponsible authority.
Neither the sound intelligence nor the good faith of these Intellectuals of the Fatherland is to be impugned.

That the--necessarily vague and circumlocutory--expositions of civic institutions and popular liberty which they have so often and so largely promulgated should have been used as a serviceable blind of dynastic statecraft is not to be set down to their discredit.

Circumstances over which they could have no control, since they were circumstances that shaped their own habits of thought, have placed it beyond their competence to apprehend or to formulate these alien principles (habits of thought) concretely in those alien institutional details and by the alien logic with which they could have no working acquaintance.
To one and another this conception of cultural solidarity within the nation, and consequent cultural aliency between nations, due to the different habits of life and of thought enforced by the two diverse institutional systems, may be so far unfamiliar as to carry no conviction.

It may accordingly not seem out of place to recall that the institutional system of any given community, particularly for any community living under a home-bred and time-tried system of its own, will necessarily be a balanced system of interdependent and mutually concordant parts working together in one comprehensive plan of law and order.

Through such an institutional system, as, e.g., the German Imperial organisation, there will run a degree of logical consistency, consonant with itself throughout, and exerting a consistent discipline throughout the community; whereby there is enforced a consistent drift or bent in the prevalent habits of life, and a correlative bent in the resulting habits of thought prevalent in the community.