What more and farther might practicably be undertaken in this way, in the absence of marplot office-holders, office-seekers, sovereigns, priests and monopolistic business concerns sheltered under national animosities and restraints of trade, would be something not easy to assign a limit to.

All the minor neutrals, that cluster about the North Sea, could unquestionably be drawn into such a composite nationality, in the absence, or with due disregard, of those classes, families and individuals whose pecuniary or invidious gain is dependent on or furthered by the existing division of these peoples.
The projected defensive league of neutrals is, in effect, an inchoate coalescence of the kind.

Its purpose is the safeguarding of the common peace and freedom, which is also the avowed purpose and justification of all those modern nations that have outlived the regime of dynastic ambition and so of enterprise in dominion for dominion's sake, and have passed into the neutral phase of nationality; or it should perhaps rather be said that such is the end of endeavour and the warrant of existence and power for these modern national establishments in so far as they have outlived and repudiated such ambitions of a dynastic or a quasi-dynastic order, and so have taken their place as intrinsically neutral commonwealths.
It is only in the common defense (or in the defense of the like conditions of life for their fellowmen elsewhere) that the citizens of such a commonwealth can without shame entertain or put in evidence a spirit of patriotic solidarity; and it is only by specious and sophistical appeal to the national honour--a conceit surviving out of the dynastic past--that the populace of such a commonwealth can be stirred to anything beyond a defense of their own proper liberties or the liberties of like-minded men elsewhere, in so far as they are not still imbued with something of the dynastic animus and the chauvinistic animosities which they have formally repudiated in repudiating the feudalistic principles of the dynastic State.
The "nation," without the bond of dynastic loyalty, is after all a make-shift idea, an episodic half-way station in the sequence, and loyalty, in any proper sense, to the nation as such is so much of a make-believe, that in the absence of a common defense to be safeguarded any such patriotic conceit must lose popular assurance and, with the passing of generations, fall insensibly into abeyance as an archaic affectation.

The pressure of danger from without is necessary to keep the national spirit alert and stubborn, in case the pressure from within, that comes of dynastic usufruct working for dominion, has been withdrawn.

With further extension of the national boundaries, such that the danger of gratuitous infraction from without grows constantly less menacing, while the traditional regime of international animosities falls more and more remotely into the background, the spirit of nationalism is fairly on the way to obsolescence through disuse.