But nostalgia is not a bellicose distemper, nor does it make for gratuitous disturbance of peaceable alien peoples; neither is it the spirit in which men lend themselves to warlike enterprise looking to profitless dominion abroad.

Men make patriotic sacrifices of life and substance in spite of home-sickness rather than by virtue of it.
* * * * * The aim of this long digression has been to show that patriotism, of that bellicose kind that seeks satisfaction in inflicting damage and discomfort on the people of other nations, is not of the essence of human life; that it is of the nature of habit, induced by circumstances in the past and handed on by tradition and institutional arrangements into the present; and that men can, without mutilation, divest themselves of it, or perhaps rather be divested of it by force of circumstances which will set the current of habituation the contrary way.
The change of habituation necessary to bring about such a decay of the bellicose national spirit would appear to be of a negative order, at least in the main.

It would be an habituation to unconditional peace and security; in other words, to the absence of provocation, rather than a coercive training away from the bellicose temper.

This bellicose temper, as it affects men collectively, appears to be an acquired trait; and it should logically disappear in time in the absence of those conditions by impact of which it has been acquired.

Such obsolescence of patriotism, however, would not therefore come about abruptly or swiftly, since the patriotic spirit has by past use and wont, and by past indoctrination, been so thoroughly worked into the texture of the institutional fabric and into the commonsense taste and morality, that its effectual obsolescence will involve a somewhat comprehensive displacement and mutation throughout the range of institutions and popular conceits that have been handed down.