And institutional changes take time, being creations of habit.

Yet, again, there is the qualification to this last, that since the change in question appears to be a matter, not of acquiring a habit and confirming it in the shape of an article of general use and wont, but of forgetting what once was learned, the time and experience to be allowed for its decay need logically not equal that required for its acquirement, either in point of duration or in point of the strictness of discipline necessary to inculcate it.
While the spirit of nationalism is such an acquired trait, and while it should therefore follow that the chief agency in divesting men of it must be disuse of the discipline out of which it has arisen, yet a positive, and even something of a drastic discipline to the contrary effect need not be altogether ineffectual in bringing about its obsolescence.

The case of the Chinese people seems to argue something of the sort.

Not that the Chinese are simply and neutrally unpatriotic; they appear also to be well charged with disloyalty to their alien rulers.

But along with a sense of being on the defensive in their common concerns, there is also the fact that they appear not to be appreciably patriotic in the proper sense; they are not greatly moved by a spirit of nationality.