Local color and local pride, with one thing and another in the way of special incitement or inhibition, may come in to vary the run of things, or to blur or hinder a common understanding and mutual furtherance and copartnery in these matters of taste and intellect.

Yet it is scarcely misleading to speak of the peoples of Christendom as one community in these respects.

The sciences and the arts are held as a joint stock among these peoples, in their elements, and measurably also in their working-out.

It is true, these interests and achievements of the race are not cultivated with the same assiduity or with identical effect throughout; but it is equally true that no effectual bar could profitably be interposed, or would be tolerated in the long run in this field, where men have had occasion to learn that unlimited collusion is more to the purpose than a clannish discrimination.
* * * * * It is, no doubt, beyond reasonable hope that these democratic peoples could be brought forthwith to concerted action on the lines of such a plan of peace by neutralisation of all outstanding national pretensions.
Both the French and the English-speaking peoples are too eagerly set on national aims and national prestige, to allow such a plan to come to a hearing, even if something of the kind should be spoken for by their most trusted leaders.

By settled habit they are thinking in terms of nationality, and just now they are all under the handicap of an inflamed national pride.