But they have been well placed for losing much of what would be well lost.
Among other things, their preconception of national animosity is not secure, in the absence of provocation.

They are now again in a position to learn to do without some of the useless legacy out of the past,--useless, that is, for life as it runs today, however it may be rated in the setting in which it was all placed in that past out of which it has come.

And the question is whether now, under the pressure of exigencies that make for a disestablishment of much cumbersome inherited apparatus for doing what need not be done, they will be ruled by their sense of expediency and of fair dealing to the extent of cancelling out of their own scheme of life so much of this legacy of conventional preconceptions as has now come visibly to hinder their own material well-being, and at the same time to defeat that peace and security for which they have shown themselves willing to fight.

It is, of course, a simpler matter to fight than it is to put away a preconceived, even if it is a bootless, superstition; as, e.g., the prestige of hereditary wealth, hereditary gentility, national vainglory, and perhaps especially national hatred.

But if the school is hard enough and the discipline protracted enough there is no reason in the nature of things why the common run of the British people should not unlearn these futilities that once were the substance of things under an older and outworn order.