Nor have specific projects for its realisation been set afoot.

That anything conclusive along that line could now be reached would seem extremely doubtful, in view of the ardent patriotic temper of all these peoples, heightened just now by the experience of war.

Still, an undesigned and unguided drift in that direction has been visible in all those nations that are accounted the vanguard among modern civilised peoples, ever since the dynastic rule among them began to be displaced by a growth of "free" institutions, that is to say institutions resting on an accepted ground of insubordination and free initiative.
The patriotism of these peoples, or their national spirit, is after all and at the best an attenuated and impersonalised remnant of dynastic loyalty, and it amounts after all, in effect, to nothing much else than a residual curtailment or partial atrophy of that democratic habit of mind that embodies itself in the formula: Live and let live.

It is, no doubt, both an ancient and a very meritorious habit.

It is easily acquired and hard to put away.