Their quasi-feudalistic national prestige is not to be trifled with, though it has lost so much of its fascination as ordinarily not to serve the purposes of an aggressive enterprise, at least not without some shrewd sophistication at the hands of militant politicians and their diplomatic agents.

Of course, an exuberant patriotism may now and again take on the ancient barbarian vehemence and lead such a provisionally pacific nation into an aggressive raid against a helpless neighbour; but it remains characteristically true, after all, that these peoples look on the country's peace as the normal and ordinary course of things, which each nation is to take care of for itself and by its own force.
The ideal of the nineteenth-century statesmen was to keep the peace by a balance of power; an unstable equilibrium of rivalries, in which it was recognised that eternal vigilance was the price of peace by equilibration.

Since then, by force of the object-lesson of the twentieth-century wars, it has become evident that eternal vigilance will no longer keep the peace by equilibration, and the balance of power has become obsolete.

At the same time things have so turned that an effective majority of the civilised nations now see their advantage in peace, without further opportunity to seek further dominion.

These nations have also been falling into the shape of commonwealths, and so have lost something of their national spirit.
With much reluctant hesitation and many misgivings, the statesmen of these pacific nations are accordingly busying themselves with schemes for keeping the peace on the unfamiliar footing of a stable equilibrium; the method preferred on the whole being an equilibration of make-believe, in imitation of the obsolete balance of power.