among the civilised peoples are imbued
with a less complete national self-complacency. If the peace is to be
kept, therefore, it will have to be kept by and between peoples made up,
in effect, of complete patriots; which comes near being a contradiction
in terms. Patriotism is useful for breaking the peace, not for keeping
it. It makes for national pretensions and international jealously and
distrust, with warlike enterprise always in perspective; as a way to
national gain or a recourse in case of need. And there is commonly no
settled demarkation between these two contrasted needs that urge a
patriotic people forever to keep one eye on the chance of a recourse to
arms.

Therefore any calculus of the Chances of Peace appears to become a
reckoning of the forces which may be counted on to keep a patriotic
nation in an unstable equilibrium of peace for the time being. As has
just been remarked above, among civilised peoples only those nations can
be counted on consistently to keep the peace who are so feeble or
otherwise so placed as to be cut off from hope of national gain. And
these can apparently be so counted on only as regards aggression, not as
regards the national defense, and only in so far as they are not drawn
into warlike enterprise, collectively, by their more competent
neighbors. Even the feeblest and most futile of them feels in honour
bound to take up arms in defense of such national pretensions as they
still may harbour; and all of them harbour such pretensions. In certain
extreme cases, which it might seem invidious to specify more explicitly,
it is not easy to discover any specific reasons for the maintenance of a
national establishment, apart from the vindication of certain national
pretensions which would quietly lapse in the absence of a national
establishment on whom their vindication is incumbent.

Of the rest, the greater nations that are spoken of as Powers no such
general statement will hold. These are the peoples who stand, in
matters of national concern, on their own initiative; and the question
of peace and war at large is in effect, a question of peace and war
among these Powers. They are not so numerous that they can be sifted
into distinct classes, and yet they differ among themselves in such a
way that they may, for the purpose in hand, fairly be ranged under two
distinguishable if not contrasted heads: those which may safely be
counted on spontaneously to take the offensive, and those whi