lf-sacrifice followed immediately on the first
incitement to manslaughter, very much as if the nation had been held
under an hypnotic spell. One need only recall the volume of overbearing
magniloquence that broke out all over the place in that beginning, when
The Day was believed to be dawning.

Such a popular frame of mind is not a transient episode, to be created
at short notice and put aside for a parcel of salutary advice. The
nation that will make such a massive concerted move with the alacrity
shown in this instance must be living in a state of alert readiness for
just such an onset. Yet this is not to be set down as anything in the
way of a racial trait specifically distinguishing the German people from
those other adjacent nationalities that are incapable of a similarly
swift and massive response to the appeal of patriotism. These adjacent
nationalities are racially identical with the German people, but they do
not show the same warlike abandon in nearly the same degree.

But for all that, it is a national trait, not to be acquired or put away
by taking thought. It is just here that the line of definition runs: it
is a national trait, not a racial one. It is not Nature, but it is
Second Nature. But a national trait, while it is not heritable in the
simple sense of that term, has the same semblance, or the same degree,
of hereditary persistence that belongs to the national institutions,
usages, conventionalities, beliefs, which distinguish the given nation
from its neighbors. In this instance it may be said more specifically
that this eager loyalty is a heritage of the German people at large in
the same sense and with the same degree of permanence as the institution
of an autocratic royalty has among them, or a privileged nobility.
Indeed, it is the institutional counterfoil of these establishments. It
is of an institutional character, just as the corresponding sense of
national solidarity and patriotic devotion is among the neighboring
peoples with whom the German nation comes in comparison. And an
institution is an historical growth, with just so much of a character of
permanence and continuity of transmission as is given it by the
circumstances out of which it has grown. Any institution is a product of
habit, or perhaps more accurately it is a body of habits of thought
bearing on a given line of conduct, which prevails with such generality
and uniformity throughout the group as to have become a matter of commo