the hands of feudal lords of
larger dominion, and the bias of allegiance and service came to hold
with some degree of permanence and uniformity, or at least of
consistency, over a considerable reach of country, including its
inhabitants. With the rise of States came allegiance to a dynasty, as
distinguished from the narrower and more ephemeral allegiance to the
semi-detached person of a victorious prince; and the relative permanence
of territorial frontiers under this rule gave room for an effectual
recrudescence of the ancient propensity to a sentimental group
solidarity; in which the accredited territorial limits of the dynastic
dominion served to outline the group that so was felt to belong together
under a joint dispensation and with something of a joint interest in
matters of fame and fortune. As the same notion is more commonly and
more suggestively expressed, a sense of nationality arose within the
sweep of the dynastic rule. This sense of community interest that is
called nationality so came in to reenforce the sense of allegiance to
the dynastic establishment and so has coalesced with it to produce that
high-wrought loyalty to the State, that draws equally on the sentiment
of community interest in the nation and on the prescriptive docility to
the dynastic head. The sense of national solidarity and of feudal
loyalty and service have coalesced, to bring this people to that climax
of patriotic devotion beyond which there lies no greater height along
this way. But this is also as far as the German people have gone; and it
is scarcely to be claimed that the Japanese have yet reached this stage;
they would rather appear to be, essentially, subjects of the emperor,
and only inchoately a Japanese nation. Of the German people it seems
safe to say that they have achieved such a coalescence of unimpaired
feudal fealty to a personal master and a full-blown sense of national
solidarity, without any perceptible slackening in either strand of the
double tie which so binds them in the service of the dynastic State.

Germany, in other words, is somewhat in arrears, as compared with those
Europeans that have gone farthest along this course of institutional
growth, or perhaps rather institutional permutation. It is not that this
retardation of the German people in this matter of national spirit is to
be counted as an infirmity, assuredly not as a handicap in the pursuit
of that national prestige on which all patriotic endeavour f