inally
converges. For this purpose the failure to distinguish between the
ambitions of the dynastic statesmen and the interests of the
commonwealth is really a prodigious advantage, which their rivals, of
more mature growth politically, have lost by atrophy of this same
dynastic axiom of subservience. These others, of whom the French and the
English-speaking peoples make up the greater part and may be taken as
the typical instance, have had a different history, in part. The
discipline of experience has left a somewhat different residue of habits
of thought embedded in their institutional equipment and effective as
axiomatic premises in their further apprehension of what is worth while,
and why.

It is not that the difference between these two contrasted strains of
the Western civilisation is either profound or very pronounced; it is
perhaps rather to be stated as a difference of degree than of kind; a
retardation of spiritual growth, in respect of the prevalent and
controlling habits of thought on certain heads, in the one case as
against the other. Therefore any attempt to speak with sufficient
definition, so as to bring out this national difference of animus in any
convincing way, will unavoidably have an appearance of overstatement, if
not also of bias. And in any case, of course, it is not to be expected
that the national difference here spoken for can be brought home to the
apprehension of any unspoiled son of the Fatherland, since it does not
lie within that perspective.

It is not of the nature of a divergence, but rather a differential in
point of cultural maturity, due to a differential in the rate of
progression through that sequence of institutional phases through which
the civilised peoples of Europe, jointly and severally, have been led by
force of circumstance. In this movement out of the Dark Ages and onward,
circumstances have fallen out differently for those Europeans that
chanced to live within the confines of the Fatherland, different with
such effect as to have in the present placed these others at a farther
remove from the point of departure, leaving them furnished with less of
that archaic frame of mind that is here in question. Possessed of less,
but by no means shorn of all--perhaps not of the major part--of that
barbaric heritage.

Circumstances have so fallen out that these--typically the French and
the English-speaking peoples--have left behind and partly forgotten that
institutional phase