in which the people of Imperial Germany now live and
move and have their being. The French partly because they--that is the
common people of the French lands--entered the procession with a very
substantial lead, having never been put back to a point abreast of their
neighbors across the Rhine, in that phase of European civilisation from
which the peoples of the Fatherland tardily emerged into the feudal age.
So, any student who shall set out to account for the visible lead which
the French people still so obstinately maintain in the advance of
European culture, will have to make up his account with this notable
fact among the premises of his inquiry, that they have had a shorter
course to cover and have therefore, in the sporting phrase, had the
inside track. They measure from a higher datum line. Among the
advantages which so have come, in a sense unearned, to the French
people, is their uninterrupted retention, out of Roman--and perhaps
pre-Roman--times, of the conception of a commonwealth, a community of
men with joint and mutual interests apart from any superimposed
dependence on a joint feudal superior. The French people therefore
became a nation, with unobtrusive facility, so soon as circumstances
permitted, and they are today the oldest "nation" in Europe. They
therefore were prepared from long beforehand, with an adequate principle
(habit of thought) of national cohesion and patriotic sentiment, to make
the shift from a dynastic State to a national commonwealth whenever the
occasion for such a move should arise; that is to say, whenever the
dynastic State, by a suitable conjunction of infirmity and irksomeness,
should pass the margin of tolerance in this people's outraged sense of
national shame. The case of the German people in their latterday
attitude toward dynastic vagaries may afford a term of comparison. These
appear yet incapable of distinguishing between national shame and
dynastic ambition.

By a different course and on lines more nearly parallel with the
life-history of the German peoples, the English-speaking peoples have
reached what is for the present purpose much the same ground as the
French, in that they too have made the shift from the dynastic State to
the national commonwealth. The British started late, but the discipline
of servitude and unmitigated personal rule in their case was relatively
brief and relatively ineffectual; that is to say, as compared with what
their German cousins had to e