than
least, they commonly are hide-bound patriots inspired with an
intractable felt need of national prestige.

It is an assemblage of peoples in such a frame of mind to whom the
pacifists are proposing, in effect, a plan for eventual submission to an
alien dynasty, under the form of a neutral peace compact to include the
warlike Powers. There is little likelihood of such a scheme being found
acceptable, with popular sentiment running as it now does in the
countries concerned. And yet, if the brittle temper in which any such
proposal is rejected by popular opinion in these countries today could
be made to yield sufficiently to reflection and deliberate appraisal, it
is by no means a foregone conclusion that its acceptance would not be
the best way out of a critical situation. The cost of disabling and
eliminating the warlike Power whose dominion is feared, or even of
staving off the day of surrender, is evidently serious enough. The
merits of the alternative should be open to argument, and should,
indeed, be allowed due consideration. And any endeavour to present them
without heat should presumably find a hearing. It appears to have been
much of the fault of the pacifists who speak for the Peace League that
they have failed or refused to recognise these ulterior consequences of
the plan which they advocate; so that they appear either not to know
what they are talking about, or to avoid talking about what they know.

It will be evident from beforehand that the grave difficulty to be met
in any advocacy of peace on terms of non-resistant subjection to an
alien dynastic rule--"peace at any price"--is a difficulty of the
psychological order. Whatever may be conceived to hold true for the
Chinese people, such submission is repugnant to the sentiments of the
Western peoples. Which in turn evidently is due to the prevalence of
certain habitual preconceptions among modern civilised men,--certain
acquired traits of temper and bias, of the nature of fixed ideas. That
something in the way of a reasonably contented and useful life is
possible under such a regime as is held in prospect, and even some
tolerable degree of well-being, is made evident in the Chinese case. But
the Chinese tolerance of such a regime goes to argue that they are
charged with fewer preconceptions at variance with the exigencies of
life under these conditions. So, it is commonly accepted, and presumably
to be accepted, that the Chinese people at large have