ch the guilty core of a
profligate dynasty. Under the wear and tear of continued war and its
incident continued vulgarisation of the directorate and responsible
staff among the pacific allies, the conventional respect of persons is
likely to suffer appreciable dilapidation; but there need be no
apprehension of such a loss of decent respect for personages as would
compromise the creature comforts of that high syndicate of personages on
whose initiative the Fatherland entered upon this enterprise in
dominion.

Bygone shortcomings and transgressions can have no reasonable place in
the arrangements by which a pacific league of neutrals designs to keep
the peace. Neither can bygone prerogatives and precedents of
magnificence and of mastery, except in so far as they unavoidably must
come into play through the inability of men to divest themselves of
their ingrained preconceptions, by virtue of which a Hohenzollern or a
Hapsburger is something more formidable and more to be considered than a
recruiting sergeant or a purveyor of light literature. The league can do
its work of pacification only by elaborately forgetting differences and
discrepancies of the kind that give rise to international grievances.
Which is the same as saying that the neutralisation of national
discriminations and pretensions will have to go all the way, if it is to
serve. But this implies, as broadly as need be, that the pacific nations
who make the league and provisionally administer its articles of
agreement and jurisdiction, can not exempt themselves from any of the
leveling measures of neutralisation to which the dynastic suspects among
them are to be subject. It would mean a relinquishment of all those
undemocratic institutional survivals out of which international
grievances are wont to arise. As a certain Danish adage would have it,
the neutrals of the league must all be shorn over the same comb.

* * * * *

What is to be shorn over this one comb of neutralisation and democracy
is all those who go into the pacific league of neutrals and all who come
under its jurisdiction, whether of their own choice or by the
necessities of the case. It is of the substance of the case that those
peoples who have been employed in the campaigns of the German-Imperial
coalition are to come in on terms of impartial equality with those who
have held the ground against them; to come under the jurisdiction, and
prospectively into the cop