So, also, in time and with experience, if the drift of circumstance shall turn out to set that way, the further move away from mediaeval discriminations and constraint and into the unspectacular scheme of neutralisation may come to seem as right, good and beautiful as the democratic commonwealth now seems to the English-speaking peoples, or as the Hohenzollern Imperial State now seems to the subjects of the Fatherland.

There is, in effect, no disputing about tastes.
There is little that is novel, and nothing that is to be rated as constructive innovation, in this sketch of what might not inaptly be called peace by neglect.

The legal mind, which commonly takes the initiative in counsels on what to do, should scarcely be expected to look in that direction for a way out, or to see its way out in that direction in any case; so that it need occasion no surprise if the many current projects of pacification turn on ingenious and elaborate provisions of apparatus and procedure, rather than on that simpler line of expedients which the drift of circumstance, being not possessed of a legal mind, has employed in the sequence of institutional change hitherto.

The legal mind that dominates in the current deliberations on peace is at home in exhaustive specifications and meticulous demarkations, and it is therefore prone to seek a remedy for the burden of supernumerary devices by recourse to further excesses of regulation.
This trait of the legal mind is not a bad fault at the worst, and the quality in which this defect inheres is of the greatest moment in any project of constructive engineering on the legal and political plane.
But it is less to the purpose, indeed it is at cross purposes, in such a conjuncture as the present; when the nations are held up in their quest of peace chiefly by an accumulation of institutional apparatus that has out-stayed its usefulness.

It is the fortune even of good institutions to become imbecile with the change of conditioning circumstances, and it then becomes a question of their disestablishment, not of their rehabilitation.