CHAPTER II
The Growth and Value of National Integrity

THERE is no question of the legality of absentee ownership, nor of its moral right. It is a settled institution of civilised life, embedded in law and morals, and its roots run through the foundations of European civilisation. Legality and morality are a matter of statute, precedent, and usage; and absentee ownership is quite securely grounded in the Common Law and deeply ingrained in the moral sense of civilised men. In the American commonwealth such ownership is also covered by the constitutional provision which declares that men must not be deprived of their property except by due process of law. And the legal precedents, interpretations and refinements which have been set up and worked out by jurists under this constitutional provision have in the main been concerned with fortifying and extending the security and implied rights of absentee ownership in one bearing and another; with the result that these rights are, legally and morally, more secure and more extensive today than ever before. Indirectly too, the provision for “due process of law” has greatly reënforced the dominant position of absentee ownership as against any claims of another kind or against claimants of any other class. Litigation as conducted according to the rules and precedents which govern the “due process” has in recent times become too costly to be carried to a conclusion by any litigant who is not an absentee owner of large means. This will hold true in America perhaps in a more conclusive fashion than in any other civilised nation.¹ In effect, due process of law as it concerns property has become an appliance for the regulation of relations between absentee owners.

Legally, the dominant position of absentee ownership is not to be questioned or shaken. And as regards its moral foundations in current common sense, in the habits of thought of this people, the institution is in a similarly strong position. It remains true that absentee ownership is still the idol of every true American heart. Indeed, chief among the civic virtues of this people is that steadfast cupidity that drives its citizens, each and several, under pain of moral turpitude, to acquire a “competence,” and then unremittingly to augment any competence alv ready acquired. The high ideal which of moral right animates these good citizens in this pursuit of a “competence” is to get something for nothing, to get legal possession of some source of income at a less cost than its capitalisable value. Invariably a “competence” signifies the ownership of means in excess of what the owner can make use of, personally and without help ; which is also a convenient definition of “absentee ownership.” By so coming into the possession of an unearned increase of wealth a man becomes a “substantial citizen.” And according to the sturdy common sense of a population trained to this pursuit of something for nothing, failure to acquire such a competence is visited with unsparing moral reprobation. Any person who falls short in this pursuit of something for nothing, and so fails to avoid work in some useful occupation, is a shiftless ne’er-do-well; he loses self-respect as well as the respect of his neighbors and is in a fair way to be rated as an undesirable citizen. By and large, the line of moral demarka-tion runs between the substantial citizen and the undesirable citizen. These ideals of propriety and morality are not peculiarly American, of course; although the Americans may perhaps be able to claim some slight peculiar degree of certitude and moral sufficiency on this head.

The established order of law and custom which safeguards absentee ownership in recent times and among civilised nations is, in the main, a modern creation ; being, in effect, an outgrowth of usages and principles (habits of thought) which were induced by the conditions of life during early-modern times. The type-form of organised control by which this modern law and custom is upheld and enabled to function is that of the Nation—a politically self-determining body of people, legally and morally competent to make war.²

Not that this modern system of law and order embodies nothing that is of older date than early-modern times. Indeed, embedded in this early-modern system are large remnants which have stood over from antiquity and from the Middle Ages ; as how should it not, since it is in all its constituents a creature of habit and tradition? The experience of life in early-modern times and since has not broken at all points—nor indeed in the main—with. what had gone before. At the same time there have been substantial though minor changes brought into the system in the course of later experience and habituation. But apart from interpretations and refinements instituted ad hoc, and in so far as it bears directly on the security, rights and powers of absentee ownership, this current system of law and custom is grounded in the principles of law and morals that were worked up and stabilised in the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

The system as it now stands comprises elements of older date, but the scheme was rounded out and stabilised in that time and in response to the impact of the conditions which prevailed then, and the resulting structure of law and moralities has not been seriously disturbed since then. By and large, the system is a holdover out of the early-modern centuries, and its period of growth was formally closed during the later half of the eighteenth century. Later experience has fluttered against the stable framework of Natural Rights set up in the eighteenth century and has, on the whole, brought no substantial change of principles; assuredly nothing that amounts to a break with the eighteenth-century point of departure. Meanwhile an industrial revolution has passed over the European peoples and has brought on an unexampled change in the material conditions of life.

It has consistently been the pride and boast of civilised men that the laws and customs which govern their conduct and regulate their behavior in all their civic and industrial relations are grounded in a system of time-worn principles—immutable principles of immemorial antiquity which are fundamentally and eternally right and good. That is to say, in this particular instance, these principles of law and morals have been “immemorially ancient” and “eternally right and good” ever since they became ingrained by habit and presently reduced to documentary statement in modern times. As regards those principles of right conduct which specifically cover the just rights and powers of absentee ownership, their immemorial antiquity and immutable validity came on by degrees during the transition from feudalism and canon law to the handicraft era and the common law ; when the petty trade of that time expanded to such dimensions as enabled it to change from peddling for a livelihood to investment for a profit. In America specifically, the immutable validity which so invests the law and morals of absentee ownership dates from A.D. 1776 or 1787, according as one may prefer to see it.

Meantime, while these immutable principles of law and morals have continued to embody the habits of thought of a bygone age, the industrial system within which and in control of which absentee ownership exercises these its ancient and immutable rights and powers is of the twentieth century and is in no respect and in no degree immutable ; quite the contrary, in fact. While modern men continue to boast and laud the changeless antiquity and stability of the rules which govern their industrial relations, it is at the same time their pride and boast that the industrial arts which condition their behavior under these rules are forever changing, progressively and at an ever-accelerating rate. In time, immutable rules of conduct enforced under progressively changing conditions should logically result in a muddle.

There is, of course, nothing particularly new or peculiarly civilised about this obstinate assumption that the main specifications of the legal and moral code are ancient and immutable. Indeed, it is quite the usual thing among the common run of barbarians and savages, ancient and contemporary. But all the while, in point of fact and as a matter of course, any system of law and custom, being a product of habituation, is necessarily subject to continued change, even in respect of its underlying principles. An underlying principle is, after all, little else than a personalised and stabilised blend of the overlying details that go to make up everyday behavior. The chain of responses to the impact of changing circumstances runs on as a course of progressive habituation, and the resulting average run of blended habits will necessarily shift and bend its course to follow the progressive displacement of its constituent elements. It follows that the upshot of this progressive habituation, which goes to create the standards of conduct, will change cumulatively from day to day by fluctuating variations.³ But always and everywhere men like to believe that their own particular standards of conduct are fixed in the nature of things, so that to each people their own established scheme of usages, in law and morals, is immutably right and good, in principle.

But habituation follows after experience and works against the side-draft of previous habituation. With the result that any deliberate change which is sought to be worked into the accepted scheme of use and wont will take effect only tardily, reluctantly, and sparingly. And it is a trait of human nature that any unavoidable minimum of change which so is perforce infused into the scheme of conduct will be covered in with an apologetic appeal to even more ancient and immutable principles erected out of painstaking subtleties and evasions, such as go to make up the consistency of the jurists and theologians. The new effectual factors in the case, those altered material circumstances that enforce a change in the established scheme of usage and law, are not allowed to come in openly as being in themselves conclusive grounds for the changes of principle which they enforce. Such is human nature. Any unavoidable move of this nature must be vouched for by make-believe. Authenticity must be found in underlying principles and immemorial usage, to be discovered by sophistical dialectics.

In the long run, of course, the pressure of changing material circumstances will have to shape the lines of human conduct, on pain of extinction. And this “long run” will necessarily have to be a shorter run when, as in the present, these relentless material circumstances are changing swiftly and at an ever accelerated rate. But always this running adaptation of the legal and moral conventions, if it is allowed at all, will be allowed to take effect only in the long run and sparingly, with an apparatus of make-believe and under cover of metaphysically immutable principles discovered ad hoc. But it does not follow that the pressure of material necessity, visiblv enforced by the death penalty, will ensure such a change in the legal and moral punctilios as will save the nation trom the death penalty. Witness the case of the civilised nations during the past few years and the immediate present (1923).

Whether any given people is to come through any given period, of such enforced change alive and fit to live, appears to be a matter of chance in which human insight plays a minor part and human foresight no part at all. As has already been spoken of above and as is well known to students of these things, any established scheme of law and morals is an outgrowth of custom, of past hab-ituation, and is bound to change incontinently in the course of further habituation. It is an empirical creation, a system of habits of thought induced by past habits of life, which have been induced by the drive of those material circumstances under which these human generations have been living in the past. And this system of habits of thought (law and custom) is, at the best, in a state of moving equilibrium, forever subject to readjustment and derangement by further habituation induced by further changes in those material circumstances that condition the community’s habits of life.

In the nature of things the growth of custom follows after the facts of experience which give rise to it, and any systematic change in the substance or direction of this growth of custom follows after the material changes which entail it. In this sense, therefore, any established order of law and custom is always out of date, in some degree. The code of right and honest living is always in arrears, by more or less; more so in the case of any people for whom the material conditions of life are in rapid process of change, as in America and the civilised countries of Europe.

Any large and persistent change in the material conditions—such, e. g., as has been taking effect in the scale and methods of industry during the past one hundred years—will necessarily be followed in due course by more or less pronounced changes in the established order of human relations and principles of conduct; but it need not follow that the resulting changes in law and morals will be of such a nature as to enhance the facility of life under the new order of material conditions which has induced these changes. Habituation affects the aptitudes of the individual as such, and comprises no collective bent. It is in the nature of a vis a tergo, which may drive many persons in the same general direction, but which looks to no end. In effect, any resulting revision of the principles of conduct will come in as a drift of habituation rather than a dispassionately reasoned adaptation of conduct to the circumstances of the case. It appears always to be a matter of “forced movements” rather than an outcome of shrewd initiative and logical design—even though much argument may be spent in the course of it all. As witness the helplessly evil case of the civilised nations since the War and the Armistice, and the solicitous fluttering of all the shrewd statesmen and the responsible men of affairs.⁴ When seen in a longer historical perspective and with a consequent greater detachment of observation any deliberate revision of the received scheme of law and morals will appear all the more patently to be a work of casual drift and an outcome of fortuitous habituation—Forced Movements, Tropisms, and Animal Conduct.⁵ Such in effect has been the growth of nationalism in recent times, as well as of the progressively expanded rights of absentee ownership during the same period.⁶

So in the passage from mediaeval to modern times certain profound and enduring changes took effect in the civil and political institutions of Europe. But all that had gone before was not lost, of course. Many things were carried over. As a matter of course very much of the institutional furniture of the Middle Ages has stood over and has continued to govern men’s conduct and convictions very nicely in one bearing and another through the modern era,—as, e.g., the Church and the Gentry. Articles of institutional furniture of this spiritual order, being somewhat out of touch with those material changes that make for change, stand a better chance of survival, with less derangement. The mechanically enforced behavior of workday life does not impinge so directly and intimately on those habits of thought that make up the verities and proprieties of religion and gentility. However intrinsic to the due balance of human affairs, these things of the spirit are after all, in their material bearing, of less immediate and less concrete effect, and they are therefore less rudely touched by innovations in the industrial arts. Regard being had to the very respectable body of such institutional holdovers, it will be seen that the established order of law and custom is, after all, modern only in the sense that it has been modernised out of the past, and that its modernisation has necessarily been incomplete, in the nature of things.

It is this modernisation of European institutions that is in question here, and only in so far as it bears directly on ownership and industry; and therefore on the material fortunes of the civilised peoples, including America. The rest of the institutional furniture that goes to make up Western civilisation, those other articles of usage and belief that are comprised in the spiritual heritage, may be no less interesting and no less admirable in their own right, but a discussion of these other things does not belong here.

In so far as bears on latterday questions of ownership and industry, there are two main articles of modern law and custom that call for consideration,—the system of Natural Rights, and the growth of National Integrity.

The two are closely in touch with one another, indeed they are bound up together, inasmuch as it is the national establishment that gives effect to the code of natural rights in this modern scheme of things. The two together make the framework of democratic institutions. Of these two pillars of the house of democracy, the national establishment may conveniently be spoken of first.

The growth of national integrity has run a fairly unbroken course since the close of the Middle Ages. It has all the while gathered vigor and momentum, on the whole, and has grown gradually more definite in its aims and motives ; and this course of growth and ripening appears by no means to be concluded yet. As it bears on the questions involved in the present inquiry the spirit (or habit) of national integrity may be said to have taken its rise and assumed much of its distinctive character in those princely adventures in “state-making” that fill the political history of early modern times.

State-making was a competitive enterprise of war and politics, in which the rival princely or dynastic establishments, all and several, each sought its own advantage at the cost of any whom it might concern. Being essentially a predatory enterprise, its ways and means were fraud and force. The several princely and dynastic establishments took on a corporate existence, with a corporate interest, policy, and organisation; and each of them worked consistently at cross purposes with all other similar corporations engaged in the same line of adventure. Among them were also principalities of the Faith, including the Holy See. The aim of it all centered in princely dominion and prestige, and in unearned incomes for the civil, military, and ecclesiastical personnel by whose concerted efforts the traffic in state-making was carried on.

Any one of these dynastic corporations could gain further dominion and prestige only at the expense of others of their kind, and only at the cost of their underlying population. It is a matter of course that the loss, damage, decay or discomfort of any one counted as gain for the rest; all gains being differential gains. The traffic was carried on then as now by warfare and warlike diplomacy ;⁷ which always resolves itself into an expenditure of life and substance on the part of the underlying population of all contending parties. It was always, as it has always continued to be, an enterprise of intimidation which counted on an eventual recourse to arms—ultima ratio principum—and the business was always, then as now, worked out in terms of mutual damage and discomfort, the outcome being decided by the balance of damage and loss; the cost in life and substance falling, then as now, on the underlying population, and the gains in dominion, prestige and goods going to the princely establishment and the kept classes.

This whole traffic in state-making is of a singularly unambiguous character and makes a sufficiently notorious chapter of history. And the States which it made were such as it might be expected to make. It was an enterprise in mutual defeat, quite unashamed. To the end that these adventures in damage, debauch and discomfort might be carried to a fitting conclusion, as they commonly have been, the several dynastic corporations claimed, and enforced, an undivided usufruct of their underlying populations and all their ways and works. So this unqualified usufruct of the underlying population became a perpetual and unalienable asset of the dynastic establishment, by Grace of God. In time, and indeed in a relatively short time, by force of strict and unremitting discipline and indoctrination the underlying population learned to believe that this princely usufruct of their persons and property by Grace of God was indispensably right and good, in the nature of things. By law and custom the underlying population came to owe, and to own, an unbounded and unquestioning allegiance of service to the princely establishment in whose usufruct they are held. Therefore servile allegiance has become not only a point of law but also a point of morals and honor. Such is the force of use and wont.

In the nature of things, these competitive princely corporations were always working at cross purposes and were imbued with an all-pervading spirit of enmity and distrust, suitable to that enterprise in mutual damage and discomfort for which they were organised and equipped ; and in all this diligent pursuit of disaster it was recognised as a plain matter of course that there was no place for scruples of any kind. All is fair in war and politics. It is a game of force and fraud. There is said to be honor among thieves, but one does not look for such a thing among statesmen. And so this spirit of dynastic statecraft spread down and outward by diffusion, by precept and example, throughout the underlying population until presently they were, all and several, bound together in the service of their predacious masters by an inveterate and unreflecting solidarity of national conceit, fear, hate, contempt, and an enthusiastically slavish obedience to the constituted authorities; Such has been the force of use and wont, and such is its institutional residue.⁸

By habituation through these bleak centuries of state-making this national integrity of hate, mischief and distrust has been ground into the texture of civilised life and thought, until it has become one of the sovereign facts in the established order of law and morals in all the civilised nations. So that when presently, under the pressure of altered material circumstances and consequent altered habits of life, a growth of democratic institutions set in, the ancient habitual solidarity of national conceit, fear, hate, contempt, and servility was carried over intact and unabated into the ideals of the democratic commonwealth, where it is still treasured as the essential substance of citizenship. It still remains the chief engine of dissension and distress at the hands of the national statesmen, whose chief end of endeavour still continues to be mutual defeat. It is only that the divine right of the prince has passed over into the divine right of the Nation. The democratic corporations of national statesmen continue to carry on the traffic in war and politics on the same lines and by use of the same means and methods as the dynastic statesmen of the era of state-making in their time. And the ways and means of it all is still the same dutiful usufruct of the underlying population, dedicated to this use by their corporate spirit of national vanity, fear, hate, contempt, and servility.

In the course of this era of state-making the prince became a “sovereign” by Grace of God, with tenure in perpetuity. His divine right to the usufruct of the underlying population was worked out and established by help of the interested connivance of the Church; and this appears to have been the only substantial contribution which the Church has made to the modern scheme of civil and political institutions. The prince became a sovereign; that is to say, all men became subject and abjectly inferior to him, in the nature of things; and to him, for no reasoned cause, all men thereupon owed unquestioning and unqualified obedience and service, in the divine nature of things. This notion of “sovereignty” is essentially a proposition in theological metaphysics, according to which some sort of immaterial superiority is infused in the person of the sovereign by divine fiat; which invests him with an axiomatically authentic personal dominion over the underlying population and all their ways and works. The Freudians would presumably call it an inferiority complex with benefit of clergy.

When and in so far as the democratic commonwealth has displaced the monarchical State, this theologico-met-aphysical attribute of sovereignty is conceived by the experts in political law and speculation to have passed over intact to the Nation; so that the Grace of God in this bearing now invests the national establishment, conceived as a corporate personality, instead of the person of the prince. The retention of this princely sovereignty in behalf of the “sovereign people” marks the Nation as a successor of the dynastic State, chartered to do business on the same lines and with the same powers ; very much as a modern oil corporation will take over all the powers and liabilities of any individual promoters whom it has bought out. The democratic Nation, therefore, is a sovereign by Grace of God, whatever other blessings it may enjoy. But the democratic Nation has no personal existence except in the several persons of its citizens. So the experts in political speculation have drawn the logical consequence, to the effect that these democratic citizens are vested with this princely sovereignty, each and several, unalienably and in perpetuity. That is to say, these democratic citizens, each and several, by Grace of God hold sovereign dominion over the underlying population of which they each and several are abjectly servile components.⁹ So also it should apparently follow by force of the same metaphysics that each of these sovereign citizens, being at the same time a loyal member of the underlying population, by Grace of God owes unqualified and unalienable allegiance to his own person in perpetuity.

All this seems foolish, of course. But it has the merit of consistency. And it was for a democracy of this complexion that the world once was to have been made safe. So also of course it is at least extremely doubtful if any stretch of human fantasy could have designed and embroidered such an extraordinary conception of citizen-sovereignty, if it had not been that the maggoty conceit of princely divine right was ready to hand,— an institutional heirloom handed down to the democratic commonwealth from the days of the Grace of God; the days of dynastic state-making and princely bishops; when the Lord’s anointed “tore each other in the slime” of political intrigue, while they visited upon the underlying population “the high justice, the middle, and the low.” When divested of this metaphysical figment of sovereignty and divine right, any national pretensions on the part of any democratic commonwealth become footless nonsense. The commonwealth in such a case would no longer be a political engine to be turned to account for political traffic by the politicians. It would be nothing to bluster and give off fumes about; nothing better, in fact, than an unsanctified workday arrangement for the common use of industrial ways and means. In fact the democratic commonwealths would in such event be in a fair way to become what they profess to be,—neighborly fellowships of ungraded masterless men given over to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” under the ancient and altogether human rule of Live and Let Live. In that event loyal subjection to the national establishment of politicians would have no sacramental value, and patriotic fervor would be no more meritorious than any other display of intolerance. Treason and sedition would accordingly fall from their high estate as the chief of crimes, and would take rank as nothing better than scandalous dissension about matters of taste and opinion. However, that is not the way things have been arranged by the blind drift of habituation out of that sorry past. And as things now stand, thanks to that parlous legacy of despotism and predation by Grace of God, patriotic inflation is the chief of the civic virtues, and failure to abet the government’s political intrigues is “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

By grace of this ingrained bias of predacious enmity toward the outside and voluntary servitude within the Nation the constituted authorities of these democratic commonwealths have fallen neatly into the place once occupied by the dynastic statesmen, and so they have, quite as a matter of course, also fallen into the same lines of dreary traffic in competitive force and fraud, without material abatement. Therefore civilised mankind is still divided against itself in a predatory scramble to get something for nothing at the cost of any whom it may concern ; which always foots up to mutual defeat at the cost of the underlying population.

This is the domain of External Politics ; a domain created out of national animosities, by statecraft, for the pursuit of national prestige and unearned gain.

In internal affairs, on the other hand, it is loosely presumed that the statesmen will be actuated by principles of equity and fair dealing and will be occupied with a humane pursuit of the common good. But the more fully the commonwealth has come to realise its status as a Nation, the more does its external politics (war and diplomacy) take precedence of its domestic concerns. The exigencies of external politics are paramount, and the conduct of internal affairs therefore are, in effect, required to conform to the needs of the nation’s external policies. And the administration of external politics, being in the nature of an enterprise in chicane and coercion, is necessarily furtive, runs forever on sharp practice, carefully withholds “information that might be useful to the enemy,” and habitually gives out information with intent to deceive. In effect, external politics is a blend of war and business and combines the peculiar traits of both. So the shadow of external politics covers also the management of domestic affairs, with the result that the authorities of the democratic commonwealths habitually go about their work under a cover of reticence tempered with prevarication.

Now, this may seem a fault; but the strategy enforced by the paramount exigencies of national politics is a furtive business, in the nature of things, and will have to be accepted with the defects of its qualities, if the Republic is to fulfil its destiny as a dignified and self-respecting Nation. The needful screen of strategic reticence serves also as a useful cover for many interested transactions that would not bear the light of un-tempered publicity; and the reasonable officers who thrive under the shade of the screen will presumably be such as the circumstances call for. By selective elimination of artless persons the personnel of official life comes to be made up, in the main, of such persons as will feel at home in the resulting spiritual twilight of official life, by native gift or by sedulous training.¹⁰ So it has also come about, under the stress of national strategy and political business enterprise, that any effectual distinction between honest politics and corrupt politics is an elusive difference of degree, not a difference in kind.¹¹ Due to the same causes it also follows that patriotic devotion to the national establishment will, in effect, come to much the same thing as partisan devotion to the fortunes of some particular gang or clique of political hucksters whose concern it is to make use of the national establishment for the profit of some particular group of special business interests ; which is called “party government” by those who theorise in Political Science.

The practical outcome has been a comprehensive defeat of democratic institutions in civilised Europe, at home and over-seas. It seems not likely that national vanity and dissension alone and working at random could have brought the affairs of the democratic nations to this pass, but they have also not been left to work out their own qualities unguided and unblended. Since and so far as the anointed princes have ceased to provide an interested motive for fomenting and mobilising international jealousies, statesmen have found a substitute in the pursuit of business interests. So the propagation of special interests under the shelter of national policy has come into the case, and this intoxicating blend has brought the civilised nations to the place where they now stand, after the War that was fought for commercial dominion. When national inflation is compounded with business enterprise bent on getting something for nothing at any cost, the product is that democratic “Imperialism” that is now carrying on the ancient traffic of statecraft. As once at the call of the anointed princes, so now at the call of a businesslike imperialist policy, the nation’s citizen has no rights which the nation’s politicians are bound to respect, except such property rights as are identified with business transactions on a reasonably large scale. So, the democratic commonwealths have fallen back on the ancient footing of intolerance, coercion, and furtive jobbery, that belongs of right to the statecraft of despotism and predation by Grace of God.

But it is, after all, a relapse with a difference, at least by profession. So far as the dynastic State has formally passed out of use among the civilised nations, and wherever democratic forms have by degrees taken its place, it is formally assumed and professed that the material needs of the country at large have displaced the ambitions of the Crown in the counsels of the statesmen who manage the nation’s affairs. All this has brought on a change in the sentiments and aims which it is now incumbent on the statesmen to profess in their public utterances.

The resulting change has affected their professions more profoundly than their policies. During the era of state-making, war-like enterprise was always the chief and abiding concern of the dynastic statesmen. But as a means to this end the politicians of the Crown were also bent on increasing the material resources of their State at the cost of their neighbors. In this endeavor, which included a “mercantile” policy, so called, they were guided by the axiomatic general principle that one nation’s gain is another’s loss, and conversely; which assumes that international hostility is a matter of course, in the nature of things ; and which appears to be a sound axiom of national statecraft, in the nature of things national.

The main and abiding pursuit of mutual defeat was never lost sight of in the economic policy of the dynastic state-makers ; and, indeed the same familiar principle still continues to govern the motions of the national statesmen and the sentiments of their democratic constituencies. This economic policy of dynastic and imperial statecraft is called Mercantilism. In practice it is always in the nature of sabotage. The ways and means of its strategy are obstruction of trade and interference with industry ; as, e.g., by a protective tariff, a colonial policy, a subsidy to shipping or munitions, an injunction of trade-unions, etc.

With the rise of the democratic nations the divine right of international obstruction and chicane passed from the dead hand of the anointed princes into the hands of the constituted authorities in these commonwealths, and these have since then continued with singular consistency to pursue the same tactics of mutual hindrance and defeat; well approved all the while by their patriotic constituencies. The only sensible departure from this course of policy occurred during the early half of the nineteenth century, before the special interests of business had conclusively displaced the material interest of the community at large in the counsels of the statesmen and in the affections of the underlying population.

America particularly, which is by all accounts the most democratic nation in Christendom, has reverted to the princely policy of mercantilism with the least abatement ; or perhaps it should rather be said that America, the most democratic, has pushed the inherited kingly policy of economic obstruction and defeat to greater lengths than the others. America’s unexampled resources have enabled this nation to carry a heavier handicap of artificial disabilities than the others. Presumably it is not that the Americans are endowed with a larger capacity for clannishness and self-deception.

Certain considerations bearing on the case of mercantilism in America may be called to mind to explain and exculpate the peculiarly shameless abandon with which that ancient policy of damage and defeat continues to be pursued by this nation. America has by nature been endowed with unexampled resources, which have hitherto enabled this people to find an easy livelihood in spite of their costly and vexatious tarififs and their equally thriftless land policy. At the same time this people has been subject to a somewhat special course of habitation, due to the peculiar position in which their resources have placed them. They have from the outset been engaged among themselves on a competitive pursuit of unearned gain to be got from taking over these resources and holding them out or trading in them. So that, by steady habituation, cupidity and sharp practice have been embedded in the common sense of this people as civic virtues of the first order, under the decent camouflage of thrift and self-help. A people whose workday ideal of self-help is unearned gain by legalised seizure at the cost of the community, who have been schooled in the practice of salesmanship until they believe that wealth is to be created by sharp practice, and that the perfect work of productive enterprise and initiative consists in. “cornering the market” and “sitting tight,”—a body of men whose sense of the realities is palsied with this manner of hip-shotten logic is also fit to believe that “the foreigner pays the tax” imposed by a protective tariff or that a ship subsidy is of some benefit to someone else than the absentee owners of the ships. An illustrious politician has said that “you can not fool all the people all the time,” but in a case where the people in question are sedulousy fooling themselves all the time the politicians can come near achieving that ideal result.

And all the while, being a new nation and of humble antecedents, this American people has ever been quite irritably beset with a felt need of national prestige ; which has engendered a bitterly patriotic sentiment and a headlong protestation of national solidarity; such a spirit as will lend itself to all manner of dubious uses in the hands of astute politicians. And finally it is also to be noted that the more maturely vicious development of this policy of commercial sabotage in America coincides in point of time and degree with the rise and dominance of absentee ownership in this country, and that any gains to be derived from such restraint of trade always accrue to one and another of the vested interests of the absentee owners, at the cost of the underlying population.

This protectionist sabotage on trade is a piece of the nationalist politics called Imperialism. Imperialism is dynastic politics under a new name, carried on for the benefit of absentee owners instead of absentee princes ; but so far as regards its bearing on the material fortunes of the underlying community it all comes to the same thing. All the civilised nations are beset with imperialistic ambitions, and so far as their limitations will permit them they are all occupied with imperialistic schemes ; that is to say schemes for the benefit of their vested business interests, masked as schemes for the aggrandisement of the nation.

There is a growing need of such national aids to business. A business corporation as such is restricted by certain large formalities of common honesty, the observance of which is not contemplated when business is done in the name of the Nation. The Nation, being in effect a licenced predatory concern, is not bound by the decencies of that code of law and morals that governs private conduct. So the national pretensions make a convenient cover for such adventures in pursuit of gain as run beyond the pale. These adventures in business, as well as the national pretensions, unavoidably run at cross purposes with one another; the abiding purpose of all competitors being to get whatever may be got at the cost of their neighbors or at the cost of those industrially backward peoples who have something to lose. It is the foremost aim of the imperialistic statesmen to extend and enlarge the advantages of such of the nation’s business men as are interested in gainful traffic in foreign parts ; that is to say, it is designed to extend and enlarge the dominion of the nation’s absentee owners beyond the national frontiers.

And by a curious twist of patriotic emotion the loyal citizens are enabled to believe that these extra-territorial gains of the country’s business men will somehow benefit the community at large. The gains which the business men come in for in this way are their private gains, of course; but the illusions of national solidarity enable the loyal ones to believe that the gains which so come to these absentee owners at the cost of the taxpayers will benefit the taxpayers in some occult way,—in some obscure way which no loyal citizen should inquire into too closely.

So the loyal citizens loyally place their persons and their substance at the service of those absentee owners who aim to get something for nothing by lucrative traffic in foreign parts and among the helpless outlying peoples ; the constituted authorities dutifully cover the traffic with the national honor, the national prestige, the national consular service, and the national armament; and the taxpayers faithfully pay the public cost of the armaments and the diplomatic and consular service by use of which their absentee owners are enabled to increase their private gains. Indeed, on occasion the same loyal taxpayers have been known gladly and proudly to risk life and limb in defense of this absentee trade that “follows the flag.” Should any undistinguished citizen, not an absentee owner of large means, hesitate to throw in his life and substance at the call of the politicians in control, for the greater glory of the flag and the greater profit of absentee business in foreign parts, he becomes a “slacker.”

By stress of this all-pervading patriotic bias and that fantastic bigotry which enables civilised men to believe in a national solidarity of material interests, it has come now to pass that the chief—virtually sole—concern of the constituted authorities in any democratic nation is a concern about the profitable business of the nation’s substantial citizens.¹²

But business enterprise here and now, and particularly business done on so large a scale as to bring it under the favorable notice of the federal authorities, is quite invariably an enterprise in absentee ownership. Any “Business Administration” will be a “Big-Business Administration.” So the constituted authorities of this democratic commonwealth come, in effect, to constitute a Soviet of Business Men’s Delegates, whose dutiful privilege it is to safeguard and enlarge the special advantages of the country’s absentee owners. And all the while the gains of the absentee owners are got at the cost of the underlying population,¹³ whether with or without special countenance from the side of the democratic authorities.

It is perhaps needless to say that all this is said without malice. A description by simple enumeration will sometimes look like fault-finding. But in all that has been said there is no presumptuous aspiration to reprove, amend, hinder, improve, or otherwise interfere with this appointed task of the constituted authorities at any point, or in any manner or degree to take exception to the very singular net residue in which democratic institutions have culminated at this point. Evidently with no such intention but simply as a matter of objective results, driven by the exigencies of national jealousies and absentee ownership, democratic institutions have worked out to such an outcome as is sketched above. By force of the unguarded drift of habituation democratic institutions, which once were designed to serve the ends of liberty, equality, and the brotherhood of man, have under these latterday conditions come to converge upon the security and free income of the absentee owners, at the cost of the underlying population.

That such a state of things has resulted is plainly due to the continued prevalence—and ever-increasing intolerance—of that unreasoning habit of national conceit, fear, hate, contempt, and servility, which the democratic peoples have inherited from the statecraft of dynastic politics, as it ran in the era of state-making ; when the prelates and princes competitively bled their underlying populations in the royal sport of realpolitik. Diligent habituation makes all things right. Except for this mob-mind of national integrity it is conceivable that democratic institutions might have come to serve the common good; but because of this the rule of Live and Let Live has in effect gone in the moral discard.

Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress. In its material effects it is altogether the most sinister as well as the most imbecile of all those institutional incumbrances that have come down out of the old order. The national mob-mind of vanity, fear, hate, contempt, and servility still continues to make the loyal citizen a convenient tool in the hands of the Adversary, whether these sentiments cluster about the anointed person of a sovereign or about the magic name of the Republic. Within a fraction of one per cent., the divine right of the Nation has the same size, shape, color, and density as the divine right of the Stuart kings once had, or as the divine right of Bourbons, Haps-burgers and Hohenzollern have continued to have at a later date ; and it has also the same significance for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”¹⁴

1: American law and procedure have taken shape under the hand of legislatures and courts which have habitually and as a matter of course been made up of investors and lawyers, with no control from outside these classes; and the upshot of it has been an arrangement such as to serve the convenience and profit of these two classes of persons,:—such as to increase the cost, volume, uncertainty and intricacy of litigation.—Cf., e. g., Charles A. Beard, Contemporary American History, especially ch. Ill and IX.

2: There appears to be no other or further attribute or capacity that can be specified as a universally essential characteristic of the modern nation except this moral and legal license to resort to violence at will. A nation is a (de jure) self-determining body in respect of its hostilities. Other attributes and capacities may be taken away without thereby terminating any given nation’s existence as such, but if this formally authentic competency for self-determining hostility be surrendered the nation, qua nation, is functa officio. It will accordingly be remarked, of course, that in respect of its authentic legal and moral type-form the modern nation is essentially of a predatory nature. And such is necessarily the case in view of its derivation. The same state of the case will also be evident on firsts hand reflection, to any person who may be passably informed as to the run of events during the past few years.

3: Cf. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct

4: By ingrained habit stabilised with precept and example the statesmen and men of affairs, together with the substantial part of their underlying constituencies, conceive the situation in terms of national intrigue and absentee ownership, and they endeavor to deal with it all along those lines. National rapacities are to be balanced and absentee property-claims are to be made secure; and there is at least a make-believe of hope that all that will help some, at least for the time being. Whereas the hardships of the situation effectually run in terms of population, foot-loose man-power, idle equipment, under-production. These are material facts that can be handled only by recourse to material science, technical organisation, industrial allocation of resources, quantity production of useful goods. But in effect, in so far as touches any action on their part in these premises, they know nothing and take no cognisance of the material sciences, the mechanical technology, or the growth of population. In the present disarray of these material ways and means, national interests and absentee claims can serve only to obstruct the work that is to be done. National interests after all are essentially predatory interests and the rightful claims of absentee ownership are essentially claims to unearned income; and the singleminded concern of the statesmen and men of affairs with these endeavours to get something for nothing has in effect resulted in unremitting sabotage on the work that is waiting to be done. So they have hitherto achieved nothing more to the point than a passably complete stultification.

5: It is evident now that such has been the nature of those revolutionary constitutional transactions that have marked the history of modern Europe and given its special character to the present established order of law and politics; as, e.g., the English revolution of 1688 or the French and the American transactions in the late eighteenth century.—Cf., e. g., Robinson and Beard, Outlines of European History, Part II.

The form of words made use of above will be recognised as taken from the title of a volume published by Jacques Loeb under that caption.

6: In all this it remains true, of course, that interested parties have shrewdly turned these forced movements of popular sentiment to account, and so have exercised something of a selective guidance over the growth of institutions.

7: The part of wise statecraft then as now was to “speak softly and carry a big stick,” as the principle has been formulated by one of the greater democratic statesmen of a later time.

8: Cf. e.g., Max Silvius Handman, “The Sentiment of Nationalism.” Political Science Quarterly, March, 1921.—No peopie can be a bona-fide Nation so long as it falls short in respect of this overhead of futilities and turpitudes.

9: “Men jeg er denne Kong Apis, Det ser jeg saa soleklart;

Og dersom du ikke forstaar det Saa skal du forstaa det snart

“Kong Apis var nemlig paa jagten, Og steg af sin hest en stund,” o. s. v.

“But I am that same King Apis, I see it as clear as noon;

And if you don’t understand it You shall understand it soon.

“King Apis once rode out a-hunting, And he went aside by himself,” etc. Peer Gynt, Act IV

10: This will ordinarily imply a degree of arrested development, particularly of the moral faculty, such as goes to create what is called a “moron.” Still, sedulous training will also do much.

11: As seen, e. g., in the late election of a United States Senator from Michigan, where this question has been decided on a technicality.

12: This is not a matter of reproach, of course ; quite the contrary, in fact. Indeed it is the boast of the present, latest and presumably best, Federal Administration in this country that this is altogether a Business Administration; and this is no idle boast. Its legal findings as well as its legislative and administrative measures have run admirably true to the form so set up. Always, night and day, the peculiar care of the Administration is now and ever shall be the profitable activity of the nation’s business concerns, more particularly the larger concerns with a large capitalisation and a substantial rate of earnings.

13: “The essence of business success is not to make good goods. It is not to have a host of employees. It is to have something left. The biggest word in the language of Business is not gross but net. To increase the net profits—that is the one aim of Efficiency.—Decreasing net profit is to a company what pain is to a human body. It is a symptom of injury or disease.”—Herbert Casson, in the Sabean, April, 1921.

14: There is, of course, no intention to find fault with these facts of history, or in any way to question the moral value of this untoward frame of mind which by ancient habit besets civilised mankind. It is only that this habitual mob-mind is untoward in the material respect. Moral values are another matter, and many untoward usages are highly moral. Moral values are a matter of settled habit; and assuredly national animosity is a sufficiently settled habit When all is said, it remains an unshaken axiom in the popular mind that these mob sentiments of national conceit, fear, hate, contempt, and servility are high qualities of manhood, and that they do greatly adorn the character of any person whose moral tissues they may infest. All of which remains a sacramental matter of course, about which there is no disputing.

See also The Nature of Peace, ch. II, “On the Nature and Uses of Patriotism” ; Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight ; H. H. Powers, What Men Fight For.