Now, a government by well-meaning gentlemen-investors will, at the nearest, come no nearer representing the material needs and interests of the common run than a parable comes to representing the concrete facts which it hopes to illuminate. And as bears immediately on the point in hand, these gentlemanly administrators of the nation's affairs who so cluster about the throne, vacant though it may be of all but the bodily presence of majesty, are after all gentlemen, with a gentlemanly sense of punctilio touching the large proprieties and courtesies of political life. The national honor is a matter of punctilio, always; and out of the formal exigencies of the national honor arise grievances to be redressed; and it is grievances of this character that commonly afford the formal ground of a breach of the peace. An appeal on patriotic grounds of wounded national pride, to the common run who have no trained sense of punctilio, by the gentlemanly responsible class who have such a sense, backed by assurances that the national prestige or the national interests are at stake, will commonly bring a suitable response. It is scarcely necessary that the common run should know just what the stir is about, so long as they are informed by their trusted betters that there is a grievance to redress. In effect, it results that the democratic nation's affairs are administered by a syndicate composed of the least democratic class in the population. Excepting what is to be excepted, it will commonly hold true today that these gentlemanly governments are conducted in a commendably clean and upright fashion, with a conscious rectitude and a benevolent intention. But they are after all, in effect, class governments, and they unavoidably carry the bias of their class. The gentlemanly officials and law-givers come, in the main, from the kept classes, whose living comes to them in the way of income from investments, at home or in foreign parts, or from an equivalent source of accumulated wealth or official emolument. The bias resulting from this state of the case need not be of an intolerant character in order to bring its modicum of mischief into the national policy, as regards amicable relations with other nationalities. A slight bias running on a ground of conscious right and unbroken usage may go far. So, e.g., anyone of these gentlemanly governments is within its legitimate rights, or rather within its imperative duty, in defending the foreign investments of its citizens and enforcing due payment of its citizens' claims to income or principal of such property as they may hold in foreign parts; and it is within its ordinary lines of duty in making use of the nation's resources--that is to say of the common man and his means of livelihood--in enforcing such claims held by the investing classes. The community at large has no interest in the enforcement of such claims; it is evidently a class interest, and as evidently protected by a code of rights, duties and