So long, however, as the nation’s vital force is unspent and taxes and soldiers are available in plenty, a great monarchy tends to turn those resources to notable results. The arts and sciences are encouraged by the patronage of men of breeding and affairs; they are disciplined into a certain firmness and amplitude which artists and scholars, if left to themselves, are commonly incapable of. Life is refined; religion itself, unless fanaticism be too hopelessly in the ascendant, is co-ordinated with other public interests and compelled to serve mankind; a liberal life is made possible; the imagination is stimulated and set free by that same brilliant concentration of all human energies which defeats practical liberty. At the same time luxury and all manner of conceits are part and parcel of such a courtly civilisation, and its best products are the first to be lost; so that very likely the dumb forces of society—hunger, conscience, and malice—will not do any great harm when they destroy those treacherous institutions which, after giving the spirit a momentary expression, had become an offence to both spirit and flesh. Observers at the time may lament the collapse of so much elegance and greatness; but nature has no memory and brushes away without a qualm her card-castle of yesterday, if a new constructive impulse possesses her to-day. [Sidenote: Impersonal symbols no advantage.] Where no suitable persons are found to embody the state’s unity, other symbols have to be chosen. Besides the gods and their temples, there are the laws which may, as among the Jews and Mohammedans, become as much a fetich as any monarch, and one more long-lived; or else some traditional policy of revenge or conquest, or even the country’s name or flag, may serve this symbolic purpose. A trivial emblem, which no thinking man can substitute for the thing signified, is not so great an advantage as at first sight it might seem; for in the first place men are often thoughtless and adore words and symbols with a terrible earnestness; while, on the other hand, an abstract token, because of its natural insipidity, can be made to stand for anything; so that patriotism, when it uses pompous words alone for its stimulus, is very apt to be a cloak for private interests, which the speaker may sincerely conceive to be the only interests in question. [Sidenote: Patriotism not self-interest, save to the social man whose aims are ideal.]