We are indeed apt to forget how important are its consequences, even when it supplies no more than a faint qualification of other and more obvious motives. It acts like those alloys which, in doses relatively minute, add strength and elasticity even to steel. The relation (for example) between a commercial company and its officials is essentially a business one. The employer pays the market price for honesty and competence, and has no claim to more. Yet that company is surely either unfortunate or undeserving whose servants are wholly indifferent to its fortunes, feeling no faintest flicker of pride when it succeeds, no tinge of regret when it fails. Honourable is the tie between those who exchange honest wage and honest work; yet loyalty can easily better it. And a like truth is manifest in spheres of action less reputable than those of commerce. Mercenaries, to be worth hiring, must be partly moved by forces higher than punishment or pay. Even pirates could not plunder with profit were their selfishness unredeemed by some slight tincture of reciprocal loyalty. There are, however, many who would admit the occasional importance of loyalty while strenuously denying that social life was wholly based upon it. For them society is an invention; of all inventions the most useful, but still only an invention. It was (they think) originally devised by individuals in their individual interest; and, though common action was the machinery employed, personal advantage was the end desired. By enlightened egoism social organisation was created; by enlightened egoism it is maintained and improved. Contrivance, therefore, not loyalty, is the master faculty required. This is a great delusion—quite unsupported by anything we know or can plausibly conjecture about the history of mankind. No one, indeed, doubts that deliberate adaptation of means to ends has helped to create, and is constantly modifying, human societies; nor yet that egoism has constantly perverted political and social institutions to merely private uses. But there is something more fundamental to be borne in mind, namely, that without loyalty there would be no societies to modify, and no institutions to pervert. If these were merely well-designed instruments like steam-engines and telegraphs, they would be worthless. They would perish at the first shock, did they not at once fall into ruin by their own weight. If they are to be useful as means, they must first impose themselves as ends; they must possess a quality beyond the reach of contrivance: the quality of commanding disinterested service and uncalculating devotion. III