me real force of character,
people with brains and hearts, fighters and lovers, saints and thinkers,
and the patient, industrious workers. Such, if you consider, are really
no integral part of the nation among which they are cast. They have no
part in what are grandiloquently called national interests--war,
politics, and horse-racing to wit. A change of Government leaves them as
unmoved as an election for the board of guardians. They would as soon
think of entering Parliament or the County Council, as of yearning to
manage the gasworks, or to go about with one of those carts bearing the
legend 'Aldermen and Burgesses of the City of London' conspicuously upon
its front. Their main concern in political changes is the rise and fall
of the income-tax, and, be the Cabinet Tory or Liberal, their rate
papers come in for the same amount. It is likely that national changes
would affect them but little more. What more would a foreign invasion
mean than that we should pay our taxes to French, Russian, or German
officials, instead of to English ones? French and Italians do our
cooking, Germans manage our music, Jews control our money markets;
surely it would make little difference to us for France, Russia, or
Germany to undertake our government. The worst of being conquered by
Russia would be the necessity of learning Russian; whereas a little
rubbing up of our French would make us comfortable with France. Besides,
to be conquered by France would save us crossing the Channel to Paris,
and then we might hope for cafes in Regent Street, and an emancipated
literature. As a matter of fact, so-called national interests are merely
certain private interests on a large scale, the private interests of
financiers, ambitious politicians, soldiers, and great merchants.
Broadly speaking, there are no rival nations--there are rival markets;
and it is its Board of Trade and its Stock Exchange rather than its
Houses of Parliament that virtually govern a country. Thus one seaport
goes down and another comes up, industries forsake one country to bless
another, the military and naval strengths of nations fluctuate this way
and that; and to those whom these changes affect they are undoubtedly
important matters--the great capitalist, the soldier, and the
politician; but to the quiet man at home with his wife, his children,
his books, and his flowers, to the artist busied with brave translunary
matters, to the saint with his eyes filled with 'the white ra