ly Press
reveals only too clearly.

From all this the danger of class-domination emerges more and more into
relief. In Prussia the old Feudal caste remains--in a decadent state,
certainly, but perhaps for that very reason more arrogant, more vulgar,
and less conscious of any _noblesse oblige_ than even before. By itself,
however, and if unsupported by the commercial class, it would probably
have done little harm. In Britain the Feudal caste has ceased to be
exclusively military, and has become blended with the commercial class.
The British aristocracy now consists largely or chiefly of retired
grocers and brewers. Commercialism here has become more confessedly
dominant than in Germany, and whereas there the commercial class may
_support_ the military in its ambitions, here the commercial class
_uses_ the military as a matter of course and for its own ends. We have
become a Nation of Shopkeepers having our own revolvers and machine-guns
behind the counter.

And yet not really a Nation of Shopkeepers, but rather a nation ruled
by a shopkeeping _class_.

[This is the point in the text referred to by Footnote 25 below]

People sometimes talk as if commercial prosperity and the interests of
the commercial folk represented the life of the whole nation. That is a
way of speaking, and it illustrates certainly a common modern delusion.
But it is far from the truth. The trading and capitalist folk are only a
class, and they do _not_, properly speaking, represent the nation. They
do not represent the landowning and the farming interests, both of which
detest them; they do not represent the artisans and industrial workers,
who have expressly formed themselves into unions in order to fight them,
and who have only been able to maintain their rights by so doing; they
do not represent the labourers and peasants, who are ground under their
heel. It would take too long to go into the economics of this subject,
interesting though they are.[10] But a very brief survey of facts shows
us that wherever the capitalist and trading classes have triumphed--as
in England early last century, and until Socialistic legislation was
called in to check them--the condition of the mass of the people has by
no means improved, rather the contrary. Japan has developed a world
trade, and is on the look out for more, yet never before has there been
such distress among her mass-populations. Russia has been lately moving
in the same direction; her commercial