he slightest inflection of
discourtesy. They are all honorable men. Indeed they afford the
conventional pattern of human dignity and meritorious achievement, and
the "Fountain of Honor" is found among them. The point of the argument
is only that their material or other self-regarding interests are of
such a nature as to be furthered by the material wealth of the
community, and more particularly by the increasing volume of the body
politic; but only with the proviso that this material wealth and this
increment of power must accrue without anything like a corresponding
cost to this class. At the same time, since this class of the superiors
is in some degree a specialised organ of prestige, so that their value,
and therefore their tenure, both in the eyes of the community and in
their own eyes, is in the main a "prestige value" and a tenure by
prestige; and since the prestige that invests their persons is a shadow
cast by the putative worth of the community at large, it follows that
their particular interest in the joint prestige is peculiarly alert and
insistent. But it follows also that these personages cannot of their own
substance or of their own motion contribute to this collective prestige
in the same proportion in which it is necessary for them to draw on it
in support of their own prestige value. It would, in other words, be a
patent absurdity to call on any of the current ruling classes,
dynasties, nobility, military and diplomatic corps, in any of the
nations of Europe, e.g., to preserve their current dignity and command
the deference that is currently accorded them, by recourse to their own
powers and expenditure of their own substance, without the usufruct of
the commonalty whose organ of dignity they are. The current prestige
value which they enjoy is beyond their unaided powers to create or
maintain, without the usufruct of the community. Such an enterprise does
not lie within the premises of the case.

In this bearing, therefore, the first concern with which these
personages are necessarily occupied is the procurement and retention of
a suitable usufruct in the material resources and good-will of a
sufficiently large and industrious population. The requisite good-will
in these premises is called loyalty, and its retention by the line of
personages that so trade on prestige rests on a superinduced association
of ideas, whereby the national honour comes to be confounded in popular
apprehension with the prestig