o engage to contribute to the common good, or
in other words to confer on the common man, falls under two heads:
defense against aggression from without; and promotion of the
community's material gain. It is to be presumed that the constituted
authorities commonly believe more or less implicitly in their own
professions in so professing to serve the needs of the common man in
these respects. The common defense is a sufficiently grave matter, and
doubtless it claims the best affections and endeavour of the citizen;
but it is not a matter that should claim much attention at this point in
the argument, as bearing on the service rendered the common man by the
constituted authorities, taken one with another. Any given governmental
establishment at home is useful in this respect only as against another
governmental establishment elsewhere. So that on the slightest
examination it resolves itself into a matter of competitive patriotic
enterprise, as between the patriotic aspirations of different
nationalities led by different governmental establishments; and the
service so rendered by the constituted authorities in the aggregate
takes on the character of a remedy for evils of their own creation. It
is invariably a defense against the concerted aggressions of other
patriots. Taken in the large, the common defense of any given nation
becomes a detail of the competitive struggle between rival nationalities
animated with a common spirit of patriotic enterprise and led by
authorities constituted for this competitive purpose.

Except on a broad basis of patriotic devotion, and except under the
direction of an ambitious governmental establishment, no serious
international aggression is to be had. The common defense, therefore, is
to be taken as a remedy for evils arising out of the working of the
patriotic spirit that animates mankind, as brought to bear under a
discretionary authority; and in any balance to be struck between the
utility and disutility of this patriotic spirit and of its service in
the hands of the constituted authorities, it will have to be cancelled
out as being at the best a mitigation of some of the disorders brought
on by the presence of national governments resting on patriotic loyalty
at large.

But this common defense is by no means a vacant rubric in any attempted
account of modern national enterprise. It is the commonplace and
conclusive plea of the dynastic statesmen and the aspiring warlords, and
it is t