lso contribute to the common good. At the same time all these national
conspiracies in restraint of trade are claimed, with more or less
reason, to inflict more or less harm on rival nationalities with whom
economic relations are curtailed; and patriotism being an invidious
sentiment, the patriotic citizen finds comfort in the promise of
mischief to these others, and is all the more prone to find all kinds of
merit in proposals that look to such an invidious outcome. In any
community imbued with an alert patriotic spirit, the fact that any given
circumstance, occurrence or transaction can be turned to account as a
means of invidious distinction or invidious discrimination against
humanity beyond the national pale, will always go far to procure
acceptance of it as being also an article of substantial profit to the
community at large, even though the slightest unbiased scrutiny would
find it of no ascertainable use in any other bearing than that of
invidious mischief. And whatever will bear interpretation as an
increment of the nation's power or prowess, in comparison with rival
nationalities, will always be securely counted as an item of joint
credit, and will be made to serve the collective conceit as an invidious
distinction; and patriotic credulity will find it meritorious also in
other respects.

So, e.g., it is past conception that such a patent imbecility as a
protective tariff should enlist the support of any ordinarily
intelligent community except by the help of some such chauvinistic
sophistry. So also, the various royal establishments of Europe, e.g.,
afford an extreme but therefore all the more convincing illustration of
the same logical fallacy. These establishments and personages are great
and authentic repositories of national prestige, and they are therefore
unreflectingly presumed by their several aggregations of subjects to be
of some substantial use also in some other bearing; but it would be a
highly diverting exhibition of credulity for any outsider to fall into
that amazing misconception. But the like is manifestly true of
commercial turnover and export trade among modern peoples; although on
this head the infatuation is so ingrained and dogmatic that even a rank
outsider is expected to accept the fallacy without reflection, on pain
of being rated as unsafe or unsound. Such matters again, as the
dimensions of the national territory, or the number of the population
and the magnitude of the national re