o, by the gentlemanly responsible class who have such a
sense, backed by assurances that the national prestige or the national
interests are at stake, will commonly bring a suitable response. It is
scarcely necessary that the common run should know just what the stir is
about, so long as they are informed by their trusted betters that there
is a grievance to redress. In effect, it results that the democratic
nation's affairs are administered by a syndicate composed of the least
democratic class in the population.

Excepting what is to be excepted, it will commonly hold true today that
these gentlemanly governments are conducted in a commendably clean and
upright fashion, with a conscious rectitude and a benevolent intention.
But they are after all, in effect, class governments, and they
unavoidably carry the bias of their class. The gentlemanly officials and
law-givers come, in the main, from the kept classes, whose living comes
to them in the way of income from investments, at home or in foreign
parts, or from an equivalent source of accumulated wealth or official
emolument. The bias resulting from this state of the case need not be of
an intolerant character in order to bring its modicum of mischief into
the national policy, as regards amicable relations with other
nationalities. A slight bias running on a ground of conscious right and
unbroken usage may go far. So, e.g., anyone of these gentlemanly
governments is within its legitimate rights, or rather within its
imperative duty, in defending the foreign investments of its citizens
and enforcing due payment of its citizens' claims to income or principal
of such property as they may hold in foreign parts; and it is within its
ordinary lines of duty in making use of the nation's resources--that is
to say of the common man and his means of livelihood--in enforcing such
claims held by the investing classes. The community at large has no
interest in the enforcement of such claims; it is evidently a class
interest, and as evidently protected by a code of rights, duties and
procedure that has grown out of a class bias, at the cost of the
community at large.

This bias favoring the interests of invested wealth may also, and indeed
it commonly does, take the aggressive form of aggressively forwarding
enterprise in investment abroad, particularly in commercially backward
countries abroad, by extension of the national jurisdiction and the
active countenancing of concessions in