true that the common man has no share in the legacy of sovereignty and national enterprise which the enlightened democratic commonwealth has taken over from the departed dynastic régime. The divine right of the prince included certain imponderables, as well as the usufruct of the material resources of the realm. There were the princely dignity and honor, which were no less substantial an object of value and ambition and were no less tenaciously held by the princes of the dynastic régime than the revenues and material "sinews of war on which the prestige and honor rested. And the common man of the democratic commonwealth has at least come in for a ratable share in these imponderables of prestige and honor that so are comprised under the divine right of the nation. He has an undivided interest in the glamour of national achievement, and he can swell with just pride in contemplating the triumphs of his gentlemanly government over the vested interests domiciled in any foreign land, or with just indignation at any diplomatic setback suffered by the vested interests domiciled in his own.

There is also a more tangible, though more petty, advantage gained for the common man in having formally taken over the sovereignty from the dead hand of the dynastic prince. The common man being now vested with the divine right of national sovereignty, held in undivided community ownership, it is ceremonially necessary for the gentlemanly stewards of the kept classes to consult the wishes of this their sovereign on any matters of policy that can not wholly be carried through in a diplomatic corner and under cover of night and cloud. He, collectively, holds an eventual power of veto. And this power of veto has in practice been found to be something of a safeguard against any universal and enduring increase of hardship at the hands of the gentlemen-investors to whom the conduct of the nation's affairs has been "entrusted; " a very modest safeguard, it is true, but always of some eventual consequence. There is the difference that in the democratic commonwealth the common man has to be managed rather than driven, - except for minor groups of common men who live on the lower-common levels, and except for recurrent periods of legislative hysteria and judiciary blind-staggers. And it is pleasanter to be managed than to be driven. Chicane is a more humane art than corporal punishment. Imperial England is, after all, a mildermannered stepmother than Imperial Germany.

And always the common man comes in for his ratable share in the glamour of national achievement, in war and peace; and this imponderable gain of the spirit is also something. The value of these collective imponderables of national prestige and collective honor is not to be made light of. These count for very much in the drift and set of national sentiment, and moral issues of national moment are wont to arise out of them. Indeed, they constitute the chief incentive which holds the common man to an unrepining constancy in the service of the national interests." So that, while the tangible shell of material gain appears to have fallen to the democratic community's kept classes, yet the "psychic income" that springs from national enterprise, the spiritual kernel of national elation they share with

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the common man on an equitable footing of community interest.

The vested rights of the nation are of the essence of that order of things which enjoys the unqualified sanction of the modern point of view. Like any other vested interest, these rights are conceived in other terms than those which are native to the new order of material science and technology. They are of an older and more spiritual order, so far as regards the principles of knowledge and belief on which they rest. But whatever may be their remoter pedigree, they have the sanction of that body of principles that is called the modern point of view, and they belong in the scheme of things handed on by the Liberal movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Apart from the imponderable values which fall under the head of national prestige, these vested rights of the nation can be defined as an extension to the commonwealth of the same natural rights of self-direction and personal security

free contract and self-help that are secured to the individual citizen under the common law.

Yet, while the national policies of the democratic commonwealths are managed by Liberal statesmen in behalf of the vested interests, they still run on the ancient lines of dynastic statecraft, as worked out by the statesmen of the ancient régime; and the common man is still passably content to see the traffic run along on those lines. The things which are considered desirable to be done in the way of national enterprise, as well as the sufficient reasons for doing them, still have much of the medieval color. National pretensions, enterprise, rivalry, intrigue and dissensions among the democratic commonwealths are still such as would have been intelligible to Macchiavelli, Frederick the Great, Metternich, Bismarck, or the Elder Statesmen of Japan. Diplomatic intercourse still runs in the same terms of systematised prevarication, and still turns about the same schedule of national pretensions that contented the medieval spirit of these masters of dynastic intrigue. As a matter of course and of common sense the nations still conceive themselves to be rivals, whose national interests are incompatible, and whose divine right it is to gain something at one another's cost, after the fashion of rival bandits or business concerns. They still seek dominion and still conceive themselves to have extra-territorial interests of a proprietary sort. They still hold and still seek vested rights in colonial possessions and in extra-territorial priorities and concessions of divers and dubious kinds. There still are conferences, stipulations and guarantees between the Powers, touching the "Open Door" in China, or the equitable partition of Africa, which read like a chapter on Honor among Thieves.

All this run of national pretensions, wrangles, dominion, aggrandisement, chicane, and ill-will, is nothing more than the old familiar trading stock of the diplomatic brokers who do business in dynastic force and fraud also called Realpolitik. The democratic nations have taken over in bulk the whole job-lot of vested interests and divine rights that once made the monarch of the old order an unfailing source of outrage and desolation. In the hands. of those "Elder Statesmen" who once did business

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under the signature of the dynasty, the traffic in statecraft yielded nothing better than a mess of superfluous affliction; and there is no reason to apprehend that a continuation of the same traffic under the management of the younger statesmen who now do business in the name of the democratic commonwealth is likely to bring anything more comfortable, even though the legal instruments in the case may carry the rubber-stamp O. K. of the common man. The same items will foot up to the same sum; and in either case the net gain is always something appreciably less than nothing.

These national interests are part of the medieval system of ends, ways and means, as it stood, complete and useless, at that juncture when the democratic commonwealth took over the divine rights of the crown. It should not be extremely difficult to understand why they have stood over, or why they still command the dutiful approval of the common

man.

It is a case of aimless survival, on the whole, due partly to the inertia of habit and tradition, partly to the solicitous advocacy of these assumed national interests by those classes the trading and officeholding classes who stand to gain something by the pursuit of them at the cost of the rest. By tenacious tradition out of the barbarian past these peoples have continued to be rival nations living in a state of habitual enmity and distrust, for no better reason than that they have not taken thought and changed their mind.

After some slackening of national animosities and some disposition to neglect national pretensions during the earlier decades of the great era of Liberal