so constitutes him
and his retinue of notables and personages its keeper.

But it is uniformly insisted by the statesmen--potentates, notables,
kings and mandarins--that this aegis of the national prowess in their
hands covers also many interests of a more substantial and more tangible
kind. These other, more tangible interests of the community have also a
value of a direct and personal sort to the dynasty and its hierarchy of
privileged subalterns, in that it is only by use of the material forces
of the nation that the dynastic prestige can be advanced and maintained.
The interest of such constituted authorities in the material welfare of
the nation is consequently grave and insistent; but it is evidently an
interest of a special kind and is subject to strict and peculiar
limitations. The common good, in the material respect, interests the
dynastic statesman only as a means to dynastic ends; that is to say,
only in so far as it can be turned to account in the achievement of
dynastic aims. These aims are "The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory," as
the sacred formula phrases the same conception in another bearing.

That is to say, the material welfare of the nation is a means to the
unfolding of the dynastic power; provided always that this material
welfare is not allowed to run into such ramifications as will make the
commonwealth an unwieldy instrument in the hands of the dynastic
statesmen. National welfare is to the purpose only in so far as it
conduces to political success, which is always a question of warlike
success in the last resort. The limitation which this consideration
imposes on the government's economic policy are such as will make the
nation a self-sufficient or self-balanced economic commonwealth. It must
be a self-balanced commonwealth at least in such measure as will make it
self-sustaining in case of need, in all those matters that bear directly
on warlike efficiency.

Of course, no community can become fully self-sustaining under modern
conditions, by use of the modern state of the industrial arts, except by
recourse to such drastic measures of repression as would reduce its
total efficiency in an altogether intolerable degree. This will hold
true even of those nations who, like Russia or the United States, are
possessed of extremely extensive territories and extremely large and
varied resources; but it applies with greatly accentuated force to
smaller and more scantily furnished territorial units.