or delivery; nor, indeed,
does he at all commonly come into even that degree of contact with
abroad that is implied in the purchase of foreign securities. Virtually
the sole occasion on which he comes in touch with the world beyond the
frontier is when, and if, he goes away from home as an emigrant, and so
ceases to enjoy the tutelage of the nation's constituted authorities.
But the common man, in point of fact, is a home-keeping body, who
touches foreign parts and aliens outside the national frontiers only at
the second or third remove, if at all, in the occasional purchase of
foreign products, or in the sale of goods that may find their way abroad
after he has lost sight of them. The exception to this general rule
would be found in the case of those under-sized nations that are too
small to contain the traffic in which their commonplace population are
engaged, and that have neither national prowess nor national prestige to
fall back on in a conceivable case of need,--and whose citizens,
individually, appear to be as fortunately placed in their workday
foreign relations, without a background of prowess and prestige, as the
citizens of the great powers who are most abundantly provided in these
respects.

With wholly negligible exceptions, these matters touch the needs or the
sensibilities of the common man only through the channel of the
national honour, which may be injured in the hardships suffered by his
compatriots in foreign parts, or which may, again, be repaired or
enhanced by the meritorious achievements of the same compatriots; of
whose existence he will commonly have no other or more substantial
evidence, and in whose traffic he has no share other than this vicarious
suffering of vague and remote indignity or vainglory by force of the
wholly fortuitous circumstance that they are (inscrutably) his
compatriots. These immaterial goods of vicarious prestige are, of
course, not to be undervalued, nor is the fact to be overlooked or
minimised that they enter into the sum total of the common citizen's
"psychic income," for whatever they may foot up to; but evidently their
consideration takes us back to the immaterial category of prestige
value, from which the argument just now was hopefully departing with a
view to consideration of the common man's material interest in that
national enterprise about which patriotic aspirations turn.

These things, then, are matters in which the common man has an interest
only as th