is attention.

There is, of course, no intention to decry this single-mindedness that
is habitually put in evidence by the dynastic statesmen. Nor should it
be taken as evidence of moral obliquity in them. It is rather the result
of a peculiar moral attitude or bent, habitual to such statesmen, and in
its degree also habitual to their compatriots, and is indispensably
involved in the Imperial frame of mind. The consummation of Imperial
mastery being the highest and ubiquitously ulterior end of all
endeavour, its pursuit not only relieves its votaries from the
observance of any minor obligations that run counter to its needs, but
it also imposes a moral obligation to make the most of any opportunity
for profitable deceit and chicanery that may offer. In short, the
dynastic statesman is under the governance of a higher morality, binding
him to the service of his nation's ambition--or in point of fact, to the
personal service of his dynastic master--to which it is his dutiful
privilege loyally to devote all his powers of force and fraud.

Democratically-minded persons, who are not moved by the call of loyalty
to a gratuitous personal master, may have some difficulty in
appreciating the force and the moral austerity of this spirit of
devotion to an ideal of dynastic aggrandisement, and in seeing how its
paramount exigence will set aside all meticulous scruples of personal
rectitude and veracity, as being a shabby with-holding of service due.

To such of these doubters as still have retained some remnants of their
religious faith this attitude of loyalty may perhaps be made
intelligible by calling to mind the analogous self-surrender of the
religious devotee. And in this connection it may also be to the purpose
to recall that in point of its genesis and derivation that unreserved
self-abasement and surrender to the divine ends and guidance, which is
the chief grace and glory of the true believer, is held by secular
students of these matters to be only a sublimated analogue or
counterfeit of this other dutiful abasement that constitutes loyalty to
a temporal master. The deity is currently spoken of as The Heavenly
King, under whose dominion no sinner has a right that He is bound to
respect; very much after the fashion in which no subject of a dynastic
state has a right which the State is bound to respect. Indeed, all these
dynastic establishments that so seek the Kingdom, the Power and the
Glory are surrounded with a penumb