[An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation by Thorstein Veblen]@TWC D-Link bookAn Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation CHAPTER III 13/50
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 penumbra of divinity, and it is commonly a bootless question where the dynastic powers end and the claims of divinity begin.
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