Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/102

 it is evident that the same medley of traditional emotionalism and magical beliefs which composes the sentiment of religious orthodoxy is present in the creeds and sentiments of political and economic orthodoxy. In politics Monarchy remains a divine institution, endowed, as the recent ceremony of the Coronation testifies, with a sanctity and mysticism designed to remove it from rational assessment. Divine right and supernatural authority, though no longer openly claimed, still lurk in the ceremonial of the anointment and the sacramental rite. But this spirit of sanctity is by no means confined to Monarchy. The glorification of the nation and the empire, as illustrated in school ceremonial and teaching, and in political meetings, does not differ, save in degree, from the cruder practices of Nazism and Fascism. The sacred emotionalism, poured out before the image of an empire bound in close solidarity by a common language, common interests and sympathies, can only be produced by keeping out of view the racial, linguistic, and other conflicts of interest visible in each of our dominions, in most of our colonies, and especially in the country that gives us our chief claim to magnitude of area and population, India.

Turning from politics to economics and the class distinctions connected with grades of income, can it be questioned that property and the legal ways of acquisition are kept from close rational scrutiny by a traditional and well-cultivated regard for “rights”?