Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/384

368 unforced unity of pulse and impulse, diplomacy, judgment of men, the art of command and masculine will to keep and extend power, which even in earliest times differentiated a nobility and a people out of the one and the same war-gathering; and, lastly, in the feeling for honour and bravery. Hence, right up to the latest phases, that State stands firmest in which the nobility or the tradition shaped by the nobility is wholly at the service of the common cause — as it was in Sparta as compared with Athens, in Rome vis-à-vis Carthage, in Tsin as against the tao-coloured state of Tsu.

The distinction is that a nobility self-contained as a class — or for that matter any Estate — experiences the residue of the nation only with reference to itself, and only desires to exercise power in that sense, whereas the very principle of the State is that it cares for all, and cares for the nobility as such only in relation to the major care. But a genuine old nobility assimilates itself to the State, and cares for all as though for a property. This care, in fact, is one of its grandest duties and one of which it is most deeply conscious; it feels it, indeed, an innate privilege, and regards service in the army and the administration as its special vocation.

It is, however, a distinction of quite another kind that holds as between the State-idea and the idea of any one of the other Estates. All these are inwardly alien to the State as such, and the State-ideals that they fashion out of their own lives have not grown up out of the spirit and the political forces of actual history — hence, indeed, the conscious emphasis with which they are labelled as social. And while in Early times the situation is simply that historical facts oppose the Church-community in its efforts to actualize religious ideals, in Late periods both the business ideal of the free economic life, and the Utopian ideal of the enthusiast who would actualize this or that abstraction, also come into the field.

But in the historical world there are no ideals, but only facts — no truths, but only facts. There is no reason, no honesty, no equity, no final aim, but only facts, and anyone who does not realize this should write books on politics — let him not try to make politics. In the real world there are no states built according to ideals, but only states that have grown, and these are nothing but living peoples "in form." No doubt it is "the form impressed that living doth itself unfold," but the impress has been that of the blood and beat of a being, wholly instinctive and involuntary; and as to the unfolding, if it is guided by the master of politics, it takes the direction inherent in the blood; if by the idealist, that dictated by his own convictions — in other words, the way to nullity.

But the destiny question, for States that exist in reality and not merely in intellectual schemes, is not that of their ideal task or structure, but that of their inner authority, which cannot in the long run be maintained by material means, but only by a belief — of friend and foe — in their effectiveness. The decisive