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The great distinguishing mark being that the German usufructuary gentlemen are, in theory at least, gentlemen-adventurers of prowess and proud words, whose place in the world's economy it is to glorify God and disturb the peace; whereas their British analogues are gentlemen-investors, of blameless propriety, whose place it is more simply to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
So the blameless, and for the purpose imbecile, executive committee of gentlemen-investors has been insensibly losing the confidence and the countenance of the common man; who, when all is said, will always have to do what is to be done.
The exigencies of this war of technological exploits have been almost wholly, and very insistently, of a character not contemplated in the constitution of such an executive committee of gentlemen-investors designed to safeguard class interests and promote their pecuniary class advantage by a blamelessly inconspicuous and indirect management of national affairs.
Should the governmental establishment and the discretion still vest in the gentlemanly classes at the close of hostilities, the retribution is likely to take the accustomed gentlemanly shape of pecuniary burdens imposed on the people of the defeated country, together with diplomatically specified surrender of territorial and colonial possessions, and the like; such as to leave the de facto enemy courteously on one side, and to yield something in the way of pecuniary benefit to the gentlemen-investors in charge, and something more in the way of new emoluments of office to the office-holding class included in the same order of gentlemen.
On the whole, this British arrangement for the control of national affairs by a body of interested gentlemen-investors has been, and perhaps still is, just as well at home in the affectionate preconceptions of the nineteenth-century British as the corresponding German usufruct by self-appointed swaggering aristocrats has been among the underlying German population, or as the American arrangement of national control by business men for business ends.
Now, a government by well-meaning gentlemen-investors will, at the nearest, come no nearer representing the material needs and interests of the common run than a parable comes to representing the concrete facts which it hopes to illuminate.
If time be given for habituation to this manner of directorate in national affairs, so that the common man comes to realise how it is feasible to get along without gentlemen-investors holding the discretion, the outcome may conceivably be very grave.
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