the economic now attached itself. The duration of a flourishing life is inseparable from its strength; its secret of begetting and conceiving is seen at its purest in the being of breed-strong peasant stock that is rooted, healthy and fruitful, in its soil. And as in the form of the body the organ of sex is bound up with that of the circulation,[1] so the middle of the house in another sense is formed by the sacred hearths, the Vesta.
For this very reason the significance of economic history is something quite different from that of political. In the latter the foreground is taken up by the great individual destinies, which fulfil themselves indeed in the binding forms of their epoch, but are nevertheless, each in itself, strictly personal. The concern of the former, and of family history, is the course of development of the form-language; everything once-occurring and personal is an unimportant private-destiny, and only the basic form common to the million cases matters. But even so economics is only a foundation, for Being that is in any way meaningful. What really signifies is not that an individual or a people is "in condition," well nourished and fruitful, but for what he or it is so; and the higher man climbs historically, the more conspicuously his political and religious will to inward symbolism and force of expression towers above everything in the way of form and depth that the economic life as such possesses. It is only with the coming of the Civilization, when the whole form-world begins to ebb, that mere life-preserving begins to outline itself, nakedly and insistently — this is the time when the banal assertion that "hunger and love" are the driving forces of life ceases to be ashamed of itself; when life comes to mean, not a waxing in strength for the task, but a matter of "happiness of the greatest number," of comfort and ease, of "panem et circenses"; and when, in the place of grand politics, we have economic politics as an end in itself.
Since economics belongs to the race side of life, it possesses, like politics, a customary ethic and not a moral — yet again the distinction of nobility and priesthood, facts and truths. A vocation-class, like an Estate, possesses a matter-of-course feeling for (not good and evil, but) good and bad. Not to have this feeling is to be void of honour, law. For those engaged in the economic life, too, honour stands as central criterion, with its tact and fine flair for what is "the right thing" — something quite separate from the sin-idea underlying the religious contemplation of the world. There exist, not only a very definite vocational honour amongst merchants, craftsmen, and peasants, but equally definite gradations downward for the shopkeeper, the exporter, the banker, the contractor, and even, as we all know, for thieves and beggars, in so far as two or three of them feel themselves as fellow practitioners. No one has stated or written out these customary-ethics, but they exist, and, like class-ethics everywhere and always, they are binding only within the circle of membership. Along with the noble virtues of loyalty and courage, chivalry and
- ↑ P. 5.
