nature, every business of a diplomatic, and both are based upon penetrative judgment of men and physiognomic tact. The adventure-spirit in great seafarers like the Phœnicians, Etruscans, Normans, Venetians, Hanseatics, the spirit of shrewd banking-lords like the Fugger and the Medici and of mighty financiers like Crassus and the mining and trust magnates of our own day, must possess the strategic talent of the general if its operations are to succeed. Pride in the clan-house, the paternal heritage, the family tradition, develops and counts in the economic sphere as in the political; the great fortunes are like the kingdoms and have their history,[1] and Polycrates and Solon, Lorenzo de' Medici and Jürgen Wullenweber are far from being the only examples of political ambitions developing out of commercial.
But the genuine prince and statesman wants to rule, and the genuine merchant only wants to be wealthy, and here the acquisitive economy divides to pursue aim and means separately.[2] One may aim at booty for the sake of power, or at power for the sake of booty. The great ruler, too, the Hwang-ti, the Tiberius, the Frederick II — has the will to wealth, the will to be "rich in land and subjects," but it is with and under a sense of high responsibilities. A man may lay hands on the treasurers of the whole world with a good conscience, not to say as a matter of course: he may lead a life of radiant splendour or even dissipation — if only he feels himself (Napoleon, Cecil Rhodes, the Roman Senate of the third century) to be the engine of a mission. When he feels so, the idea of private property can scarcely be said to exist so far as he is concerned.
He who is out for purely economic advantages — as the Carthaginians were in Roman times and, in a far greater degree still, the Americans in ours — is correspondingly incapable of purely political thinking. In the decisions of high politics he is ever deceived and made a tool of, as the case of Wilson shows — especially when the absence of statesmanlike instinct leaves a chair vacant for moral sentiments. This is why the great economic groupings of the present day (for example, employers' and employees' unions) pile one political failure on another, unless indeed they find a real political politician as leader, and he — makes use of them. Economic and political thinking, in spite of a high degree of consonance of form, are in direction (and therefore in all tactical details) basically different. Great business successes[3] awaken an unbridled sense of public power — in the very word "capital" one catches an unmistakable undertone of this. But it is only in a few individuals that the colour and direction of their willing and their criteria of situations of things undergo change. Only
- ↑ Undershaft in Shaw's Major Barbara is a true ruler-figure of this realm.
- ↑ P. 344. As a means for governments it is called finance-economy (financial policy). Here the whole nation is the object of a levy of tribute, in the forms of taxes and customs, of which the purpose is not to make, so to say, the upkeep of its life more comfortable, but to secure its historical position and to enhance its power.
- ↑ Using the phrase widely, as including, for instance, the rise of workmen, journalists, and men of learning to positions of leadership.
