From all this the danger of class-domination emerges more and more into relief.  In Prussia the old Feudal caste remains—­in a decadent state, certainly, but perhaps for that very reason more arrogant, more vulgar, and less conscious of any noblesse oblige than even before.  By itself, however, and if unsupported by the commercial class, it would probably have done little harm.  In Britain the Feudal caste has ceased to be exclusively military, and has become blended with the commercial class.  The British aristocracy now consists largely or chiefly of retired grocers and brewers.  Commercialism here has become more confessedly dominant than in Germany, and whereas there the commercial class may support the military in its ambitions, here the commercial class uses the military as a matter of course and for its own ends.  We have become a Nation of Shopkeepers having our own revolvers and machine-guns behind the counter.

And yet not really a Nation of Shopkeepers, but rather a nation ruled by a shopkeeping class.

[This is the point in the text referred to by Footnote 25 below]

People sometimes talk as if commercial prosperity and the interests of the commercial folk represented the life of the whole nation.  That is a way of speaking, and it illustrates certainly a common modern delusion.  But it is far from the truth.  The trading and capitalist folk are only a class, and they do not, properly speaking, represent the nation.  They do not represent the landowning and the farming interests, both of which detest them; they do not represent the artisans and industrial workers, who have expressly formed themselves into unions in order to fight them, and who have only been able to maintain their rights by so doing; they do not represent the labourers and peasants, who are ground under their heel.  It would take too long to go into the economics of this subject, interesting though they are.[10] But a very brief survey of facts shows us that wherever the capitalist and trading classes have triumphed—­as in England early last century, and until Socialistic legislation was called in to check them—­the condition of the mass of the people has by no means improved, rather the contrary.  Japan has developed a world trade, and is on the look out for more, yet never before has there been such distress among her mass-populations.  Russia has been lately moving in the same direction; her commercial interests are rapidly progressing, but her peasantry is at a standstill, France and Italy have already grown a fat bourgeoisie, but their workers remain in a limbo of poverty and strikes.  And in all these countries, including Germany, Socialism has arisen as a protest against the commercial order—­which fact certainly does not look as if commercialism were a generally acknowledged benefit.