all citizens owe loyalty to the nation, all citizens who are soldiers owe loyalty to the Army.  But nobody has any obligation to make some particular rich man richer.  A man is bound, of course, to consider the indirect results of his action in a strike; but he is bound to consider that in a swing, or a giddy-go-round, or a smoking concert; in his wildest holiday or his most private conversation.  But direct responsibility like that of a soldier he has none.  He need not aim solely and directly at the good of the shop; for the simple reason that the shop is not aiming solely and directly at the good of the nation.  The shopman is, under decent restraints, let us hope, trying to get what he can out of the nation; the shop assistant may, under the same decent restraints, get what he can out of the shopkeeper.  All this distinction is very obvious.  At least I should have thought so.

But the primary point which I mean is this.  That even if we do take the military view of mercantile service, even if we do call the rebellious shop assistant “disloyal”—­that leaves exactly where it was the question of whether he is, in point of fact, in a good or bad shop.  Granted that all Mr. Poole’s employees are bound to follow for ever the cloven pennon of the Perfect Pair of Trousers, it is all the more true that the pennon may, in point of fact, become imperfect.  Granted that all Barney Barnato’s workers ought to have followed him to death or glory, it is still a Perfectly legitimate question to ask which he was likely to lead them to.  Granted that Dr. Sawyer’s boy ought to die for his master’s medicines, we may still hold an inquest to find out if he died of them.  While we forbid the soldier to shoot the general, we may still wish the general were shot.

The fundamental fact of our time is the failure of the successful man.  Somehow we have so arranged the rules of the game that the winners are worthless for other purposes; they can secure nothing except the prize.  The very rich are neither aristocrats nor self-made men; they are accidents—­or rather calamities.  All revolutionary language is a generation behind the times in talking of their futility.  A revolutionist would say (with perfect truth) that coal-owners know next to nothing about coal-mining.  But we are past that point.  Coal-owners know next to nothing about coal-owning.  They do not develop and defend the nature of their own monopoly with any consistent and courageous policy, however wicked, as did the old aristocrats with the monopoly of land.  They have not the virtues nor even the vices of tyrants; they have only their powers.  It is the same with all the powerful of to-day; it is the same, for instance, with the high-placed and high-paid official.  Not only is the judge not judicial, but the arbiter is not even arbitrary.  The arbiter decides, not by some gust of justice or injustice in his soul like the old despot dooming men under a tree, but by the permanent climate of the class to which he happens to belong.  The ancient wig of the judge is often indistinguishable from the old wig of the flunkey.