POLITICAL RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 663 



of the inferior, legislation, if unrestricted in its range, will 

 inevitably be moulded by them in such way as more or 

 less remotely to work out to their own advantage, and to the 

 disadvantage of the superior. The politics of trades -unions 

 exemplify the tendency. Their usages have become such 

 that the more energetic and skilful workmen are not allowed 

 to profit to the full extent of their capacities ; because, if 

 they did so, they would discredit and disadvantage those of 

 lower capacities, who, forming the majority, establish and 

 enforce the usages. In multitudinous ways a like tendency 

 must act through a political organization, if, while all citizens 

 have equal powers, the organization can be used for other 

 purposes than administering justice. State-machineries 

 worked by taxes falling in more than due proportion on those 

 whose greater powers have brought them greater means, will 

 give to citizens of smaller powers more benefits than they 

 have earned. And this burdening of the better for the benefit 

 of the worse, must check the evolution of a higher and more 

 adapted nature : the ultimate result being that a community 

 by which this policy is pursued, will, other things equal, fail 

 in competition with a community which pursues the purely 

 equitable policy, and will eventually disappear in the race of 

 civilization. 



In brief, the diffusion of political power unaccompanied by 

 the limitation of political functions, issues in communism. 

 For the direct defrauding of the many by the few, it sub 

 stitutes the indirect defrauding of the few by the many : evil 

 proportionate to the inequity, being the result in the one case 

 as in the other. 



582. But the conclusion of profoundest moment to which 

 all lines of argument converge, is that the possibility of a high 

 social state, political as well as general, fundamentally de 

 pends on the cessation of war. After all that has been said 

 it is needless to emphasize afresh the truth that persistent 

 militancy, maintaining adapted institutions, must inevitably 



