10. The Monopolist Instincts - Page 2

citizens are not praised as
patriots but reviled as unpatriotic. To urge that our own country should
strive with all its might to be better, higher, purer, nobler, juster
than other countries around it--the only kind of Patriotism worth a
brass farthing in a righteous man's eyes--is accounted by most men both
wicked and foolish.

Patriotism, then, is the collective or national form of the Monopolist
Instincts. And like all those Instincts, it is a relic of savagery,
which the Man of the Future is now engaged in out-living.

Property is the next form. That, on the very face of it, is a viler and
more sordid one. For Patriotism at least can lay claim to some
expansiveness beyond mere individual interest; whereas property stops
dead short at the narrowest limits. It is not "Us against the world!"
but "Me against my fellow-citizens!" It is the final result of the
industrial war in its most hideous avatar. Look how it scars the fair
face of our England with its anti-social notice-boards, "Trespassers
will be prosecuted!" It says, in effect, "This is my land. God made it;
but I have acquired it and tabooed it. The grass on it grows green; but
only for me. The mountains rise beautiful; no foot of man, save mine and
my gamekeepers', shall tread them. The waterfalls gleam fresh and cool
in the glen: avaunt there, you non-possessors; _you_ shall never see
them! All this is my own. And I choose to monopolise it."

Or is it the capitalist? "I will add field to field," he says, in
despite of his own scripture; "I will join railway to railway. I will
juggle into my own hands all the instruments for the production of
wealth that I can lay hold of; and I will use them for myself against
the producer and the consumer. I will enrich myself by 'corners' on the
necessaries of life; I will make food dear for the poor, that I myself
may roll in needless luxury. I will monopolise whatever I can seize, and
the people may eat straw." That temper, too, humanity must outlive. And
those who can't outlive it of themselves, or be warned in time, must be
taught by stern lessons that their race has outstripped them.

As for slavery, 'tis now gone. That was the vilest of them all. It was
the naked assertion of the Monopolist platform: "You live, not for
yourself, but wholly and solely for me. I disregard your life entirely,
and use you as my chattel." It died at last of the moral indignation of
humanity. It died when a Southern court of so-called justice formulated
in plain words the underlying principle of its hateful creed: "A black
man has no rights which a white man is bound to respect." That finally
finished it. We no longer allow every man to