THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
institutions failed. But it can conduct civilization only to a certain
simple pitch; further development demands a larger and more complex
system in which the family ceases to be the productive unit, loses its
control over the economic relations of its members, and finds its authority
and its powers more and more appropriated by the state. The state may
be a monster, as Nietzsche called it; a monster of unnecessary size; but
its centralized tyranny has the virtue of abolishing the miscellaneous and
innumerable petty tyrannies by which life was of old pestered and confined.
One master pirate, accepting tribute is
quietly,
better than a hundred
pirates, taking toll without warning and without stint.20
Hence, in part, the patriotism of the people; they know that the price
they pay for government is cheaper than the cost of chaos. Santayana
wonders whether such patriotism does more harm than good; for it tends
to attach the stigma of disloyalty to advocates of change. "To love one's
country, unless that love is quite blind and lazy, must involve a distinction
between the country's actual condition and its inherent ideal; and this
distinction in turn involves a demand for changes and for effort." On the
other hand, race patriotism is indispensable. "Some races arc obviously
to the conditions of
superior to others. A more thorough adjustment
existence has given their spirit victory, scope, and a relative stability.'"
Hence intermarriage is perilous, except between races of acknowledged
equality and stability. "The Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, the English,
were never so great as when they confronted other nations, reacting
against them and at the same time, perhaps, adopting their culture; but
this greatness fails inwardly whenever contact leads to amalgamation," 80
The great evil of the state is its tendency to become an engine of war,
a hostile fist shaken in the face of a supposedly inferior world. Santayana
thinks that no people has ever won a war.
Where parties and governments are bad, as they are in most ages and
countries, it makes practically no difference to a community, apart from local
ravages, whether its own army or the enemy's is victorious in war. . * . The
private citizen in any event continues in such countries to pay a maximum
of taxes and to suffer, in all his private interests, a maximum of vexation and
neglect. Nevertheless . . . the oppressed subject will glow like the rest with
patriotic ardor, and will decry as dead to duty and honor anyone who points
out how perverse is this helpless allegiance to a government representing no
public interest81
This is strong language for a philosopher; but let us have our San-
tayana unexpurgated. Often enough, he thinks, conquest and absorption
by a larger state is a step forward toward the organization and pacification
of mankind; it would be a boon to all the world if all the world were
*R. in Society, pp. 45, 77, 79.
"Ibid., pp. 164-167. "Ibid., p. 171.