“To pillage, to rob, that is no shame, The best in the land do quite the same.”
Besides this principal point of the “squire-archical” psychology, a second distinguishing mark scarcely less characteristic is found in the piety of these folk whether it be of conviction or merely strongly accentuated in public.
It seems as though the same social ideas always force identical characteristics on the ruling class. This is illustrated by the form under which God, in their view, appears as their special National God and preponderatingly as a God of War. Although they profess God as the creator of all men, even of their enemies, and since Christianity, as the God of Love, this does not counteract the force with which class interests formulate their appropriate ideology.
In order to complete the sketch of the psychology of the ruling class, we must not forget the tendency to squander, easily understood in those “ignorant of the taste of toil,” which appears sometimes in a higher form as generosity; nor must we forget, as their supreme trait, that death-despising bravery, which is called forth by the coercion imposed on a minority, their need to defend their rights at any time with arms, and which is favored by a freedom from all labor which permits the development of the body in hunting, sport and feuds. Its caricature is combativeness, and a supersensitiveness to personal honor, which degenerates into madness.
At this point a small digression: Cæsar found the Celts just at that stage of their development, in which the nobles had obtained dominion over their fellow clansmen. Since that time, his classic narrative has stood as a norm--their class psychology appears as the race psychology of all Celts. Not even Mommsen escaped this error. The result is that now, in every book on universal history or sociology, one may read the palpable error, repeated until contradiction is of no avail, although a mere glance would have sufficed to show that all peoples of all races, in the same stage of their development, have showed the same characteristics; in Europe, Thessalians, Apulians, Campanians, Germans, Poles, etc. Meanwhile the Celts, and specifically the French, in different stages of their development, have showed quite different traits of character. The psychology belongs to the stage of development, not to the race!
