As I am now often asked, in private letters, the constitution of St. George’s Company, and cannot, hitherto, refer, in answer, to any clear summary of it, I will try to write such a summary in this number of Fors; that it may henceforward be sent to inquirers as alone sufficiently explanatory.
The St. George’s Company is a society established to carry out certain charitable objects, towards which it invites, and thankfully will receive, help from any persons caring to give it, either in money, labour, or any kind of gift. But the Company itself consists of persons who agree in certain general principles of action, and objects of pursuit, and who can, therefore, act together in effective and constant unison.
These objects of pursuit are, in brief terms, the health, wealth, and long life of the British nation: the Company having thus devoted itself, in the conviction that the British nation is at present unhealthy, poor, and likely to perish, as a power, from the face of the [[204]]earth. They accordingly propose to themselves the general medicining, enriching, and preserving in political strength, of the population of these islands; they themselves numbering at present, in their ranks, about thirty persons,—none of them rich, several of them sick, and the leader of them, at all events, not likely to live long.
Whether the nation be healthy, or in unwholesome degradation of body and mind; wealthy, or in continual and shameful distress; strong, or in rapid decline of political power and authority,—the reader will find debated throughout the various contents of the preceding five volumes of Fors. But there is one public fact, which cannot be debated—that the nation is in debt. And the St. George’s Company do practically make it their first, though not their principal, object, to bring that state of things to an end; and to establish, instead of a National Debt, a National Store. (See the last line of the fifth page of the first letter of the series, published 1st January, 1871, and the eleventh, and twenty-seventh, letters, throughout.)
That very few readers of this page have any notion, at this moment, what a National Debt is, or can conceive what a National Store should be, is one of many evil consequences of the lies which, under the title of “Political Economy,” have been taught by the ill-educated, and mostly dishonest, commercial men who at present govern the press of the country. [[205]]
I have again and again stated the truth in both these matters, but must try once more to do it, emphatically, and intelligibly.
A ‘civilized nation’ in modern Europe consists, in broad terms, of (A) a mass of half-taught, discontented, and mostly penniless populace, calling itself the people; of (B) a thing which it calls a government—meaning an apparatus for collecting and spending money; and (C) a small number of capitalists, many of them rogues, and most of them stupid persons, who have no idea of any object of human existence other than money-making, gambling, or champagne-bibbing. A certain quantity of literary men, saying anything they can get paid to say,—of clergymen, saying anything they have been taught to say,—of natural philosophers, saying anything that comes into their heads,—and of nobility, saying nothing at all, combine in disguising the action, and perfecting the disorganization, of the mass; but with respect to practical business, the civilized nation consists broadly of mob, money-collecting machine, and capitalist.
Now when the civilized mob wants to spend money for any profitless or mischievous purposes,—fireworks, illuminations, battles, driving about from place to place, or what not,—being itself penniless, it sets its money-collecting machine to borrow the sum needful for these amusements from the civilized capitalist.
The civilized capitalist lends the money, on condition [[206]]that, through the money-collecting machine, he may tax the civilized mob thenceforward for ever. The civilized mob spends the money forthwith, in gunpowder, infernal machines, masquerade dresses, new boulevards, or anything else it has set its idiotic mind on for the moment; and appoints its money-collecting machine to collect a daily tax from its children, and children’s children, to be paid to the capitalists from whom it had received the accommodation, thenceforward for ever.
That is the nature of a National Debt.