ABSTRACT
There is no question of the legality of absentee ownership, nor of its moral right. It is a settled institution of civilised life, embedded in law and morals, and its roots run through the foundations of European civilisation. The growth of national integrity has run a fairly unbroken course since the close of the Middle Ages. The practical outcome has been a comprehensive defeat of democratic institutions in civilised Europe, at home and over-seas. It seems not likely that national vanity and dissension alone and working at random could have brought the affairs of the democratic nations to this pass, but they have also not been left to work out their own qualities unguided and unblended. Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress.
