Whether the theory of an actual paternal origin of government is a correct phylogenetic or logical inference, or merely a psychological delusion, we … - Lewis Bernstein Namier

There is no-one alive engaged on history work with your experience of politics, government, and war. Please do not try to write history as other historians do, but do it in your own way. Tell us more how various transactions strike you, and what associations they evoke in your mind. When studying the detail of government at that distant period of almost 250 years ago, many comparisons must have occurred to you, which you seem to have suppressed. Too much history is written by don-bred dons with no knowledge or understanding of the practical problems of statecraft.

He writes about the decade before the war:—"Foreign policy ('rearmament') and social services ('the dole') were competitive claims on a straitened national output." Surely, with 2,000,000 unemployed the output could easily have been expanded to satisfy both claims. It was not; because we believed in "thrift" and transferred this conception derived from individual economy to that of the nation, in which it is apt to turn into sheer nonsense. Further, in the "thrifty" view of national economy production for export is a virtue, but for self-consumption it is, at the best, excusable. This led us into a second absurdity. If we produced material for armaments and exported them, say, to Germany (and they were financed by city loans on which the Germans duly defaulted) "classical economists" beamed with pleasure over our "roaring exports." But had anyone suggested using these materials for the rearmament of this country he would have been decried as a "spendthrift militarist."

The relations of groups of men to plots of land, of organised communities to units of territory, form the basic content of political history. The conflicting territorial claims of communities constitute the greater part of conscious international history; social stratifications and convulsions, primarily arising from the relationship of men to land, make the greater, not always fully conscious part of the domestic history of nations—and even under urban and industrial conditions ownership of land counts for more than is usually supposed. To every man, as to Brutus, the native land is his life-giving Mother, and the State raised upon the land his law-giving Father... There is some well-nigh mystic power in the ownership of space—for it is not the command of resources alone which makes the strength of the landowner, but that he had a place in the world which he can call his own, from which he can ward off strangers, and in which he himself is rooted—the superiority of a tree to a log. In land alone can there be real patrimony, and he who as freeman holds a share in his native land—the freeholder—is, and must be, a citizen.