merely as an
illustration of the general fact that it is the multiplication of
nobodies that makes a nation. 'Increase and multiply' was, it will be
remembered, the recipe for the Jewish nation.

Nobodies of the same colour, tongue, and prejudices have but to
congregate together in a crowd sufficiently big for other similar crowds
to recognise them, and then they are given a name of their own, and
become recognised as a nation--one of the 'Great Powers.'

Beyond those differences in colour, tongue, and prejudices there is
really no difference between the component units--or rather ciphers--of
all these several national crowds. You have seen a procession of various
trades-unions filing toward Hyde Park, each section with its particular
banner with a strange device: 'The United Guild of Paperhangers,' 'The
Ancient Order of Plumbers,' and so on. And you may have marvelled to
notice how alike the members of the various carefully differentiated
companies were. So to say, they each and all might have been plumbers;
and you couldn't help feeling that it wouldn't have mattered much if
some of the paper-hangers had by mistake got walking amongst the
plumbers, or _vice versa_.

So the great trades-unions of the world file past, one with the odd word
'Russia' on its banner; another boasting itself 'Germany'--this with a
particularly bumptious and self-important young man walking backward in
front of it, in the manner of a Salvation Army captain, and imperiously
waving an iron wand; still another 'nation' calling itself 'France'; and
yet another boasting the biggest brass band, and called 'England.' Other
smaller bodies of nobodies, that is, smaller nations, file past with
humbler tread--though there is really no need for their doing so. For,
as we have said, they are in every particular like to those haughtier
nations who take precedence of them. In fact, one or two of them, such
as Norway and Denmark--were a truer system of human mathematics to
obtain--are really of more importance than the so-called greater
nations, in that among their nobodies they include a larger percentage
of intellectual somebodies.

Remembering that percentage of wise men, the formula of a nation were
perhaps more truly stated in our first mathematical image. The wise men
in a nation are as the units with the noughts in front of them. And when
I say wise men I do not, indeed, mean merely the literary men or the
artists, but all those somebodies with so