d interests, laws are
heaped upon laws; but no old one is thoroughly repealed, nor new one
thoroughly enforced. Everything is done by halves, giving satisfaction
in no direction. The requirements of civilization that spring from the
life of the people, demand some attention, unless everything is to be
risked; even the fractional way they are attended to, demands
considerable sacrifice, all the more seeing that our public institutions
are overrun by parasites. At the same time, not only are all the
unproductive institutions, wholly at variance with the trend of
civilization, continued in force, but, due to the existing conflicts of
interests, they are rather enlarged, and thus they become all the more
burdensome and oppressive in the measure that increasing popular
intelligence ever more loudly pronounces them superfluous. Police,
armies, courts of law, prisons, the whole administrative apparatus--all
are enlarged ever more, and become ever more expensive. And yet neither
external nor internal security is obtained. The reverse follows.

A wholly unnatural state of things has gradually arisen in the
international relations of the several nations. The relations between
nation and nation multiply in the measure that the production of goods
increases; that, thanks to improved transportation, the exchange of this
mass of merchandise is facilitated; and that the economic and scientific
achievements of each become the public possession of all. Treaties of
commerce are concluded; expensive routes of traffic--Suez Canals, St.
Gotthard Tunnels--are opened with international funds. Individual
countries support with heavy subsidies steamship lines that help to
promote intercourse between several nations. The Postal Union--a step of
first rank in civilization--is established; international conventions
are convoked for all imaginable practical and scientific purposes; the
literary products of genius of any nation are spread abroad by
translations into the leading languages. Thus the tendency is ever more
strongly marked toward the internationalizing, the fraternizing of all
peoples. Nevertheless, the political, the military state of the nations
of Europe stands in strange contrast to this general development. The
hatred of nation against nation, Chauvinism, is artificially nourished
by all. The ruling classes seek everywhere to keep green the belief that
it is the peoples who are hostilely inclined toward one another, and
only wait fo