choice, others through weakness, and it is
not the weak who are the least guilty. The apathy of the majority, the
timorousness of the well-meaning, the selfishness and scepticism of
listless rulers, the ignorance or cynicism of the press, the rapacity of
profiteers, the faint-hearted servility of the thinkers who make
themselves the apostles of devastating prejudices which it should be
their mission to uproot; the ruthless pride of intellectuals who value
their own ideas more than they value the lives of their fellow-men, and
who will send millions to death to prove themselves in the right; the
counsels of expediency of a church that is too Roman, a church in which
St. Peter the fisherman has become the ferryman of diplomacy; pastors
with arid souls, with souls keen-edged as a knife, immolating their
flocks in the hope of purifying them; the blind submission of the silly
sheep.... Who among us is free from blame? Who among us can wash his
hands of the blood of a butchered Europe? Let each one admit his fault
and endeavour to expiate it!--But let us turn to the most immediate
task.

Here is the outstanding fact: EUROPE IS NOT FREE. The voice of the
nations is stifled. In the history of the world, these years will be
looked upon as the years of the great Slavery. One half of Europe is
fighting the other half, in the name of liberty. That they may fight the
better, both halves of Europe have renounced liberty. An appeal to the
will of the nations is fruitless. As individual entities, THE NATIONS NO
LONGER EXIST. A handful of politicians, a few score journalists, have
the audacity to speak in the name of this nation or of that. They have
no right to speak. They represent no one but themselves. They do not
even represent themselves. As early as 1905, Maurras, denouncing the
tamed intelligentsia which claims to lead opinion and to represent the
nation, spoke of it as "ancilla plutocratiae." ... The nation! Who has
the right to call himself the representative of a nation? Who knows the
soul, who has ever dared to look into the soul, of a nation at war? It
is a monster, composed of many myriads of conglomerated lives, of lives
that are distinct and conflicting, lives that move in all directions and
are yet joined at the base like the tentacles of an octopus.... It is a
confused mingling of all the instincts, and of all the reasons, and of
all the unreasons.... Blasts of wind from the abyss; sightless and
raging forces issuing