r heads to disparage their
science and to outdo the professional philosophers in psychological
scepticism, in order to plunge with them into the most vapid
speculation. Nor is this insecurity about first principles limited to
abstract subjects. It reigns in politics as well. Liberalism had been
supposed to advocate liberty; but what the advanced parties that still
call themselves liberal now advocate is control, control over
property, trade, wages, hours of work, meat and drink, amusements,
and in a truly advanced country like France control over education and
religion; and it is only on the subject of marriage (if we ignore
eugenics) that liberalism is growing more and more liberal. Those who
speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality; how
many people read and write, or how many people there are, or what is
the annual value of their trade; whereas true progress would rather
lie in reading or writing fewer and better things, and being fewer and
better men, and enjoying life more. But the philanthropists are now
preparing an absolute subjection of the individual, in soul and body,
to the instincts of the majority--the most cruel and unprogressive of
masters; and I am not sure that the liberal maxim, "the greatest
happiness of the greatest number," has not lost whatever was just or
generous in its intent and come to mean the greatest idleness of the
largest possible population.

Nationality offers another occasion for strange moral confusion. It
had seemed that an age that was levelling and connecting all nations,
an age whose real achievements were of international application, was
destined to establish the solidarity of mankind as a sort of axiom.
The idea of solidarity is indeed often invoked in speeches, and there
is an extreme socialistic party that--when a wave of national passion
does not carry it the other way--believes in international
brotherhood. But even here, black men and yellow men are generally
excluded; and in higher circles, where history, literature, and
political ambition dominate men's minds, nationalism has become of
late an omnivorous all-permeating passion. Local parliaments must be
everywhere established, extinct or provincial dialects must be
galvanised into national languages, philosophy must be made racial,
religion must be fostered where it emphasises nationality and
denounced where it transcends it. Man is certainly an animal that,
when he lives at all, lives for ideals