admire the exchange of flashing blows, who hail
like women the bright colors of uniforms; those whom military music and
the martial ballads poured upon the public intoxicate as with brandy;
the dizzy-brained, the feeble-minded, the superstitious, the savages.

There are those who bury themselves in the past, on whose lips are the
sayings only of bygone days, the traditionalists for whom an injustice
has legal force because it is perpetuated, who aspire to be guided by
the dead, who strive to subordinate progress and the future and all
their palpitating passion to the realm of ghosts and nursery-tales.

With them are all the parsons, who seek to excite you and to lull you
to sleep with the morphine of their Paradise, so that nothing may
change. There are the lawyers, the economists, the historians--and how
many more?--who befog you with the rigmarole of theory, who declare the
inter-antagonism of nationalities at a time when the only unity
possessed by each nation of to-day is in the arbitrary map-made lines
of her frontiers, while she is inhabited by an artificial amalgam of
races; there are the worm-eaten genealogists, who forge for the
ambitious of conquest and plunder false certificates of philosophy and
imaginary titles of nobility. The infirmity of human intelligence is
short sight. In too many cases, the wiseacres are dunces of a sort, who
lose sight of the simplicity of things, and stifle and obscure it with
formulae and trivialities. It is the small things that one learns from
books, not the great ones.

And even while they are saying that they do not wish for war they are
doing all they can to perpetuate it. They nourish national vanity and
the love of supremacy by force. "We alone," they say, each behind his
shelter, "we alone are the guardians of courage and loyalty, of ability
and good taste!" Out of the greatness and richness of a country they
make something like a consuming disease. Out of patriotism--which can
be respected as long as it remains in the domain of sentiment and art
on exactly the same footing as the sense of family and local pride, all
equally sacred--out of patriotism they make a Utopian and impracticable
idea, unbalancing the world, a sort of cancer which drains all the
living force, spreads everywhere and crushes life, a contagious cancer
which culminates either in the crash of war or in the exhaustion and
suffocation of armed peace.

They pervert the most admirable of moral principles