itself with its own hands, as
it will soon succeed in doing. It is because of motherland that the
big countries, more rich in blood, have overcome the little ones. It
is because of motherland that the overlord of German nationalism
attacked France and let civil war loose among the people of the world.
The question must be placed there where it is, that is to say,
everywhere at once. One must see face to face, in one glance, all
those immense, distinct unities which each shout "I!"

The idea of motherland is not a false idea, but it is a little idea,
and one which must remain little.

There is only one common good. There is only one moral duty, only one
truth, and every man is the shining recipient and guardian of it. The
present understanding of the idea of motherland divides all these great
ideas, cuts them into pieces, specializes them within impenetrable
circles. We meet as many national truths as we do nations, and as many
national duties, and as many national interests and rights--and they
are antagonistic to each other. Each country is separated from the
next by such walls--moral frontiers, material frontiers, commercial
frontiers--that you are imprisoned when you find yourself on either
side of them. We hear talk of sanctified selfishness, of the adorable
expansion of one race across the others, of noble hatreds and glorious
conquests, and we see these ideals trying to take shape on all hands.
This capricious multiplication of what ought to remain one leads the
whole of civilization into a malignant and thorough absurdity. The
words "justice" and "right" are too great in stature to be shut up in
proper nouns, any more than Providence can be, which every royalty
would fain take to itself.

National aspirations--confessed or unconfessable--are contradictory
among themselves. All populations which are narrowly confined and
elbow each other in the world are full of dreams vaster than each of
them. The nations' territorial ambitions overlap each other on the map
of the universe; economic and financial ambitions cancel each other
mathematically. Then in the mass they are unrealizable.

And since there is no sort of higher control over this scuffle of
truths which are not admissible, each nation realizes its own by all
possible means, by all the fidelity and anger and brute force she can
get out of herself. By the help of this state of world-wide anarchy,
the lazy and slight distinction between patrioti