sm, imperialism and
militarism is violated, trampled, and broken through all along the
line, and it cannot be otherwise. The living universe cannot help
becoming an organization of armed rivalry. And there cannot fail to
result from it the everlasting succession of evils, without any hope of
abiding spoils, for there is no instance of conquerors who have long
enjoyed immunity, and history reveals a sort of balance of injustices
and of the fatal alternation of predominance. In all quarters the hope
of victory brings in the hope of war. It is conflict clinging to
conflict, and the recurrent murdering of murders.

The kings! We always find the kings again when we examine popular
unhappiness right to the end! This hypertrophy of the national unities
is the doing of their leaders. It is the masters, the ruling
aristocracies--emblazoned or capitalist--who have created and
maintained for centuries all the pompous and sacred raiment,
sanctimonious or fanatical, in which national separation is clothed,
along with the fable of national interests--those enemies of the
multitudes. The primeval centralization of individuals isolated in the
inhabited spaces was in agreement with the moral law; it was the
precise embodiment of progress; it was of benefit to all. But the
decreed division, peremptory and stern, which was interposed in that
centralization--that is the doom of man, although it is necessary to
the classes who command. These boundaries, these clean cuts, permit
the stakes of commercial conflict and of war; that is to say, the
chance of big feats of glory and of huge speculations. _That_ is the
vital principle of Empire. If all interests suddenly became again the
individual interests of men, and the moral law resumed its full and
spacious action on the basis of equality, if human solidarity were
world-wide and complete, it would no longer lend itself to certain
sudden and partial increases which are never to the general advantage,
but may be to the advantage of a few fleeting profiteers. That is why
the conscious forces which have hitherto directed the old world's
destiny will always use all possible means to break up human harmony
into fragments. Authority holds fast to all its national bases.

The insensate system of national blocks in sinister dispersal,
devouring or devoured, has its apostles and advocates. But the
theorists, the men of spurious knowledge, will in vain have heaped up
their farrago of qui