a of oppressed peoples; the
Law of the Strong, changing life's humble festival into useless and
recurring hecatombs; the chronology of that crushing of lives and ideas
which always tortured or executed the innovators; that Past in which
sovereigns settled their personal affairs of alliances, ruptures,
dowries and inheritance with the territory and blood which they owned;
in which each and every country was so squandered--it is common to all.
That Past in which the small attainments of moral progress, of
well-being and unity (so far as they were not solely semblances) only
crystallized with despairing tardiness, with periods of doleful
stagnation and frightful alteration along the channels of barbarism and
force; that Past of somber shame, that Past of error and disease which
every old nation has survived, which we should learn by heart that we
may hate it--yes, that Past is common to all, like misery, shame and
pain. Blessed are the new nations, for they have no remorse!

And the blessings of the past--the splendor of the French Revolution,
the huge gifts of the navigators who brought new worlds to the old one,
and the miraculous exception of scientific discoveries, which by a
second miracle were not smothered in their youth--are they not also
common to all, like the undying beauty of the ruins of the Parthenon,
Shakespeare's lightning and Beethoven's raptures, and like love, and
like joy?

The universal problem into which modern life, as well as past life,
rushes and embroils and rends itself, can only be dispersed by a
universal means which reduces each nation to what it is in truth; which
strips from them all the ideal of supremacy stolen by each of them from
the great human ideal; a means which, raising the human ideal
definitely beyond the reach of all those immoderate emotions, which
shout together "_Mine_ is the only point of view," gives it at last its
divine unity. Let us keep the love of the motherland in our hearts,
but let us dethrone the conception of Motherland.

I will say what there is to say: I place the Republic before France.
France is ourselves. The Republic is ourselves and the others. The
general welfare must be put much higher than national welfare, because
it _is_ much higher. But if it is venturesome to assert, as they have
so much and so indiscriminately done, that such national interest is in
accord with the general interest, then the converse is obvious; and
that is illuminating, mom