ndividual interests and a general interest, those two only. When you
say "I," it means "I"; when you say "We," it means Man. So long as a
single and identical Republic does not cover the world, all national
liberations can only be beginnings and signals!

Thus you will disarm the "fatherlands" and "motherlands," and you will
reduce the notion of Motherland to the little bit of social importance
that it must have. You will do away with the military frontiers, and
those economic and commercial barriers which are still worse.
Protection introduces violence into the expansion of labor; like
militarism, it brings in a fatal absence of balance. You will suppress
that which justifies among nations the things which among individuals
we call murder, robbery, and unfair competition. You will suppress
battles--not nearly so much by the direct measure of supervision and
order that you will take as because you will suppress the causes of
battle. You will suppress them chiefly because it is _you_ who will do
it, by yourself, everywhere, with your invincible strength and the
lucid conscience that is free from selfish motives. You will not make
war on yourself.

You will not be afraid of magic formulas and the churches. Your giant
reason will destroy the idol which suffocates its true believers. You
will salute the flags for the last time; to that ancient enthusiasm
which flattered the puerility of your ancestors, you will say a
peaceful and final farewell. In some corners of the calamities of the
past, there were times of tender emotion; but truth is greater, and
there are not more boundaries on the earth than on the sea!

Each country will be a moral force, and no longer a brutal force; while
all brutal forces clash with themselves, all moral forces make mighty
harmony together.

The universal republic is the inevitable consequence of equal rights in
life for all. Start from the principle of equality, and you arrive at
the people's international. If you do not arrive there it is because
you have not reasoned aright. They who start from the opposite point
of view--God, and the divine rights of popes and Kings and nobles, and
authority and tradition--will come, by fabulous paths but quite
logically, to opposite conclusions. You must not cease to hold that
there are only two teachings face to face. All things are amenable to
reason, the supreme Reason which mutilated humanity, wounded in the
eyes, has deified among th