lone in the silence.

"I see you, you myriads of herded peoples, hugging together perforce
in shoals to spawn and to think! Each group of you, like the bees, has
a special sacred odour of its own. The stench of the queen-bee makes
the unity of the hive and gives joy to the labour of the bees. As with
the ants, whosoever does not stink like me, I kill! O you bee-hives of
men! each of you has its own peculiar smell of race, religion, morals
and approved tradition; it impregnates your bodies, your wax, the
brood-comb of your hives; it permeates your entire lives from birth to
death; and woe to him who would wash himself clean of it.

"He who would sense the mustiness of this swarm-thinking, the
night-sweat of a hallucinated people, should look back at the rites
and beliefs of ancient history. Let him ask the quizzical Herodotus
to unroll for him the film of human wanderings, the long panorama of
social customs, sometimes ignoble or ridiculous, but always venerated;
of the Scythians, the Gatae, the Issedones, the Gindares, the
Nasamones, the Sauromates, the Lydians, the Lybians, and the
Egyptians; bipeds of all colours, from East to West and from North to
South. The Great King, who was a man of wit, asked the Greeks, who
burn their dead, to eat them; and the Hindoos, who eat them, to burn
them, and was much amused by their indignation. The wise Herodotus
who doffs his cap, though he may grin behind it, will not judge them
himself and does not think it fair to laugh at them. He says: 'If it
were proposed to all men to choose between the best laws of different
nations, each one would give the preference to his own; so true it is
that every man is convinced that his own country is the best. Nothing
can be truer than the words of Pindar: _Custom is the Sovereign of all
men_.'

"It is true everyone must drink out of his own trough, but you would
at least think that we would allow others to do likewise; but not
at all, we cannot enjoy our own without spitting in that of our
neighbours. It is the will of God,--for a god we must have in some
shape, in that of man or beast, or even of a thing, a black or red
line as in the Middle Ages,--a blackbird, a crow, a blazon of some
kind; we must have something on which to throw the responsibility of
our insanities.

"Now that the coat-of-arms has been superseded by the flag, we declare
that we are freed from superstitions! But at what time were they
darker than they are now? Under our