But it is in Motherland’s name, as once in the name of God only, that humanity robs itself and tries to choke 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 patriotism, 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.