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 quibbles and arguments, their fallacies drawn from so-called precedents or from so-called economic and ethnic necessity; for the simple, brutal and magnificent cry of life renders useless the efforts they make to galvanize and erect doctrines which cannot stand alone.  The disapproval which attaches in our time to the word “internationalism” proves together the silliness and meanness of public opinion.  Humanity is the living name of truth.  Men are like each other as trees!  They who rule well, rule by force and deceit; but by reason, never.

The national group is a collectivity within the bosom of the chief one.  It is one group like any other; it is like him who knots himself to himself under the wing of a roof, or under the wider wing of the sky that dyes a landscape blue.  It is not the definite, absolute, mystical group into which they would fain transform it, with sorcery of words and ideas, which they have armored with oppressive rules.  Everywhere man’s poor hope of salvation on earth is merely to attain, at the end of his life, this:  To live one’s life freely, where one wants to live it; to love, to last, to produce in the chosen environment—­just as the people of the ancient Provinces have lost, along with their separate leaders, their separate traditions of covetousness and reciprocal robbery.