If, from the idea of motherland, you take away covetousness, hatred, envy and vainglory; if you take away from it the desire for predominance by violence, what is there left of it?

It is not an individual unity of laws; for just laws have no colors.  It is not a solidarity of interests, for there are no material national interests—­or they are not honest.  It is not a unity of race; for the map of the countries is not the map of the races.  What is there left?

There is left a restricted communion, deep and delightful; the affectionate and affecting attraction in the charm of a language—­there is hardly more in the universe besides its languages which are foreigners—­there is left a personal and delicate preference for certain forms of landscape, of monuments, of talent.  And even this radiance has its limits.  The cult of the masterpieces of art and thought is the only impulse of the soul which, by general consent, has always soared above patriotic littlenesses.

“But,” the official voices trumpet, “there is another magic formula—­the great common Past of every nation.”

Yes, there is the Past.  That long Golgotha 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.