this insecurity about first principles limited to abstract subjects.  It reigns in politics as well.  Liberalism had been supposed to advocate liberty; but what the advanced parties that still call themselves liberal now advocate is control, control over property, trade, wages, hours of work, meat and drink, amusements, and in a truly advanced country like France control over education and religion; and it is only on the subject of marriage (if we ignore eugenics) that liberalism is growing more and more liberal.  Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality; how many people read and write, or how many people there are, or what is the annual value of their trade; whereas true progress would rather lie in reading or writing fewer and better things, and being fewer and better men, and enjoying life more.  But the philanthropists are now preparing an absolute subjection of the individual, in soul and body, to the instincts of the majority—­the most cruel and unprogressive of masters; and I am not sure that the liberal maxim, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” has not lost whatever was just or generous in its intent and come to mean the greatest idleness of the largest possible population.

Nationality offers another occasion for strange moral confusion.  It had seemed that an age that was levelling and connecting all nations, an age whose real achievements were of international application, was destined to establish the solidarity of mankind as a sort of axiom.  The idea of solidarity is indeed often invoked in speeches, and there is an extreme socialistic party that—­when a wave of national passion does not carry it the other way—­believes in international brotherhood.  But even here, black men and yellow men are generally excluded; and in higher circles, where history, literature, and political ambition dominate men’s minds, nationalism has become of late an omnivorous all-permeating passion.  Local parliaments must be everywhere established, extinct or provincial dialects must be galvanised into national languages, philosophy must be made racial, religion must be fostered where it emphasises nationality and denounced where it transcends it.  Man is certainly an animal that, when he lives at all, lives for ideals.  Something must be found to occupy his imagination, to raise pleasure and pain into love and hatred, and change the prosaic alternative between comfort and discomfort into the tragic one between happiness and sorrow.  Now that the hue of daily adventure is so dull, when religion for the most part is so vague and accommodating, when even war is a vast impersonal business, nationality seems to have slipped into the place of honour.  It has become the one eloquent, public, intrepid illusion.  Illusion, I mean, when it is taken for an ultimate good or a mystical essence, for of course nationality is a fact.  People speak some particular language and are very uncomfortable where another is spoken or where their