There are all those things against you. Against you
and your great common interests which as you dimly saw are the same
thing in effect as justice, there are not only the sword-wavers, the
profiteers, and the intriguers.
There is not only the prodigious opposition of interested
parties--financiers, speculators great and small, armorplated in
their banks and houses, who live on war and live in peace during
war, with their brows stubbornly set upon a secret doctrine and
their faces shut up like safes.
There are those who admire the exchange of flashing blows, who hail
like women the bright colors of uniforms; those whom military music
and the martial ballads poured upon the public intoxicate as with
brandy; the dizzy-brained, the feeble-minded, the superstitious, the
savages.
There are those who bury themselves in the past, on whose lips are
the sayings only of bygone days, the traditionalists for whom an
injustice has legal force because it is perpetuated, who aspire to
be guided by the dead, who strive to subordinate progress and the
future and all their palpitating passion to the realm of ghosts and
nursery-tales.
With them are all the parsons, who seek to excite you and to lull
you to sleep with the morphine of their Paradise, so that nothing
may change. There are the lawyers, the economists, the
historians--and how many more?--who befog you with the rigmarole of
theory, who declare the inter-antagonism of nationalities at a time
when the only unity possessed by each nation of to-day is in the
arbitrary map-made lines of her frontiers, while she is inhabited by
an artificial amalgam of races; there are the worm-eaten
genealogists, who forge for the ambitious of conquest and plunder
false certificates of philosophy and imaginary titles of nobility.
Pages:
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422