The infirmity of human intelligence is short sight. In too many
cases, the wiseacres are dunces of a sort, who lose sight of the
simplicity of things, and stifle and obscure it with formulae and
trivialities. It is the small things that one learns from books, not
the great ones.
And even while they are saying that they do not wish for war they
are doing all they can to perpetuate it. They nourish national
vanity and the love of supremacy by force. "We alone," they say,
each behind his shelter, "we alone are the guardians of courage and
loyalty, of ability and good taste!" Out of the greatness and
richness of a country they make something like a consuming disease.
Out of patriotism--which can be respected as long as it remains in
the domain of sentiment and art on exactly the same footing as the
sense of family and local pride, all equally sacred--out of
patriotism they make a Utopian and impracticable idea, unbalancing
the world, a sort of cancer which drains all the living force,
spreads everywhere and crushes life, a contagious cancer which
culminates either in the crash of war or in the exhaustion and
suffocation of armed peace.
They pervert the most admirable of moral principles. How many are
the crimes of which they have made virtues merely by dowering them
with the word "national"? They distort even truth itself. For the
truth which is eternally the same they substitute each their
national truth. So many nations, so many truths; and thus they
falsify and twist the truth.
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