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.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25