ved. The
whole country will become one of those stagnant pools to which one of
our ministers lately referred. Everyone having become an official,
everyone will realise the ideal of the official which the Goncourts have
very neatly described. "The good official," they say, "is the man who
combines laziness with extreme accuracy." It is a definitive
definition. The country that reformed itself in this way would be
conquered at the end of ten years by some neighbouring people more or
less ambitious.

That admits of no question; but what does it prove? That collectivism is
only impossible because it is only possible if established in every
country at once. Very well, and in order to establish it in every
country at once, only one thing is needful, namely, that there shall no
longer be distinct and separate countries and no longer any
nationalities. It surely will not answer to establish collectivism
before the abolition of nationalities, since, once established, it will
serve no purpose except to bring into prominent relief the vast
superiority of countries which have not adopted collectivism. We must,
therefore, take our problems in order and abolish nationalities before
we can establish collectivism.

Now if nations organise themselves against nature (the nature that, the
schoolmaster assumes, makes all men equal), if instinctively they
organise themselves in a hierarchy which is aristocratic, if they have
their leaders and their subordinates, their stronger and their weaker
members, it is because this arrangement is necessary in a camp, and each
nation feels that it is a camp. If each feels that it is a camp, it is
simply because there are other nations round it, because it feels and
knows that there are others round it. When there are no longer other
nations, each nation will organise itself no longer against nature, but
naturally, that is to say on _egalitarian_ principles. Nature perhaps
strictly speaking is not _egalitarian_, but it tends towards equality in
the sense that it produces many more, indeed infinitely more,
mediocrities than superior intelligences.

Thus equality demands the abolition of inheritance, and the equality of
possessions. Equality of possessions necessitates collectivism, and
collectivism requires the abolition of nationalities. We are
_egalitarians_, then collectivists, and by logical consequence
anti-patriots.

So argue the great majority of school teachers, with an absolute logic,
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