Then the flaming sword of some angel divided them, and
they fell in love with each other.

Should the reader require an example a little more within historical
range, or a little more subject to critical tests, than the above
prehistoric anecdote (which I need not say was revealed to me in a
vision) it would be easy enough to supply them both in a hypothetical
and a historical form. It is obvious enough in a general way that if we
begin to subject diverse countries to an identical test, there will not
only be rivalry, but what is far more deadly and disastrous,
superiority. If we institute a competition between Holland and
Switzerland as to the relative grace and agility of their mountain
guides, it will be clear that the decision is disproportionately easy;
it will also be clear that certain facts about the configuration of
Holland have escaped our international eye. If we establish a comparison
between them in skill and industry in the art of building dykes against
the sea, it will be equally clear that the injustice falls the other
way; it will also be clear that the situation of Switzerland on the map
has received insufficient study. In both cases there will not only be
rivalry but very unbalanced and unjust rivalry; in both cases,
therefore, there will not only be enmity but very bitter or insolent
enmity. But so long as the two are sharply divided there can be no
enmity because there can be no rivalry. Nobody can argue about whether
the Swiss climb mountains better than the Dutch build dykes; just as
nobody can argue about whether a triangle is more triangular than a
circle is round.

This fancy example is alphabetically and indeed artificially simple;
but, having used it for convenience, I could easily give similar
examples not of fancy but of fact. I had occasion recently to attend the
Christmas festivity of a club in London for the exiles of one of the
Scandinavian nations. When I entered the room the first thing that
struck my eye, and greatly raised my spirits, was that the room was
dotted with the colours of peasant costumes and the specimens of peasant
craftsmanship. There were, of course, other costumes and other crafts in
evidence; there were men dressed like myself (only better) in the garb
of the modern middle classes; there was furniture like the furniture of
any other room in London. Now, according to the ideal formula of the
ordinary internationalist, these things that we had in common ought to
ha