by a
dog that he finally threw himself upon him. The dog was overcome by
this unexpected reversal of the laws of nature and ran away, howling
with surprise and terror. The Dog-State is too sure of its own fangs
to feel afraid of a few mutinous sheep; but the lamb Clerambault no
longer calculated the danger; he simply put his head down and butted.
Generous and weak natures are prone to pass without transition from
one extreme to another; so from an intensely gregarious feeling
Clerambault had jumped at one bound to the extreme of individual
isolation. Because he knew it so well, he could see nothing around
him but the plague of obedience, that social suggestion of which the
effects are everywhere manifest. The passive heroism of the armies
excited to frenzy, like millions of ants absorbed in the general mass,
the servility of Assemblies, despising the head of their Government,
but sustaining him by their votes, even at the risk of an explosion
brought about by one "bolter," the sulky but well-drilled submission
of even the liberal Parties, sacrificing their very reason for
existence to the absurd fetish of abstract unity. This abdication,
this passion, represented the true enemy in Clerambault's eyes. And it
was his task, he thought, to break down its great suggestive power by
awakening doubt, the spirit that eats away all chains.

The chief seat of the disease was the idea of Nation; this inflamed
point could not be touched without howls from the beast. Clerambault
attacked it at once, without gloves.

_What have I to do with your nations? Can you expect me to love or
hate a nation? It is men that I love or hate, and in all nations
you will find the noble, the base, and the ordinary man. Yes, and
everywhere are few great or low, while the ordinary abound. Like or
dislike a man for what he is, not for what others are; and if there
is one man who is dear to me in a whole nation, that prevents me from
condemning it. You talk of struggles and hatred between races? Races
are the colours of life's prism; it binds them together, and we have
light. Woe to him who shatters it! I am not of one race, I belong to
life as a whole; I have brothers in every nation, enemy or ally, and
those you would thrust upon me as compatriots are not always the
nearest. The families of our souls are scattered through the world.
Let us re-unite them! Our task is to undo these chaotic nations, and
in their place to bind together more harmonio