large family in possession of an immense and infinitely fertile estate, and that we will develop our property more advantageously for each of us if we act as though we were brothers, can hardly be challenged. The question of the exact expression of our relationship to each other may be left to poets and scientists.
Those lighter shams of patriotism, which I shall describe in this chapter as hampering the march of the race, will be recognised even by men who, with Carlyle or Nietzsche, refuse the title of brother to some of their fellows. We ourselves smile at them sometimes, and at the cheerfulness with which we endure the grave inconvenience they put on us; and they will certainly provoke the laughter of the scholars who will some day learnedly discuss the question whether we men and women of the twentieth century were or were not civilised. They have, it is true, a much more serious aspect; they are important auxiliaries of the war-god. On the whole, however, they are shams that we ought to kill with ridicule and bury with genial disdain. They are practices or institutions which we have plainly inherited from the barbaric past, when men were slaves of tradition, kingly or priestly, and dare hardly use their own intelligence on their own habits. In this age of ours, when we are at last becoming the masters, instead of the slaves, of our traditions, they are regarded by large bodies of men and women in every civilised country as stupid, anachronistic, and mischievous.
