other country. They are capable of little else but cheating and lying, even to themselves. They meddle in everyone else's affairs, poking their nose into matters that do not concern them, criticising everything, bossing everything, lowering and distorting everything. What a pity that twenty-three centuries after Socrates and Plato, two thousand years after Christ, the voice of men like these should still be heard in the world, worse still that they should be listened to, and worst of all that any one should believe them! Country for them is an isolated organism and they admit it is possible for them to live and breathe in an atmosphere of haughty contempt for their neighbors. They conceive their country as a permanent element of dissolution like a devouring and insatiable monster, a beast of prey, whose one function is to plunder. All that it does not possess it has been robbed of. The universe belongs to it by right. Whoever attempts to escape from its tyranny is a rebel. This jingo country, this bloodthirsty fetish of which they are the champions, they endow, with the capriciousness of potentates, when it suits their purpose, with every marvelous and charming attribute. Whoever does not at once agree with
—22—
