260 ESSAYS AND LETTERS
And there is only one kind of help possible — it lies in the abolition of that terrible linking up into a cone of violence, which enables the person or persons who succeed in seizing the apex to have power over all the rest, and to hold that power the more firmly the more cruel and inhuman they are, as we see by the cases of the Napoleons, Nicholas I., Bismarck, Chamberlain, Rhodes, and our Russian Dictators who rule the people in the Tsar's name.
And there is only one way to destroy this binding together — it is by shaking off the hypnotism of patriotism.
Understand that all the evils from which you suffer, you yourselves cause by yielding to the suggestions by which Emperors, Kings, Members of Parliament, Governors, officers, capitalists, priests, authors, artists, and all who need this fraud of patriotism in order to live upon your labour, deceive you !
^Mloever you may be — Frenchman, Russian, Pole, Englishman, Irishman, or Bohemian — understand that all your real human interests, whatever they may be — agricultural, industrial, commercial, artistic, or scien- tific — as well as your pleasures and joys, in no way run counter to the interests of other peoples or States ; and that you are united, by mutual co-operation, by interchange of services, by the joy of wide brotherly intercourse, and by the interchange not merely of goods but also of thoughts and feelings, with the folk of other lands.
Understand that the question as to who manages to seize Wei-hai-wei, Port Arthur, or Cuba — your Govern- ment or another — does not affect you, or, rather, that every such seizure made by your Government injures you, by inevitably bringing in its train all sorts of pressure on you by your Government to force you to take part in the robbery and violence by which alone such seizures are made, or can be retained when made. Understand that your life can in no way be bettered by Alsace becoming German or French, and Ireland or Poland being free or enslaved — whoever holds them.
