Page:Rolland - Clerambault, tr. Miller, 1921.djvu/74

 s, as a child hides his head under the sheet, so as not to see the shadow on the wall?

Country? A Hindoo temple: men, monsters, and gods. What is she? The earth we tread on? The whole earth is the mother of us all. The family? It is here and there, with the enemy as with ourselves, and it asks nothing but peace. The poor, the workers, the people, they are on both sides, equally miserable, equally exploited. Thinkers have a common field, and as for their rivalries and their vanities, they are as ridiculous in the East as in the West; the world does not go to war over the quarrels of a Vadius or a Trissotin. The State? But the State and the Country are not the same thing. The confusion is made by those who find profit in it; the State is our strength, used and abused by men like ourselves, no better than ourselves, often worse. We are not duped by them, and in times of peace we judge them fairly enough, but let a war come on, they are given _carte blanche_, they can appeal to the lowest instincts, stifle all control, suppress liberty and truth, destroy all humanity; they are masters, we must stand shoulder to shoulder to defend the honour and the mistakes of these Masacarilles arrayed in borrowed plumes. We are all answerable, do you say? Terrible net-work of words! Responsible no doubt we are for the best and the worst of our people, it is a fact as we well know, but that it is a duty that binds us to their injustices and their insanities.... I deny it!...

There can be no question as to community of interest. No one, thought Clerambault, has had more joy in it, or said more in praise of its greatness. It is good and healthy, it makes for rest and strength, to plunge the bare, stiff, cold ego into the collective mind, as into a bath of confidence and fraternal gifts. It unbends, gives itself, breathes more deeply; man needs his fellow-man, and owes himself to