Page:The Yellow Book - 06.djvu/356

322 even fifty million times would still be nobody. However, such is far from being the case. Fifty million nobodies make—a nation. Of course, there is no need for so many. I am reckoning as a British subject, and speak of fifty million merely as an illustration of the general fact that it is the multiplication of nobodies that makes a nation. "Increase and multiply" was, it will be remembered, the recipe for the Jewish nation.

Nobodies of the same colour, tongues, and prejudices, have but to congregate together in a crowd sufficiently big for other similar crowds to recognise them, and they are given a name of their own, and become recognised as a nation—one of "the Great Powers."

Beyond those differences in colour, tongue, and prejudices, there is really no difference between the component units or rather ciphers—of all these several national crowds. You have seen a procession of various trades-unions filing towards Hyde Park, each section with its particular banner of a strange device: "the United Guild of Paperhangers," "the Ancient Order of Plumbers," and so on. And you may have marvelled to notice how alike the members of the various carefully differentiated companies were. So to say, they each and all might have been plumbers; and you couldn't help feeling that it wouldn't have mattered much if some of the paperhangers had by mistake got walking amongst the plumbers, or vice versa.

So the great trades-unions of the world file past, one with the odd word "Russia" on its banner; another boasting itself "Germany"—this with a particularly bumptious and self-important young man walking backward in front of it, in the manner of a Salvation Army captain, and imperially waving an iron wand; still another "nation" calling itself "France"; and yet another boasting the biggest brass band, and called "England." Other smaller bodies of nobodies—that is, smaller nations—file past with humbler