The absurdities of courts
and the indignities of representative parliamentary government, coupled
with the opening of vast fields of opportunity in other directions, had
withdrawn the best intelligences more and more from public affairs.
The ostensible governments of the world in the twentieth century were
following in the wake of the ostensible religions. They were ceasing to
command the services of any but second-rate men. After the middle of
the eighteenth century there are no more great ecclesiastics upon the
world's memory, after the opening of the twentieth no more statesmen.
Everywhere one finds an energetic, ambitious, short-sighted,
common-place type in the seats of authority, blind to the new
possibilities and litigiously reliant upon the traditions of the past.
Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn traditions were the
boundaries of the various 'sovereign states,' and the conception of a
general predominance in human affairs on the part of some one particular
state. The memory of the empires of Rome and Alexander squatted, an
unlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human imagination--it bored into the
human brain like some grisly parasite and filled it with disordered
thoughts and violent impulses. For more than a century the French
system exhausted its vitality in belligerent convulsions, and then the
infection passed to the German-speaking peoples who were the heart and
centre of Europe, and from them onward to the Slavs.
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