Those lighter shams of patriotism, which I shall describe in this chapter as hampering the march of the race, will be recognised even by men who, with Carlyle or Nietzsche, refuse the title of brother to some of their fellows. We ourselves smile at them sometimes, and at the cheerfulness with which we endure the grave inconvenience they put on us; and they will certainly provoke the laughter of the scholars who will some day learnedly discuss the question whether we men and women of the twentieth century were or were not civilised. They have, it is true, a much more serious aspect; they are important auxiliaries of the war-god. On the whole, however, they are shams that we ought to kill with ridicule and bury with genial disdain. They are practices or institutions which we have plainly inherited from the barbaric past, when men were slaves of tradition, kingly or priestly, and dare hardly use their own intelligence on their own habits. In this age of ours, when we are at last becoming the masters, instead of the slaves, of our traditions, they are regarded by large bodies of men and women in every civilised country as stupid, anachronistic, and mischievous.
In fact, there is here again no serious difference of opinion. One has not to force one's way through some controversial thicket before one can discover the correct path of reform. The way lies perfectly clear before us, and we can enter it at any time when we have the collective will to do so. One might again describe the proposal, not as a "reform"--since many people instinctively shrink from the word reform--but as a business proposition of the simplest and most profitable character. I speak of those false and antiquated freaks of patriotism which keep different groups of human beings speaking different languages, using different weights and measures, wrestling with each other's mysterious coinage, collecting each other's stamps, and stumbling against the many other irritating diversities which make one part of the earth "foreign" to another. It may seem to imply some lack of sense of proportion to pass from so grave a subject as war to these matters, but a very little reflection will show how closely they are connected.