Flags were originally religious tokens, like the oriflamme of Saint-Denis, and their symbolic utility has remained at least as great as their real usefulness. But how, outside of war, have they become symbols of the idea of country? This is easier to explain by the facts themselves than by abstract logic. To-day, in nearly all civilized countries, the idea of country and the idea of flag are invincibly associated. The two words are even interchangeable. But this is a question of symbolism quite as much as of association of ideas. Insistence upon it would lead us to the language of colours, counterpart of the language of flowers, but still more unstable and arbitrary. If it is amusing to note that the blue of the French flag is the consecrated colour of the Virgin and of the children of Mary, it is no less so to find that the pious purple of the robe of Saint-Denis has become a revolutionary symbol. Like the atoms of Epicurus, ideas cling together as best they may, through chance encounters, shocks and accidents.
Certain associations, though very recent, have rapidly acquired a singular authority, like those of education and intelligence, of education and morality. But, at most, education may have something to say for one of the particular forms of memory, or for a literal knowledge of the commonplaces contained in the Decalogue. The absurdity of these forced relations appears very clearly in that which concerns woman. It seems clear that there is a certain sort of education--that which they receive to-day--which, far from stimulating their intelligence, tends rather to blunt it. Since they have been educated seriously, they no longer have the least influence either in politics or in literature. Compare, in this connection, our last thirty years with the last thirty years of the _ancien régime_. These two associations of ideas have, nevertheless, become veritable commonplaces--truths which it is as useless to expose as to combat. They take their place with all those which infest books and the degenerate lobes of man's brain--with old and venerable truths like: virtue-recompense, vice-punishment, God-goodness, crime-remorse, duty-happiness, authority-respect, unhappiness-punishment, future-progress, and thousands of others, some of which, though absurd, are useful to mankind.