But surely collectivism is a chimæra, an utopia, a thing impossible. Certainly it is impossible in the sense that in the country which adopts it the source of all initiative will be destroyed. No man will make an effort to improve his position, since it must never be improved. The whole country will become one of those stagnant pools to which one of our ministers lately referred. Everyone having become an official, everyone will realise the ideal of the official which the Goncourts have very neatly described. "The good official," they say, "is the man who combines laziness with extreme accuracy." It is a definitive definition. The country that reformed itself in this way would be conquered at the end of ten years by some neighbouring people more or less ambitious.
That admits of no question; but what does it prove? That collectivism is only impossible because it is only possible if established in every country at once. Very well, and in order to establish it in every country at once, only one thing is needful, namely, that there shall no longer be distinct and separate countries and no longer any nationalities. It surely will not answer to establish collectivism before the abolition of nationalities, since, once established, it will serve no purpose except to bring into prominent relief the vast superiority of countries which have not adopted collectivism. We must, therefore, take our problems in order and abolish nationalities before we can establish collectivism.
Now if nations organise themselves against nature (the nature that, the schoolmaster assumes, makes all men equal), if instinctively they organise themselves in a hierarchy which is aristocratic, if they have their leaders and their subordinates, their stronger and their weaker members, it is because this arrangement is necessary in a camp, and each nation feels that it is a camp. If each feels that it is a camp, it is simply because there are other nations round it, because it feels and knows that there are others round it. When there are no longer other nations, each nation will organise itself no longer against nature, but naturally, that is to say on _egalitarian_ principles. Nature perhaps strictly speaking is not _egalitarian_, but it tends towards equality in the sense that it produces many more, indeed infinitely more, mediocrities than superior intelligences.