At first, when the land was still without cities, it was the nobility that represented, in the highest sense of the word, the nation. The peasantry, “everlasting” and historyless, was a people _before_ the dawn of the Culture, and in very fundamental characters it continued to be the primitive people, surviving when the form of the nation had passed away again. “The nation,” like every other grand symbol of the Culture, is intimately the cherished possession of a few; those who have it are born to it as men are born to art or philosophy, and the distinctions of creator, critic, and layman, or something like them, hold for it also--alike in a classical Polis, a Jewish consensus, and a Western people. When a nation rises up ardent to fight for its freedom and honour, it is always a minority that really fires the multitude. The people “awakens”--it is more than a figure of speech, for only thus and then does the waking-consciousness of the whole become manifested. All these individuals whose “we”-feeling yesterday went content with a horizon of family and job and perhaps home-town are suddenly to-day men of nothing less than the People. Their thought and feeling, their Ego, and therewith the “it” in them have been transformed to the very depths. It has become _historic_. And then even the unhistorical peasant becomes a member of the nation, and a day dawns for him in which he experiences history and not merely lets it pass him by.

But in the world-cities, besides a minority which has history and livingly experiences, feels, and seeks to lead the nation, there arises another minority of timeless a-historic, literary men, men not of destiny, but of reasons and causes, men who are inwardly detached from the pulse of blood and being, wide-awake thinking consciousnesses, that can no longer find any “reasonable” connotation for the nation-idea. Cosmopolitanism is a mere waking-conscious association of intelligentsias. In it there is hatred of Destiny, and above all of history as the expression of Destiny. Everything national belongs to race--so much so that it is incapable of finding language for itself, clumsy in all that demands thought, and shiftless to the point of fatalism. _Cosmopolitanism is literature_ and remains literature, very strong in reasons, very weak in defending them otherwise than with more reasons, in defending them with the blood.

All the more, then, this minority of far superior intellect chooses the intellectual weapon, and all the more is it able to do so as the world cities are pure intellect, rootless, and by very hypothesis the common property of the civilization. The born world-citizens, world-pacifists, and world-reconcilers--alike in the China of the “Contending States,” in Buddhist India, in the Hellenistic age, and in the Western world to-day--are the _spiritual leaders of fellaheen_. _“Panem et circenses” is only another formula for pacifism._ In the history of all Cultures there is an anti-national element, whether we have evidences of it or not. Pure self-directed thinking was ever alien to life, and therefore alien to history, unwarlike, raceless. Consider our Humanism and Classicism, the Sophists of Athens, Buddha and Lao-tze--not to mention the passionate contempt of all nationalisms displayed by the great champions of the ecclesiastical and the philosophical world-view. However the cases differ amongst themselves otherwise, they are alike in this, that the world-feeling of race; the political (and therefore national) instinct for fact (“my country, right or wrong!”); the resolve to be the subject and not the object of evolution (for one or the other it has to be)--in a word, the _will_-to-power--has to retreat and make room for a tendency of which the standard-bearers are most often men without original impulse, but all the more set upon their logic; men at home in a world of truths, ideals, and Utopias; bookmen who believe that they can replace the actual by the logical, the might of facts by an abstract justice, Destiny by Reason. It begins with the everlastingly fearful who withdraw themselves out of actuality into cells and study-chambers and spiritual communities, and proclaim the nullity of the world’s doings, and it ends in every Culture with the apostles of world-peace. Every people has such (historically speaking) waste-products. Even their heads constitute physiognomically a group by themselves. In the “history of intellect” they stand high--and many illustrious names are numbered amongst them--but regarded from the point of view of actual history, they are inefficients.

The Destiny of a nation plunged in the events of its world depends upon how far its race-quality is successful in making these events historically ineffective against it. It could perhaps be demonstrated even now that in the Chinese world of states the realm of Tsin won through (250 B.C.) because it alone had kept itself free from Taoist sentiments. Be this as it may, the Roman people prevailed over the rest of the Classical world because it was able to insulate its conduct of policy from the fellah-instincts of Hellenism.

A nation is humanity brought into living form. The practical result of world-improving theories is consistently a _formless and therefore historyless mass_. All world-improvers and world-citizens stand for fellaheen ideals, whether they know it or not. _Their success means the historical abdication of the nation in favour, not of everlasting peace, but of another nation._ World-peace is always a one-sided resolve. The _Pax Romana_ had for the later soldier-emperors and Germanic band-kings only the one practical significance that it made a formless population of a hundred millions a mere object for the will-to-power of small warrior-groups. This peace cost the peaceful sacrifices beside which the losses of Cannæ seem vanishingly small. The Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian worlds pass from one conqueror’s hands to another’s, and it is their own blood that pays for the contest. That is their--peace. When in 1401 the Mongols conquered Mesopotamia, they built a victory memorial out of the skulls of a hundred thousand inhabitants of Baghdad, which had not defended itself. From the intellectual point of view, no doubt, the extinction of the nations puts a fellaheen-world above history, civilized at last and _for ever_. But in the realm of facts it reverts to a state of nature, in which it alternates between long submissiveness and brief angers that for all the bloodshed--world-peace never diminishes that--alter nothing. Of old they shed their blood for themselves; now they must shed it for others, often enough for the mere entertainment of others--that is the difference. A resolute leader who collects ten thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes.

“_Lever doodt als Sklav_ (better dead than slave)” is an old Frisian peasant-saying. The reverse has been the choice of every Late Civilization, and every Late Civilization has had to experience how much that choice costs it.