XIV
The picture of the National Utopia that I have drawn is perhaps a little too black to stand out clearly; and I must now add a few high lights for definition.
As in Coketown, there was a point up to which efficiency in mechanical production was a good thing, so in the national utopia there is a point up to which uniformity is a good thing. The National State seems historically to have arisen in some part through the relief which the people of the Middle Age experienced in being able to travel under the protection of the King’s law along the King’s highway, and their discovery that common laws and customs, common weights and measures, were on the whole an advantage over a multitude of senseless irregularities which continued to exist in particular neighborhoods. It was a distinct triumph for the good life when the men of London and the men of Edinburgh, let us say, realized that they had something in common as citizens of a single country, and emphasized the likenesses which bound them as men rather than the antagonisms that separated them as cities. If the National State erected barriers of trade against other countries, it at any rate broke down barriers that had long existed in even more limited regions, and that have long continued to exist in certain cities in Italy and France. So much is to the good.
But uniformity is not a good in itself. It is a good only in so far as it promotes association and social intercourse. In breaking down minor barriers, the State created major ones, and it created national uniformities in regions where they were meaningless. Moreover, nationalism is inimical to cultural unity, and it perpetuates irrelevant conflicts in the Kingdom of the Spirit where there should be neither slave nor free, neither white nor black, neither citizen nor outlander. As a matter of fact, the two great international cultural vehicles of the Middle Age—the Latin Language and the Roman Church—were broken down by the propagation of a National Language, that spoken at the National Capital, and a National Church, that which was subservient to the State; and nothing that nationalism has done since has repaired this loss. On one hand, the idolum of the National State is too narrow, because the world of culture is man’s common inheritance, and not the mere segment of it which is called “national literature” or “national science.” And on the other hand, the idolum is too big, for the reason that there is no bond except a paper one between men who are as far apart as Bermondsey and Bombay, or New York and San Francisco. The temporal community, as Auguste Comte finely pointed out, is local, restricted, and multiform; this is its essential nature and limitation. The spiritual community is universal. It was a great cultural misdemeanor when the National Utopia, in its extension as imperialism, sought to make the spiritual community restricted and the temporal community universal; and it is this heresy to the good life which makes all the pretensions of the national utopia so shabby and insincere.