But it is, I think, fair to say that the value of nationality is at the origin, the bottom. Nationality is like the essential underground roots of a tree; the tree itself springs up into the universal air. Thus, in all countries national prejudices are strongest among the uneducated and the half-educated; whereas the more men become truly cultivated, the less marked in them become their national differences. There are no barriers between an intelligent educated American and an intelligent educated Englishman or Italian; merely subtle distinctions in point of view that add to the richness of their mutual relationship. Their nationality is behind them, not with them. Men of genuine cultivation grow impatient at all this flaunting of nationalism. They find themselves too similar to men of other countries to believe any longer in the grosser national generalizations. Indeed, they distrust generalizations of any sort, and grow more and more inclined to take everything, fact by fact, as they find it. Thus, as the mature man whose development has not halted feels an increasing desire to get away from himself, so, too, does he feel an increasing desire to get away from his nationality--not, like the petty Anglomaniac or Francophile, into some other, but into a broader human fellowship. Neither desire can ever be completely realized, but each is noble--a craving to shake off fetters of the mind. Perhaps the two desires are really one. When emancipated men of this sort witness the disagreeable act of some foreigner, it is to them simply a disagreeable act committed by an individual of faulty breeding. They do not say, with a shrug: ‘Characteristically Italian, that, eh?’ or, ‘A Boche is always a Boche.’ That, I fear, is precisely what, with fewer exceptions than among any other western people, a Frenchman would say--or, at any rate, feel. It appears, for some reason, extremely difficult for him to emerge from being a Frenchman into being a man. Perhaps the desire is not very strong. Far more than the Englishman, whose sense of racial superiority is currently supposed to be enormous (and is, of course, among the half-educated, but I am not considering them here), the Frenchman leans on his nationality for support, assumes its heritage of greatness as his own. So far as I am aware, no Frenchman has ever written anything similar to the famous song in _Pinafore_--‘For he himself has said it, and it’s greatly to his credit, that he is an Englishman, that he i-i-i-i-i-i-is an Eng-lish-man.’