It will not be the French who will overthrow the barriers between races, sacrifice their nationality to something broader and greater, or conduct the League of Nations to a position of supreme importance. True, there are those moments of national madness when it is as though the French were atoning for all their habitual narrowness. But one cannot say: ‘Come, let us now have a moment of madness.’ No, for the achievement of unselfish uncircumscribed ideals the world will have to depend on individuals who in their growth have gradually sloughed off all that is narrow, restrictive and myopic in their nationality. Such individuals have come in the past, and should come increasingly in the future, from many different peoples--hardly from the French. On the other hand, even though we may feel that nationality is narrowing, and that at best it should be only a means to an end, we may nevertheless be actually grateful that the French have made it an end in itself. The similar devotion to it of the Poles arouses principally distaste; in the French we not only excuse but admire it. For there is about it in their case, and in their case alone, something akin to the results of intensive cultivation in agriculture, something that the best minds of other races must sacrifice (rightly, I think) to broader results--a perfection, an orderliness of thought, a fine neat thoroughness, incapable of achievement in any other way than through this persistent nurture of nationality, and to the contemplation of which we can always turn with pleasure. PORNOGRAPHY The abridged edition of the Oxford Dictionary, which is the only dictionary within my reach at present, defines pornography as (1) ‘description of manners, etc., of harlots’ (an etymological definition that the word has long since outgrown); and (2) ‘treatment of obscene subjects in literature; such literature.’ Looking up ‘obscene,’ I find ‘lewd’; looking up ‘lewd,’ I find ‘lascivious’; and looking up ‘lascivious,’ I find ‘lustful; inciting to lust.’ (Is there something especially wicked about the Ls?) So the definition finally appears as ‘literature treating of subjects inciting to lust.’