To all these enquiries Rolland returned the same answer: "Follow your conscience. Seek out your own truth and realize it. There is no ready-made truth, no rigid formula, which one person can hand over to another. Each must create truth for himself, according to his own model. There is no other rule of moral conduct than that a man should seek his own light and should be guided by it even against the world. He who lays down his arms and accepts imprisonment, does rightly when he follows the inner light, and is not prompted by vanity or by simple imitativeness. He likewise is right, who takes up arms with no intention to use them in earnest, who thus cheats the state that he may propagate his ideal and save his inner freedom--provided always he acts in accordance with his own nature." Rolland declared that the one essential was that a man should believe in his own faith. He approved the patriot desirous of dying for his country, and he approved the anarchist who claimed freedom from all governmental authority. There was no other maxim than that of faith in one's own faith. The only man who did wrong, the only man who acted falsely, was he who allowed himself to be swept away by another's ideals, he who, influenced by the intoxication of the crowd, performed actions which conflicted with his own nature. A typical instance was that of Ludwig Frank, the socialist, the advocate of a Franco-German understanding, who, deciding to serve his party instead of serving his own ideal, volunteered at the outbreak of the war, and died for the ideals of his opponent, for the ideals of militarism. There is but one truth, such was Rolland's answer to all. The only truth is that which a man finds within himself and recognizes as his very own. Any other would-be truth is self-deception. What appears to be egoism, serves humanity. "He who would be useful to others, must above all remain free. Even love avails nothing, if the one who loves be a slave." Death for the fatherland is worthless unless he who sacrifices himself believes in his fatherland as in a god. To evade military service is cowardice in one who lacks courage to proclaim himself a sanspatrie. There are no true ideas other than those which spring from inner experience; there are no deeds worth doing other than those which are the outcome of fully responsible reflection. He who would serve mankind, must not blindly obey the arguments of a stranger. We cannot regard as a moral act anything which is done simply through imitativeness, or in consequence of another's persuasion, or (as almost universally under modern war stresses) through the suggestive influence of mass illusion. "A man's first duty is to be himself, to remain himself, at the cost of self-sacrifice."