"The force of tradition, fanned by interested parties. We are not free, we are attached to the past. We study what has always been done, and do it over again--war and injustice. Some day perhaps humanity will succeed in ridding itself of the ghost of the past. Let us hope that some day we shall emerge from this endless epoch of massacre and misery. What else is there to do than to hope?" The old man stopped at this. The young man said: "To will." The other man made a gesture with his hand. "There is one great general cause for the world's ulcer," the younger one kept on. "You have said it--servility to the past, prejudice which prevents us from doing things differently, according to reason and morality. The spirit of tradition infects humanity, and its two frightful manifestations are--" The old man rose from his chair, as if about to protest and as if to say, "Don't mention them!" But the young man could not restrain himself any more. "--inheritance from the past and the fatherland." "Hush!" cried the old man. "You are treading on ground on which I cannot follow. I recognise present evils. I pray with all my heart for the new era. More than that, I believe in it. But do not speak that way about two sacred principles." "You speak like everybody else," said the young man bitterly. "We must go to the root of the evil, you know we must. /You/ certainly do." And he added violently, "Why do you act as if you did not know it? If we wish to cure ourselves of oppression and war, we have a right to attack them by all the means possible--all!--the principle of inheritance and the cult of the fatherland." "No, we haven't the right," exclaimed the old man, who had risen in great agitation and threw a look at his interlocutor that was hard, almost savage. "We have the right!" cried the other. All at once, the grey head drooped, and the old man said in a low voice: "Yes, it is true, we have the right. I remember one day during the war. We were standing beside a dying man. No one knew who he was. He had been found in the debris of a bombarded ambulance--whether bombarded purposely or not, the result was the same. His face had been mutilated beyond recognition. All you could tell was that he belonged to one or other of the two armies. He moaned and groaned and sobbed and shrieked and invented the most appalling cries. We listened to the sounds that he made in his agony, trying to find one word, the faintest accent, that would at least indicate his nationality. No use. Not a single intelligible sound from that something like a face quivering on the stretcher. We looked and listened, until he fell silent. When he was dead and we stopped trembling, I had a flash of comprehension. I understood. I understood in the depths of my being that man is more closely knit to man than to his vague compatriots.