obtain in the mathematics of human nature. One might have supposed that
the result of one nobody multiplied even fifty million times would still
be nobody. However, such is far from being the case. Fifty million
nobodies make--a nation. Of course, there is no need for so many. I am
reckoning as a British subject, and speak of fifty million merely as an
illustration of the general fact that it is the multiplication of
nobodies that makes a nation. 'Increase and multiply' was, it will be
remembered, the recipe for the Jewish nation.

Nobodies of the same colour, tongue, and prejudices have but to
congregate together in a crowd sufficiently big for other similar crowds
to recognise them, and then they are given a name of their own, and
become recognised as a nation--one of the 'Great Powers.'

Beyond those differences in colour, tongue, and prejudices there is
really no difference between the component units--or rather ciphers--of
all these several national crowds. You have seen a procession of various
trades-unions filing toward Hyde Park, each section with its particular
banner with a strange device: 'The United Guild of Paperhangers,' 'The
Ancient Order of Plumbers,' and so on. And you may have marvelled to
notice how alike the members of the various carefully differentiated
companies were. So to say, they each and all might have been plumbers;
and you couldn't help feeling that it wouldn't have mattered much if
some of the paper-hangers had by mistake got walking amongst the
plumbers, or _vice versa_.

So the great trades-unions of the world file past, one with the odd word
'Russia' on its banner; another boasting itself 'Germany'--this with a
particularly bumptious and self-important young man walking backward in
front of it, in the manner of a Salvation Army captain, and imperiously