waving an iron wand; still another 'nation' calling itself 'France'; and
yet another boasting the biggest brass band, and called 'England.' Other
smaller bodies of nobodies, that is, smaller nations, file past with
humbler tread--though there is really no need for their doing so. For,
as we have said, they are in every particular like to those haughtier
nations who take precedence of them. In fact, one or two of them, such
as Norway and Denmark--were a truer system of human mathematics to
obtain--are really of more importance than the so-called greater
nations, in that among their nobodies they include a larger percentage
of intellectual somebodies.

Remembering that percentage of wise men, the formula of a nation were
perhaps more truly stated in our first mathematical image. The wise men
in a nation are as the units with the noughts in front of them. And when
I say wise men I do not, indeed, mean merely the literary men or the
artists, but all those somebodies with some real force of character,
people with brains and hearts, fighters and lovers, saints and thinkers,
and the patient, industrious workers. Such, if you consider, are really
no integral part of the nation among which they are cast. They have no
part in what are grandiloquently called national interests--war,
politics, and horse-racing to wit. A change of Government leaves them as
unmoved as an election for the board of guardians. They would as soon
think of entering Parliament or the County Council, as of yearning to
manage the gasworks, or to go about with one of those carts bearing the
legend 'Aldermen and Burgesses of the City of London' conspicuously upon
its front. Their main concern in political changes is the rise and fall
of the income-tax, and, be the Cabinet Tory or Liberal, their rate
papers come in for the same amount. It is likely that national changes
would affect them but little more. What more would a foreign invasion
mean than that we should pay our taxes to French, Russian, or German