who can thus be persuaded to fight for them; we know, indeed, that there
is a good deal of very mean and unworthy Patriotism--the flag-waving
variety, for instance, which we saw in the Boer war--exultant over a
small nation of farmers defending their homes, and whipped up
deliberately by a commercial gang for their own purposes; or the
narrow-minded, lying, canting variety which blinds a people to its own
faults, and credits itself with all the moral virtues, while at the same
time it gloats over every defamation of the enemy. There is a good deal
of that variety in the present war. And it is easy to understand that
many people, sick of that sort of Patriotism, would go straight for a
ready-made denial of all frontiers and boundaries.

Still, allowing to the full all that can be said in the above direction,
one must admit also that there is such a thing as a true Patriotism, and
I do not see why--however socialist or cosmopolitan we may be--we should
not recognize what is an obvious fact. There is a love of one's own
country--a genuine attachment to and preference for it--"in spite of all
temptations to belong to other nations"--which after all is very
natural, and on the whole a sound and healthy thing. There may be some
people whose minds are so lofty that to them all peoples and races are
alike and without preference; but one knows that the vast multitudes of
our mortal earth are not made like that. "If a man love not his brother
whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?" It is
certainly easier and more natural to make an effort and a sacrifice for
the sake of your own countrymen whom you know so well and with whom you
are linked by a thousand ties than for the sake of foreigners who are
little more than a name--however worthy you may honestly believe the
latter to be. It is more obvious and instinctive for a man to work for
his own family than to give his services to his municipality or his
county council. Charity begins at home, and the wider spirit of human