love and helpfulness which passes beyond the narrow bounds of the family
hearth has perhaps to find an intermediate sphere before it can unfold
itself and expand in the great field of Humanity among all colours and
races.

Personally, I am probably more International by temperament than
Patriotic. I feel a strange kinship and intimacy with all sorts of queer
and outlandish races--Chinese, Egyptian, Mexican, or Polynesian--and
always a slight but persistent sense of estrangement and
misapprehension among my own people. Flag-waving certainly, does not
stir me. Still, I feel that, whatever one's country may be, the love of
it has value and is not to be scoffed at. The Nation is bigger than the
Parish; and to a man of limited outlook it is a means of getting him out
of his own very narrow and local circle of life; to rob him of that in
order to jump him into a cosmopolitan attitude (which to him may be
quite empty and arid) is a mistake. It is easy enough to break the shell
for the growing chick, but if you break it too soon your chick, when
hatched, will be dead.

If you look at the great majority of those who are enthusing just now
about our country and patriotically detesting the Germans, you will see
that notwithstanding lies and slanders and cant galore, and much of
conceit and vanity, their patriotism _is_ pulling them together from one
end of Britain to another, causing them to help each other in a thousand
ways, urging them to make sacrifices for the common good, helping them
to grow the sinews and limbs of the body politic, and even the wings
which will one day transport that body into a bigger world. Really, I
think we ought to be very grateful to the Germans for doing all this for
us; and the Germans ought to be grateful to us for an exactly similar
reason. You will see plainly enough that the great majority of those who