Pimlico itself, he may lay it waste and turn it into the New Jerusalem.
I do not deny that reform may be excessive; I only say that it is the
mystic patriot who reforms. Mere jingo self-contentment is commonest
among those who have some pedantic reason for their patriotism.
The worst jingoes do not love England, but a theory of England.
If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success
with which we rule the Hindoos. But if we love it only for being
a nation, we can face all events: for it would be a nation even
if the Hindoos ruled us. Thus also only those will permit their
patriotism to falsify history whose patriotism depends on history.
A man who loves England for being English will not mind how she arose.
But a man who loves England for being Anglo-Saxon may go against
all facts for his fancy. He may end (like Carlyle and Freeman)
by maintaining that the Norman Conquest was a Saxon Conquest.
He may end in utter unreason--because he has a reason. A man who
loves France for being military will palliate the army of 1870.
But a man who loves France for being France will improve the army
of 1870. This is exactly what the French have done, and France is
a good instance of the working paradox. Nowhere else is patriotism
more purely abstract and arbitrary; and nowhere else is reform more
drastic and sweeping. The more transcendental is your patriotism,
the more practical are your politics.

Perhaps the most everyday instance of this point is in the case
of women; and their strange and strong loyalty. Some stupid people
started the idea that because women obviously back up their own
people through everything, therefore women are blind and do not
see anything. They can hardly have known any women. The same women
who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin are (in
their personal intercourse with the man) almost morbidly lucid