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 about the thinness of his excuses or the
thickness of his head. A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is:
his wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into somebody else.
Women who are utter mystics in their creed are utter cynics in their
criticism. Thackeray expressed this well when he made Pendennis' mother,
who worshipped her son as a god, yet assume that he would go wrong as a
man. She underrated his virtue, though she overrated his value. The
devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a
sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is
bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

This at least had come to be my position about all that was called
optimism, pessimism, and improvement. Before any cosmic act of reform we
must have a cosmic oath of allegiance. A man must be interested in life,
then he could be disinterested in his views of it. "My son give me thy
heart"; the heart must be fixed on the right thing: the moment we have a
fixed heart we have a free hand. I must pause to anticipate an obvious