Post-Prandial Philosophy by Grant Allen
page 52 of 129 (40%)
page 52 of 129 (40%)
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"Patriotism." True, a good man will feel more sensitively anxious that
justice should be done by the particular State of which he happens himself to be a member than by any other, because he is partly responsible for the corporate action; but then, people who feel deeply this joint moral responsibility of all the citizens are not praised as patriots but reviled as unpatriotic. To urge that our own country should strive with all its might to be better, higher, purer, nobler, juster than other countries around it--the only kind of Patriotism worth a brass farthing in a righteous man's eyes--is accounted by most men both wicked and foolish. Patriotism, then, is the collective or national form of the Monopolist Instincts. And like all those Instincts, it is a relic of savagery, which the Man of the Future is now engaged in out-living. Property is the next form. That, on the very face of it, is a viler and more sordid one. For Patriotism at least can lay claim to some expansiveness beyond mere individual interest; whereas property stops dead short at the narrowest limits. It is not "Us against the world!" but "Me against my fellow-citizens!" It is the final result of the industrial war in its most hideous avatar. Look how it scars the fair face of our England with its anti-social notice-boards, "Trespassers will be prosecuted!" It says, in effect, "This is my land. God made it; but I have acquired it and tabooed it. The grass on it grows green; but only for me. The mountains rise beautiful; no foot of man, save mine and my gamekeepers', shall tread them. The waterfalls gleam fresh and cool in the glen: avaunt there, you non-possessors; _you_ shall never see them! All this is my own. And I choose to monopolise it." Or is it the capitalist? "I will add field to field," he says, in |
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