good intention in the age that has come to its end, there has been much
hasty running to obvious shelters, and many men have been forced to
take refuge under this echoing patriotism--for want of a better
gathering place. It is like an incident during an earthquake, when men
who have abandoned a cleft fortress will shelter in a drinking bothy.
But the very upheavals that have shattered the old fastnesses of
altruistic men, will be found presently to be taking the shape of a new
gathering place--and of this the New Republic presents an early guess
and anticipation. I do not see how men, save in the most unexpected
emergency, can be content to accept such an artificial convention as
modern patriotism for one moment. On the one hand there are the
patriots of nationality who would have us believe that the miscellany
of European squatters in the Transvaal are one nation and those in Cape
Colony another, and on the other the patriots of Empire who would have
me, for example, hail as my fellow-subjects and collaborators in man-
making a host of Tamil-speaking, Tamil-thinking Dravadians, while
separating me from every English-speaking, English-thinking person who
lives south of the Great Lakes. So long as men are content to work in
the grooves set for them by dead men, to derive all their significances
from the past, to accept whatever is as right and to drive along before
the compulsions of these acquiescences, they may do so. But directly
they take to themselves the New Republican idea, directly they realize
that life is something more than passing the time, that it is
constructive with its direction in the future, then these things slip
from them as Christian's burthen fell from him at the very outset of
his journey. Until grave cause has been shown to the contrary, there is
every reason why all men who speak the same language, think the same
literature, and are akin in blood and spirit, and who have arrived at
the great constructive conception that so many minds nowadays are
reaching, should entirely disregard these old separations. If the old