"_Viva Italia!_" the boy conscript shouted, leaning far out of the
car window in a last look at the familiar fields and roof of his
native village. "_Viva Italia!_" the King of Italy cried, and his
people responded with a mighty shout,--"_Viva Italia!_" What do they
mean? In the simplest, the most primitive sense they mean literally
the earth, the trees, the homes they have always known--the physical
body of the mother country. And this primal love of the earth that
has borne you and your ancestors seems to me infinitely stronger,
more passionate with the European than with the American. We roam:
our frontiers are still horizons.... But even for the simple peasant
lad, joining the colors to fight for his country, patriotism is
something more complex than love of native soil. It is love of life
as he has known it, its tongue, its customs, its aspects. It is love
of the religion he has known, of the black or brown or yellow-haired
mother he knows--of the women of his race, of the men of his race,
and their kind.

Deeper yet, scarce conscious to the simple instinctive man, patriotism
is belief in the tradition that has made you what you are, in the ideal
that your ancestors have seeded in you of what life should be. Therefore,
patriotism is the better part of man, his ideal of life woven in with
his tissue. Men have always fought for these things,--for their own
earth, for their own kind, for their own ideal,--and they will continue
to give their blood for them as long as they are men, until wrong and
unreason and aggression are effaced from the earth. The pale concept
of internationalism, whether a class interest of the worker or an
intellectual ideal of total humanity, cannot maintain itself before
the passion of patriotism, as this year of fierce war has proved beyond
discussion.