good than harm for the majority of individuals present and future; it may likewise result in more harm than good. If a virtue can be distinguished from a vice (" and of this virtue I will make a vice," says Satan) by the balance of good over mischief which it produces under given circumstances, then Patriotism can be considered virtuous or vicious only according to circumstances; and hence cannot be called virtuous or vicious taken in itself and, so to speak, in its own right.

My metaphorical description of it as an Orchestra has the advantage of affording us another, though subsidiary, test of Patriotism's very varying, moral value. That test is the varying part played by its components. There is so much muddled thinking on these subjects, particularly in war-time, that I feel obliged to insult my more intelligent reader for the benefit of his weaker brethren, by clearing away any notion that these components are the various Nations, and that while the patriotism of Germans is wolfish and wicked, the patriotism of Britons (as Mr. Trotter tells us) is that of loyal, useful, though somewhat unintelligent bees, rather too overworked for the benefit of their hereditary magnates. I am moreover not speaking of Patriotism such as it manifests itself in any particular country, but of Patriotism such as it exists in the abstract and in all countries equally; and the components of this Orchestra I am speaking of are the different human impulses, habits and passions which always, though maybe in varying proportions, enter into its composition.

And having guarded against the attempt (so natural in wartime) to call one's own nation's Patriotism virtuous and the other nation's Patriotism wicked, I may as well point out that one of the characteristics of all Patriotism as such is that, just as every Religion calls every other Religion a superstition or a heresy, the Patriotism of every belligerent nation tends to call that of its opponents by a less flattering name: long before Mr. Trotter had compared Germany to a wolf-pack, Burke had called Republican France a Band of Assassins, and a college for the training of atheists and madmen. I am glad to have been obliged to this little digression, for if you bear its occasion in mind (namely the distinction between our good Patriotism and the enemy's wicked Patriotism), it may make

it easier to recognize the abstract and essential nature of that famous Orchestra, and of the players who invariably go to make it up.

II

Let us now consider those various players and the varying parts they are sure to play in patriotism's great symphonies with concerting parts obbligati, that is solos, trios, and so forth; its wonderful counterpoints where the same theme introduced in the shrill notes of Fear will be repeated in the mellow, tender tones of loyalty to our dead, or the husky gravity of elderly fortitude: above all Patriotism's matchless blending of all the different timbres and registers in a tutti which amounts in itself to a miraculous new instrument.

That Patriotism should so rarely emerge except in the presence of an enemy real or imagined, of a threat or a challenge, leads to the recognition that there must be in its composition more of Fear and Hate than of Love. At least we would none of us give much for a Love which needed Fear or Hate to awaken or keep it alive; it would be love born of Jealousy. Howsoever that last point may be, Love there necessarily must be in all Patriotism, for is not Patriotism treated as synonymous with Love of one's country?

So, before inquiring into the part played by viler passions, let us inquire into the nature of this Love which is so conspicuous a portion of Patriotism as to lead some people to imagine that it is the whole. The nature of this Love: I might almost have said, its grammatical status. For grammar, being the track worn by mankind's use of words, not only canalizes our thought and often prevents its spreading to fertilize new fields, but reveals by its very channels of usage the direction which the drops and trickles and streams of our thoughts have taken in the past, and what have been the places of their confluence and of their rapid passionate pressure. Now the love entering into Patriotism, and called by Patriotism's name, is a love which is governed by the first personal pronoun; and manifests itself in the possessive case. It is love due to possession; not love . . . how shall we distinguish it? (though my Satan by the way has done so !) by preference,

attraction, suitability, choice, desire: not love simply as love.

An undeservedly forgotten Italian poet, Metastasio, perhaps paraphrasing some even obscurer classic, has left a brief and moving summary of patriotic love. It is Themistocles answering Xerxes' inquiry, "What can make him love so greatly the city which has exiled him?" For Themistocles had previously refused the Great King's offer with the mere statement: "Nacqui in Atene-I was born in Athens."

"E che tanto ami in lei-and what is it thou lovest so much in her?" rejoins Xerxes. Whereupon Themistocles:

"Everything, O King. The ashes of my fathers, the sacred Laws, the tutelary gods. The language and the manners; the sweat it has cost me; the glory it once gave me; the air and earth, the walls, the very stones.

("Tutto, O signor; le ceneri degli avi, le sacri leggi, i tutelari numi; la favella, i costumi; il sudor che mi costa ; lo splendor che ne trassi: Paria, il terren, le mura, i sassi.")

The whole evokes a vague and lovely vision of antique life which, even as I repeat it to myself and write it down, makes my own heart beat with the particular little rhythm associated with the name Athens. And each item is, or may be, extremely attaching in itself. An ancestral grave-(we see the little garlanded Chapel of the local hero), a language and manners and customs (the language too, of Greece, the manners and customs we know from Plato and the oration of Pericles !) what can be more so? And then that lie of the stony olivegrowing land; the Southern sky, the atmosphere bright and full of the scent of sun-dried Mediterranean herbs; and then again the Gods; there never were such Gods as those we know from Homer and Pindar and Greek marbles. I have chosen this example, and enlarged a little upon the images which accompany that little throb of my own heart at the word 99 Athens ; because I want to draw attention to the fact that they are objects of my love as well as of that antique patriot's; a fact which Metastasio, or rather the usage of the courteous Italian language (which says "the father," "the house" or "the garden," without the reiteration of my or your), has left quite uncomplicated with grammatical indications that any

of these things were more the property of Themistocles than yours or mine. Now suppose we leave it at that: recognize the lovableness of all these details and of their combination called Athens; and the love we most of us do, or could, feel for them suppose we place Themistocles among ourselves as such lovers of all that Athens means; leaving it doubtful whether the graves, ancestors, manners and language, Gods, atmosphere, stocks and stones and landscapes belong to someone else, to the country where someone else (no matter who) happened to be born; follow up the suggestion that, like you or me, Themistocles is contemplating Athens and Athenian things with intense love and veneration, but as one contemplates what never has or could have belonged to oneself, without any implication of mine or thine. Should we then be in presence of Patriotism? Should we be listening to the outburst of a patriot? Evidently not. If the Great King had pointed to some equally delightful and venerable country, say in his own domains, Sardis or Ephesus, would Themistocles have answered, as we might answer someone who pitted Browning's English "laneside aflutter with poppies" against his "castle, precipice-encurled in a gash of the wind-swept Apennine," "well both are delightful and I don't know which I care for most." No, Themistocles has answered beforehand in that-“I was born in Athens." It is that which makes him love those Athenian things which he enumerates; makes him prefer them to the similar things or equivalent ones (including plenty of future sudore e splendore offered by Xerxes) of some country of which he happened not to be a native. The previous answer "I was born in Athens " explains the difference between your or my love of Athens, of Italy, of any woman-country wooed not won," and his love, which is the patriot's love. It shows the difference of attitude between one who merely enjoys or appreciates or venerates, and one who owns; it reinstates the possessive pronoun omitted in Metastasio's enumeration; it shows that Themistocles loves Athens and Athenian things because he regards them as his.

It seems, therefore, that patriotic love is not due merely to the intrinsic qualities recognized in the object of that love, but also, and in so far as it differs from the love felt by an

alien, upon the attitude of ownership or part ownership, upon the presence of the possessive pronoun. That attitude is one of those most constant in all human affairs, so constant that we are apt to overlook it, as we overlook our own respiration or our balancing over a centre of gravity. And the possessive pronoun or possessive flexion, that humble part of speech which literary experts find so much less interesting than nouns, verbs and adjectives, is perhaps the most important, if not of grammatical, at least of affective, of human, categories. Its classifications into mine and thine represents the vastest of all emotional and active, hence of ethical, distinctions. Its presence, the bare fact of our thinking, at any moment, in terms of possession, possession positively by self, negatively by others, instead of thinking in terms of existence (of things being so and so), means that we are no longer or not yet in the realm of contemplation and appreciation, of reason, analysis and causality; but in that of passion and action, desire and effort: not of seeing but of taking, grabbing, clinging to, keeping, defending; and, in the course of such taking or keeping, frequently destroying.

"A country right or wrong." Whoever said such an absurdity? But substitute the one word my and the saying becomes not only legitimate but meritorious and beyond the reach of criticism. Neither, of course, must anyone dare to criticize my country: for right or wrong, reasonably or unreasonably criticized it is mine; and when I say mine I say hands off! For round that little word mine there watch the most valiant guards, the most vigilant sentinels of the most wretched but most august of Entities: the Human Self.

Our conscious life is such that we require not merely a modicum of food, warmth, breathable air and standing-room, but a modicum of self-importance, without which we are trampled, starved, asphyxiated. That is part of our innermost inviolable life. And everything gathered around that sacred core grows to be part of it: a knock upon the thing we are grasping shakes the grasping hand: the sun's heat passes from our garments to our skin: the praise of our belongings is felt as praise of ourself. And every criticism of whatever I call mine is a diminution of my sacred self. Do we willingly