tell a man that his horse is broken-winded, his house damp, his coat greasy, his hair unbrushed, his hearing defective, his child deficient or his wife unfaithful or undesirable? Such statements of facts are always a liberty taken, often an inexpiable offence, sometimes an insult calling for blows or a duel. And when the criticized belongings are what is called my country... well then, if we are patriots, we answer "my country right or wrong." And "national honour" is expressly excluded from the subjects of international arbitration.

Conversely, a child is taught that Elisha sent bears to devour the little boys who called attention to his baldness; he learns from experience that it is good policy to remark upon the beauty and value of his elders' possessions or supposed possessions. What is odder still is that it is not yet deemed impolite to suggest, even in the naïf manner of one's French friends, that though a poor alien was not born of one's own nation, he really deserved that honour and might almost claim it. All this is absolutely natural and on the whole doubtless for the best. I mean it is natural that people should feel a certain special interest, warmth, familiarity, a quite supreme intimacy and importance in and with whatever had become identified with themselves by possession; and all for the best that they should prefer what is theirs to what is not. It would be intolerable if all parents wanted to rear other children than their own; frightful if all husbands preferred other men's wives; most disturbing even if whole populations, as occurred in barbaric times and still occurs at the expense of what colonials call "natives" or "savages," took it into their heads to prefer other folk's countries to the one they were born in. Egoism, whatever we may say to the contrary, is the first rule in life; and altruism, collective or otherwise, is its corrective, its purifying, ennobling, transforming agency, but cannot do without it. Neither do I suggest that life could be carried on one fraction of a second by mere contemplation, reason, etc., or by anything save an irresistible, unfailing, unceasing push and pull of passion, habit, and what people call (rather mistakenly) instinct. Indeed the truth of this is demonstrated by their always having the upper hand; and contemplation, reason, etc., rarely having a chance against them. Just

therefore, natural selection or providence has usually provided rather too much of the unreasonable faculties and too little of the reasoning ones. And it so happens that there is an objection to the unchecked dominion of the sacred sense of self and of the venerable and comfortable feeling of possession: and that is that there are other selfs and other selfs' belongings. The other fellow, man or thing happens to be there, hence requires to be taken into account. The rest of the universe also happens to be there and moreover quite colossally more there and everywhere than just you or I or we. And we can settle the quite exorbitant claims of this inexorable Rest of the Universe, this Otherness, only by occasionally slackening down our necessary natural self-preference, by interrupting awhile the inter-play of our various passions and instincts, and taking an interest in otherness for its own sake; contemplating it, appreciating it, and even, as we love countries which are not ours because we recognize their lovable qualities, taking to love where there can be no question of mine or thine, but merely of the suitability of its lovableness to our capacity for love.

But that, as I have tried to show by the example of Themistocles, is not patriotic love. Patriotic love is love for one's country because it is one's own; and so far it is of the same sort as the feeling which impels all of us to linger over the good points of our own children, horses, house, garden, library, greenhouse and garage (if we have one), and naïvely take for granted that their complete and detailed appreciation must be a source of equal spiritual bien être to our visitors.

Such love due to possession does justice neither to the real qualities of its object (since it fills up their gaps and makes them almost unnecessary), nor to the qualities of all the other things in creation. Hence although undoubtedly the most prevailing, therefore, perhaps, the most needful, kind of love, it is not the highest. And if you ask me what I mean by highest in such a reference, I mean the kind which is required to correct, to check, to transform, in short to see to its not becoming a mere pest, such being, it seems to me, the only reasonable meaning in any kind of hierarchy, and especially the only one in the hierarchic order of any ethical valuation. It is for lack of a higher (in this sense) regulator that the

Q

Orchestra of Patriotism (or of any collective self-preference which has preceded or may succeed it) has come to admit such very disreputable members, to show such unexpected cheekby-jowlness; and finally, to be, as I have shown, the property of Satan and occasionally under the conductorship of Ballet Master Death.

III

The gist of all your remarks about patriotism," I can hear my Reader answering, "is that you have none."

Exactly so. Indeed my not having any myself is, very likely, what allows my seeing what Patriotism really is. For it is with Patriotism as with all other things which we possess, and possessing, enjoy, as we are apt to enjoy even our own defects and maladies when they lead to talking of ourselves and feeling for ourselves; as we tend to prefer our family, our horse, dog, or the view from our backyard, regarding them with an especial complacency, as objects of possible pride, often with the acquiescent familiarity of habit, always with the warm intensity of all pertaining to self. I know that friendly feeling towards one's belongings, bodily or spiritual, for I notice it in myself about so many things of which, as you remark, Patriotism happens not to be one. I accept, I proclaim from the housetops this providential arrangement which makes us kind to everything constituting our thought of self. All I contend is that this attitude is not always favourable to knowledge of, or correct estimation, of realities.

No, I have no Patriotism; since it is not Patriotism to feel love and admiration (and also occasional shame) for several countries besides the one which taxes one's income or gives (or at present usually refuses) one's passport. I have no Patriotism, and might have added, am just as happy without it; but even as the Inquisition or the Church Elders used certain arguments for demonstrating that one cannot be happy outside the True Belief, so also the war has shown me that there are moments in the World's history when one is really not altogether comfortable without some little Patriotism.

But though I have no Patriotism, I have sundry feelings or preferences which are often confused with it; which occasion

ally grow up in its shelter and are also occasionally starved and stunted by its shade. For instance, public-spiritedness; by which I mean a wish to make things better for the unknown majority of people, and a repugnance to gaining or keeping advantages at their expense; not perhaps love of one's neighbour, since one loves only the neighbour one feels to be lovable, but respect for one's neighbour's welfare, one's neighbour's chance of happiness, which is quite different from wishing to marry, live with, converse with, or even see that neighbour in his or her individual embodiment. And as a consequence, a preference for certain things, liberty of the subject, equality of opportunities, free speech, free trade, free thought, administrative probity, political internationalism, which seem to increase such chances of happiness for mankind at large. I call this public-spiritedness; and have, or wish I had it. It is what Patriotism transforms itself into more and more in times of peace, losing its teeth, claws and bark; it is what Patriotism may eventually evolve into for good and all, leaving those animal weapons behind, as mankind discarded the clutching jaws and grasping feet and balancing tail of apes, and acquired a human thumb and a human brain. Publicspiritedness implies a willingness to forgo certain advantages for the sake, for the bare thought, of certain other ones, the fruitful barter of one's wish for gain or ease or eminence against one's wish that the world at large, or the mews to the back, should be a less depressing object of contemplation. Such public-spiritedness unites the individual in effort and in thought with the multitude. And, since it is easier to feel for what we see, and to see what lies closest at hand, such public-spiritedness naturally begins at home. And since our home is often set against another home; one town, country, class against another, even public-spiritedness is apt to lose its temper, to be blinded by prejudice, seek advantages at others' expense; suspect others of like seekings; roll itself up like hedgehogs into a mass of bristles or squirt out inky poison like the cuttlefish of journalism; in fact public-spiritedness tends to be ousted by Patriotism. Indeed, long before this war, I was impressed by the fact that in countries where, as in France and Italy, the patriotic habit, the bristling and spouting against

other countries, happened (for some historical cause) to be much to the fore, there was a lack of public-spiritedness as such, a blinking of administrative muddle, an acquiescence in political corruption, and that habit, as Italians say, of “one hand washing the other hand"; in fact I noticed that, in proportion as men feel violently against other men, good or bad, beyond their frontiers, they accepted their own evil-doers in a fraternal spirit. And the Patriotism of all the belligerent nations, with its Coalitions, Unions Sacrées, not merely of mutually exclusive principles and parties, but of scoundrels with honourable persons, of maniacs with wise men, has reinforced the same lesson; to wit: that however different things may have been in a Past which I do not know, Patriotism, under the present conditions which I see, absorbs the com

bativeness and endurance and self-renunciation needed for putting one's own house in decent order; and spends it in devastating the house on the other side of the road, with the result that, just as this war-expenditure on shells and guns and khaki must result in a lack of food and rolling-stock and clothes and schools, so also both this house and the other house will be left in an excessively ruinous and disorderly condition.

And let this be my answer to the initial question: Do you think that Patriotism is or is not a virtue ? namely: not in our modern times; because, besides destroying men and wealth and sympathy and common sense and desire for truthfulness, it also puts itself in the place and absorbs the much-needed resources of public-spiritedness. Has not this war whittled down "national service" to mean whatever helps to carry on war, turning schoolmasters and men of science into soldiers killing and killed by other schoolmasters and men of science? And one reason why I am pleased with my discovery that Patriotism is not a human passion but an Orchestra of Human Passions, is that it helps to show how in that Orchestra the noblest, rarest human impulses are sat upon and polluted by Fear, Hatred, Hypocrisy and all the vile crew which waste the collective, as they waste the individual, soul.

August, 1918.