Personally, I am probably more International by temperament than Patriotic.  I feel a strange kinship and intimacy with all sorts of queer and outlandish races—­Chinese, Egyptian, Mexican, or Polynesian—­and always a slight but persistent sense of estrangement and misapprehension among my own people.  Flag-waving certainly, does not stir me.  Still, I feel that, whatever one’s country may be, the love of it has value and is not to be scoffed at.  The Nation is bigger than the Parish; and to a man of limited outlook it is a means of getting him out of his own very narrow and local circle of life; to rob him of that in order to jump him into a cosmopolitan attitude (which to him may be quite empty and arid) is a mistake.  It is easy enough to break the shell for the growing chick, but if you break it too soon your chick, when hatched, will be dead.

If you look at the great majority of those who are enthusing just now about our country and patriotically detesting the Germans, you will see that notwithstanding lies and slanders and cant galore, and much of conceit and vanity, their patriotism is pulling them together from one end of Britain to another, causing them to help each other in a thousand ways, urging them to make sacrifices for the common good, helping them to grow the sinews and limbs of the body politic, and even the wings which will one day transport that body into a bigger world.  Really, I think we ought to be very grateful to the Germans for doing all this for us; and the Germans ought to be grateful to us for an exactly similar reason.  You will see plainly enough that the great majority of those who are at this moment giving their thoughts and lives for their countrymen and neighbours either in Germany or in England could not by any manner of possibility be expected to act with similar self-surrender and enthusiasm in an International cause.  They are not grown to that point of development yet, and it is better that they should learn helpfulness and brotherhood within somewhat narrow bounds than perhaps not learn these things at all in the open and indiscriminate field of universal equality.  After all, to stimulate love and friendship there is nothing like a common enemy!

It is an old story and an old difficulty.  There comes a time when every institution of social life becomes rotten and diseased and has to be removed to make way for the new life which is expanding behind it.  Broadly speaking, we may say that the institution of Patriotism is approaching this period—­at any rate over Western Europe.  The outlines of an International life are becoming clearly visible behind it.