need not mind because it is only his son.  Here clearly the word ‘love’ is used unmeaningly.  It is the essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other.  This sensitiveness, rising sometimes to an almost morbid sensitiveness, was the mark of all great lovers like Dante and all great patriots like Chatham.  ‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case.  It is like saying, ’My mother, drunk or sober.’  No doubt if a decent man’s mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.

What we really need for the frustration and overthrow of a deaf and raucous Jingoism is a renascence of the love of the native land.  When that comes, all shrill cries will cease suddenly.  For the first of all the marks of love is seriousness:  love will not accept sham bulletins or the empty victory of words.  It will always esteem the most candid counsellor the best.  Love is drawn to truth by the unerring magnetism of agony; it gives no pleasure to the lover to see ten doctors dancing with vociferous optimism round a death-bed.

We have to ask, then, Why is it that this recent movement in England, which has honestly appeared to many a renascence of patriotism, seems to us to have none of the marks of patriotism—­at least, of patriotism in its highest form?  Why has the adoration of our patriots been given wholly to qualities and circumstances good in themselves, but comparatively material and trivial:—­trade, physical force, a skirmish at a remote frontier, a squabble in a remote continent?  Colonies are things to be proud of, but for a country to be only proud of its extremities is like a man being only proud of his legs.  Why is there not a high central intellectual patriotism, a patriotism of the head and heart of the Empire, and not merely of its fists and its boots?  A rude Athenian sailor may very likely have thought that the glory of Athens lay in rowing with the right kind of oars, or having a good supply of garlic; but Pericles did not think that this was the glory of Athens.  With us, on the other hand, there is no difference at all between the patriotism preached by Mr. Chamberlain and that preached by Mr. Pat Rafferty, who sings ‘What do you think of the Irish now?’ They are both honest, simple-minded, vulgar eulogies upon trivialities and truisms.