So much for the citizenship of the individual in his relations to his family, to his neighbor, to the State.  There remain duties of citizenship which the State, the aggregation of all the individuals, owes in connection with other states, with other nations.  Let me say at once that I am no advocate of a foolish cosmopolitanism.  I believe that a man must be a good patriot before he can be, and as the only possible way of being, a good citizen of the world.  Experience teaches us that the average man who protests that his international feeling swamps his national feeling, that he does not care for his country because he cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves himself the foe of mankind; that the man who says that he does not care to be a citizen of any one country, because he is a citizen of the world, is in very fact usually an exceedingly undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the world he happens at the moment to be in.  In the dim future all moral needs and moral standards may change; but at present, if a man can view his own country and all other countries from the same level with tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust him, just as it is wise to distrust the man who can take the same dispassionate view of his wife and his mother.  However broad and deep a man’s sympathies, however intense his activities, he need have no fear that they will be cramped by love of his native land.

Now, this does not mean in the least that a man should not wish to do good outside of his native land.  On the contrary, just as I think that the man who loves his family is more apt to be a good neighbor than the man who does not, so I think that the most useful member of the family of nations is normally a strongly patriotic nation.  So far from patriotism being inconsistent with a proper regard for the rights of other nations, I hold that the true patriot, who is as jealous of the national honor as a gentleman is of his own honor, will be careful to see that the nation neither inflicts nor suffers wrong, just as a gentleman scorns equally to wrong others or to suffer others to wrong him.  I do not for one moment admit that political morality is different from private morality, that a promise made on the stump differs from a promise made in private life.  I do not for one moment admit that a man should act deceitfully as a public servant in his dealings with other nations, any more than that he should act deceitfully in his dealings as a private citizen with other private citizens.  I do not for one moment admit that a nation should treat other nations in a different spirit from that in which an honorable man would treat other men.