Of course, Americans have no monopoly of patriotic enthusiasm and good faith.  Englishmen return thanks to Providence for not being born anything but an Englishman, in churches and ale-houses as well as in comic operas.  The Frenchman cherishes and proclaims the idea that France is the most civilized modern country and satisfies best the needs of a man of high social intelligence.  The Russian, whose political and social estate does not seem enviable to his foreign contemporaries, secretes a vision of a mystically glorified Russia, which condemns to comparative insipidity the figures of the “Pax Britannica” and of “La Belle France” enlightening the world.  Every nation, in proportion as its nationality is thoroughly alive, must be leavened by the ferment of some such faith.  But there are significant differences between the faith of, say, an Englishman in the British Empire and that of an American in the Land of Democracy.  The contents of an Englishman’s national idea tends to be more exclusive.  His patriotism is anchored to the historical achievements of Great Britain and restricted thereby.  As a good patriot he is bound to be more preoccupied with the inherited fabric of national institutions and traditions than he is with the ideal and more than national possibilities of the future.  This very loyalty to the national fabric does, indeed, imply an important ideal content; but the national idealism of an Englishman, a German, or even a Frenchman, is heavily mortgaged to his own national history and cannot honestly escape the debt.  The good patriot is obliged to offer faithful allegiance to a network of somewhat arbitrary institutions, social forms, and intellectual habits—­on the ground that his country is exposed to more serious dangers from premature emancipation than it is from stubborn conservatism.  France is the only European country which has sought to make headway towards a better future by means of a revolutionary break with its past; and the results of the French experiment have served for other European countries more as a warning than as an example.

The higher American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise.  The Land of Democracy has always appealed to its more enthusiastic children chiefly as a land of wonderful and more than national possibilities.  “Neither race nor tradition,” says Professor Hugo Muensterberg in his volume on “The Americans,” “nor the actual past, binds the American to his countrymen, but rather the future which together they are building.”  This vision of a better future is not, perhaps, as unclouded for the present generation of Americans as it was for certain former generations; but in spite of a more friendly acquaintance with all sorts of obstacles and pitfalls, our country is still figured in the imagination of its citizens as the Land of Promise.  They still believe that somehow and sometime something better will happen