we have more religious, political, and social differences than any other people.  Yet when we need companionship for work or pleasure, at home or abroad, we would sooner have an Englishman at our side than any other man.  Men and country—­’dear souls and dear, dear land’—­these are the elements which make up the real thing called patriotism and which, in spite of all our curses and all our self-seeking, lead us in millions to work or die for our country, and will, while life lasts, bring us home at last.

To those who know the local narrowness, the jealousies and pettiness of much of our own national life, it will seem a primary duty in education to present the country as an object of education and service, imperfect indeed and limited by larger ends, but yet supreme over the selfish interests of trade, town, or individual.  This, with all its terrible losses, the war is doing for us with mighty and irresistible strokes, and it is a tragic truth that in our present imperfect social state, it is only a war, hurling us against other great and really co-operating communities of men, which can make us bear with comparative ease and cheerfulness the most serious burdens of loss and suffering.  We act instantly as one people in war, we haggle and hesitate about the most moderate sacrifices to secure an advance in peace.  It is this quality in patriotism, and in war as its stimulus, which largely and naturally biases our view.  But to the ideal of a united Western civilization or a united mankind it is only one step.  We cannot do without patriotism, but we must immediately proceed beyond it.  We cannot reform the troubles and conflicts of mankind by attempting to root up some of our most tenacious passions; we progress by mastering and not mutilating our being.  We have to advance beyond the limits of patriotism by wider sympathy, by seeing analogies, by recognizing the facts of common interests and co-operation in the world.

But here again, looking at the question from an educational rather than an abstract point of view, we have to recognize that actual realization of the life and services of other nations is a slow, difficult, and, at best, a limited process.  It was really easier for the travelling student of the Middle Ages to enter into the simple and similar life of universities abroad than for the modern traveller to grasp the complex relations of a great foreign city or state.  We have therefore, in practice, to select and concentrate.  For the modern Englishman a knowledge of one or two other countries and languages is as much as the pressure of life will permit, and it is greatly to be regretted that poverty and hard work limit even this acquisition to very few.  A Wanderjahr for the working-man would do much to cement the unity of western civilization.

Until the recent acute rivalry with Germany developed, English sympathies were fairly evenly divided.  Your Liberal, as a rule, was a Frenchman, and your Conservative a German.  George Meredith and John Morley sang the praises of France, Coleridge and Carlyle would have us learn from Germany.  Now for many years the die is cast.  We shall face the settlement and the dangers of the future side by side with France.