pure love that nature, our mother, has imparted within you.”  No woman, in turn, is truly civilized till she can say to every man of all the men she loves, of all the men who love her, “Give me what you can of your love, and of yourself; but don’t think I am so vile, and so selfish, and so poor as to desire to monopolize you.  Respect me enough never to give me your body without giving me your heart; never to make me the mother of children whom you desire not and love not.”  When men and women can say that alike, the world will be civilized.  Until they can say it truly, the world will be as now a jarring battlefield for the monopolist instincts.

Those jealous and odious instincts have been the bane of humanity.  They have given us the stiletto, the Morgue, the bowie-knife.  Our race must inevitably in the end outlive them.  The test of man’s plane in the scale of being is how far he has outlived them.  They are surviving relics of the ape and tiger.  But we must let the ape and tiger die.  We must cease to be Calibans.  We must begin to be human.

Patriotism is the one of these lowest vices which most often masquerades in false garb as a virtue.  But what after all is patriotism?  “My country, right or wrong, and just because it is my country!” This is clearly nothing more than collective selfishness.  Often enough, indeed, it is not even collective.  It means merely, “My business-interests against the business-interests of other people, and let the taxes of my fellow-citizens pay to support them.”  At other times it means pure pride of race, and pure lust of conquest; “My country against other countries; my army and navy against other fighters; my right to annex unoccupied territory against the equal right of all other peoples; my power to oppress all weaker nationalities, all inferior races.”  It never means or can mean anything good or true.  For if a cause be just, like Ireland’s, or once Italy’s, then ’tis a good man’s duty to espouse it with warmth, be it his own or another’s.  And if a cause be bad, then ’tis a good man’s duty to oppose it, tooth and nail, irrespective of your patriotism.  True, a good man will feel more sensitively anxious that strict justice should be done by the particular community of which chance has made him a component member than by any others; but then, people who feel acutely this joint responsibility of all the citizens to uphold the moral right are not praised as patriots but reviled as unpatriotic.  To urge that our own country should strive with all its might to be better, higher, purer, nobler, more generous than other countries,—­the only kind of patriotism worth a moment’s thought in a righteous man’s eyes, is accounted by most men both wicked and foolish.