Above all, for empire and greatness, it importeth most, that a nation do profess arms, as their principal honour, study, and occupation.  For the things which we formerly have spoken of are but habilitations towards arms; and what is habitation without intention and act?...  It is so plain that a man profiteth in that he most intendeth, that it needeth not to be stood upon.  It is enough to point at it; that no nation, which doth not directly profess arms, may look to have greatness fall into their mouths.

A state, therefore, ’ought to have those laws or customs, which may reach forth unto them just occasions of war.’  Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V’ has been not unreasonably recommended by the Germans as ’good war-reading.’  It would be easy to compile a catena of bellicose maxims from our literature, reaching down to the end of the 19th century.  The change is perhaps due less to progress in morality than to that political good sense which has again and again steered our ship through dangerous rocks.  But there has been some real advance, in all civilised countries.  We do not find that men talked about the ’bankruptcy of Christianity’ during the Napoleonic campaigns.  Even the Germans think it necessary to tell each other that it was Belgium who began this war.

But, though pugnacity and acquisitiveness have been the real foundation of much miscalled patriotism, better motives are generally mingled with these primitive instincts.  It is the subtle blend of noble and ignoble sentiment which makes patriotism such a difficult problem for the moralist.  The patriot nearly always believes, or thinks he believes, that he desires the greatness of his country because his country stands for something intrinsically great and valuable.  Where this conviction is absent we cannot speak of patriotism, but only of the cohesion of a wolf-pack.  The Greeks, who at last perished because they could not combine, had nevertheless a consciousness that they were the trustees of civilisation against barbarism; and in their day of triumph over the Persians they were filled, for a time, with an almost Jewish awe in presence of the righteous judgment of God.  The ‘Persae’ of AEschylus is one of the noblest of patriotic poems.  The Romans, a harder and coarser race, had their ideal of virtus and gravitas, which included simplicity of life, dignity and self-restraint, honesty and industry, and devotion to the state.  They rightly felt that these qualities constituted a vocation to empire.  There was much harshness and injustice in Roman imperialism; but what nobler epitaph could even the British empire desire than the tribute of Claudian, when the weary Titan was at last stricken and dying: