Belgium, the Abbe maintains, has found this national consciousness amid her sufferings; there are no longer any distinctions between French-speaking Belgians and Walloons or Flemings.  This is in truth the real base of patriotism.  It is the basis of our own love for our country.  What Britain stands for is what Britain is.  We have long known in our hearts what Britain stands for; but we have now been driven to search our thoughts and make our ideals explicit to ourselves and others.  The Englishman has become a philosopher malgre lui, ’Whatever the world thinks,’ writes Bishop Berkeley. ’he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human soul, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman.’  These words, which were quoted by Mr. Arthur Balfour a few years ago, may seem to make a large demand on the average citizen; but in our quiet way we have all been meditating on these things since last August, and we know pretty well what our summum bonum is for our country.  We believe in chivalry and fair play and kindliness—­these things first and foremost; and we believe, if not exactly in democracy, yet in a government under which a man may think and speak the thing he wills.  We do not believe in war, and we do not believe in bullying.  We do not flatter ourselves that we are the supermen; but we are convinced that the ideas which we stand for, and which we have on the whole tried to carry out, are essential to the peaceful progress and happiness of humanity; and for these ideas we have drawn the sword.  The great words of Abraham Lincoln have been on the lips of many and in the hearts of all since the beginning of the great contest:  ’With malice towards none; with charity for all:  with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right—­let us strive on to finish the work we are in.’

Patriotism thus spiritualised and moralised is the true patriotism.  When the emotion is once set in its right relations to the whole of human life and to all that makes human life worth living, it cannot become an immoral obsession.  It is certain to become an immoral obsession if it is isolated and made absolute.  We have seen the appalling perversion—­the methodical diabolism—­which this obsession has produced in Germany.  It has startled us because we thought that the civilised world had got beyond such insanity; but it is of course no new thing.  Machiavelli said, ’I prefer my country to the salvation of my soul’—­a sentiment which sounds noble but is not; it has only a superficial resemblance to St. Paul’s willingness to be ‘accursed’ for the sake of his countrymen.  Devil-worship remains what it was, even when the idol is draped in the national flag.  This obsession may be in part a survival from savage conditions, when all was at stake in every feud; but chiefly it is an example of the idealising and universalising power of the imagination, which turns every unchecked passion into a monomania.  The only remedy is, as Lowell’s Hosea Biglow reminds us, to bear in mind that