our true country is that ideal realm which we represent to ourselves under the names of religion, duty, and the like.  Our terrestrial organisations are but far-off approaches to so fair a model; and all they are verily traitors who resist not any attempt to divert them from this their original intendment.  Our true country is bounded on the north and the south, on the east and west, by Justice, and when she oversteps that invisible boundary-line by so much as a hair’s breadth, she ceases to be our mother, and chooses rather to be looked upon quasi noverca.

So Socrates said that the wise man will be a citizen of his true city, of which the type is laid up in heaven, and only conditionally of his earthly country.

The obsession of patriotism is not the only evil which we have to consider.  We may err by defect as well as by excess.  Herbert Spencer speaks of an ‘anti-patriotic bias’; and it can hardly be disputed that many Englishmen who pride themselves on their lofty morality are suffering from this mental twist.  The malady seems to belong to the Anglo-Saxon constitution, for it is rarely encountered in other countries, while we had a noisy pro-Napoleonic faction a hundred years ago, and the Americans had their ‘Copperheads’ in the Northern States during the civil war.  In our own day, every enemy of England, from the mad Mullah to the mad Kaiser, has had his advocates at home; and the champions of Boer and Boxer, of Afridi and Afrikander, of the Mahdi and the Matabele, have been usually the same persons.  The English, it would appear, differ from other misguided rascals in never being right even by accident.  But the idiosyncrasy of a few persons is far less important than the comparative insensibility of whole classes to the patriotic appeal, except when war is actually raging.  This is not specially characteristic of our own country.  The German Emperor has complained of his Social Democrats as ‘people without a fatherland’; and the cry ’A bas la patrie’ has been heard in France.

It is usual to explain this attitude by the fact that the manual workers ‘have no stake in the country,’ and might not find their condition altered for the worse by subjection to a foreign power.  A few of our working-men have given colour to this charge by exclaiming petulantly that they could not be worse off under the Germans; but in this they have done themselves and their class less than justice.  The anti-militarism and cosmopolitanism of the masses in every country is a profoundly interesting fact, a problem which demands no superficial investigation.  It is one result of that emancipation from traditional ideas, which makes the most important difference between the upper and middle classes on the one side and the lower on the other.  We lament that the working-man takes but little interest in Christianity, and rack our brains to discover what we have done to discredit our religion in his eyes.  The truth is that Christianity,