The iconoclast of to-day is full of scorn for patriotism, which he holds the most retrograde of emotions. He may as usefully declaim against friendship, comradeship, the love of man for woman or of mother for child. The lowest savage regards himself, and cannot but regard himself, as a member of some sort of political aggregation. This feeling is one of the primal instincts of humanity, and as such one of the permanent data of the problem of the future. It is folly to denounce or seek to eradicate it. The wise course is to give it large and noble instead of petty and parochial concepts to which to attach itself. Rightly esteemed and rightly directed, patriotism is not a retrograde emotion, but one of the indispensable conditions of progress.

"Nothing is," says Hamlet, "but thinking makes it so." It is not oceans, straits, rivers, or mountain-barriers, that constitute a Nation, but the idea in the minds of the people composing it. Now, the largest political idea that ever entered the mind—not of a man—not of a governing class—but of a people, is the idea of the United States of America. The "Pax Romana" was a great idea in its day, but it was imposed from without, and by military methods, upon a number of subject peoples, who did not realise and intelligently co-operate in it, but merely submitted to it. It has its modern analogue in the "Pax Britannica" of India. The idea of the United States, on the other hand, gives what may be called psychological unity to one of the largest political aggregates, both in territory and population, ever known to history. In the modern world, there are only two political aggregates in any wise comparable to it: the British Empire, whereof the idea is not as yet quite clearly formulated; and the Russian Empire, whereof the idea, in so far as it belongs to the people at all, is a blind and slavish superstition. Holy Russia is a formidable idea, Greater Britain is a picturesque and pregnant idea; but the United States is a self-conscious, clearly defined and heroically vindicated idea, in whose further vindication the whole world is concerned. It is only an experiment, say some—an experiment which, thirty years ago, trembled on the brink of disastrous failure, and which may yet have even greater perils to encounter. This is true in a sense, but not the essential truth. Let us substitute for "experiment" another word which means the same thing—with a difference. The United States of America, let us say, is a rehearsal for the United States of Europe, nay, of the world. It is the very difficulties over which the croakers shake their heads that make the experiment interesting, momentous. The United States is a veritable microcosm: it presents in little all the elements which go to make up a world, and which have hitherto kept the world, almost unintermittently, in a state of battle and bloodshed. There are wide differences of climate and of geographical conditions in the United States, with the resulting conflict of material interest between different regions of the country. There are differences of race and even of language to be overcome, extremes of wealth and poverty to be dealt with. As though to make sure that no factor in the problem of civilisation should be omitted, the men of last century were at pains to saddle their descendants with the burden of the negro—a race incapable of assimilation and yet tenacious of life. In brief, a thousand difficulties and temptations to dissension beset the giant Republic: in so far as it overcomes them, and carries on its development by peaceful methods, it presents a unique and invaluable object-lesson to the world. The idea of unity, annealed in the furnace of the Civil War, has as yet been stronger than all the forces of disintegration; and there is no reason to doubt that it will continue to be so. When France falls out with Germany, or Russia with Turkey, there is nothing save a purely material counting of the cost to hinder them from flying at each other's throats. The abstract humanitarianism of a few individuals is as a feather on the torrent. Such sentiment as comes into play is all on the side of bloodshed. It takes very little to make a Frenchman and a German feel that they are in a state of war by nature, and that peace between them is an artificial and necessarily unstable condition. But in America, should two States or two groups of States fall out, there is a strong, and we may hope unconquerable, sentiment of unity to be overcome before the dissentients even reach the point of counting the material cost of war. Men feel that they are in a state of peace by nature, and that war between them, instead of being a hereditary and almost consecrated habit, would be a monstrous and almost unthinkable crime. The National Government, as established by the Constitution, is in fact a permanent court of arbitration between the States; and the common-sense of all may be trusted to "hold a fractious State in awe." "Did not people say and think the same thing in 1859," it may be asked, "on the eve of the greatest Civil War in history?" Possibly; but that war was precisely what was needed to ratify the Union, and lift it out of the experimental stage. "Blut ist ein ganz besondrer Saft," and it is sometimes necessary that other pacts than those of hell should be written in blood, before the world recognises their full validity. Heaven forbid that the Deed of Union of the United States should require a second time to be retraced in red!

But it is an illusion, though a salutary one, that civil war is any more barbarous than international war. What the world wants is the realisation that every war is a civil war, a war between brothers, justifiable only for the repression of some cruelty more cruel than war itself, some barbarism more barbarous. Towards this realisation the United States is leading the way, by showing that, under the conditions of modern life, an effective sense of brotherhood, a resolute loyalty to a unifying idea, may be maintained throughout a practically unlimited extent of territory.

But, while enumerating the difficulties which the Republic has to overcome, I have said nothing of the one great advantage it enjoys—a common, or at any rate a dominant, language. The diversity of tongues which prevails in Europe is doubtless one of the chief hindrances to that "Federation of the World" of which the poet dreamed. But if the many tongues of Europe retard its fusion into what I have called a political aggregate, there exists in the world a political aggregate larger in extent than either Europe or the United States, which possesses, like the United States, the advantage of one dominant language. I mean, of course, the British Empire; and surely it is, on the face of it, a fact of good augury for the world that the dominant language of these two vast aggregations of democracies should happen to be one and the same. The hopes—and perhaps, too, some apprehensions—arising from this unity of speech will form the subject of another article.

POSTSCRIPT.—My representation of the South as the conservative and the North as the innovating party is the only point in this article to which (so far as I know) serious objection has been made. A very able and courteous critic—Mr. Norman Hapgood—writes to me as follows: "I think the history of the Kansas-Nebraska trouble, in which the preliminary conflict centred, the speeches of the time, North and South, the party platforms, all proved that the North said, 'Slavery shall keep its rights and have no further extension,' while the South said, 'It shall go into any newly-acquired territory it chooses.' In 1860 the slave interest was more protected and extended by law than ever before in the history of the country. It had simply made a new claim which the North could not allow. The abolitionists were few; the Northerners who said that slavery should not be extended were many.... I don't believe there is an American historian of standing who does not say that the propositions of the South, on which the North took issue in 1861, were these: (1) Slavery shall go into all territory hereafter acquired; (2) We will secede if this is not allowed."

It was inevitable that this protest should be raised, since, in the limited space at my command, I had imperfectly expressed my meaning. My reply to Mr. Hapgood puts it, I hope, more clearly. It ran as follows:".... What I was trying to do was not so much to summarise conscious motives as to present my own interpretation (right or wrong) of the sub-conscious, the unconscious forces that were at work. I go behind the declarations of Northern statesmen, and what, I have no doubt, was the sincere sentiment of the majority in the North, against interference with slavery in the existing slave States. I have tried to allow to this sentiment what weight it deserves, in saying that the North 'obscurely and reluctantly felt a revision of the Constitution essential to the national welfare.' But my view is that whatever they said, and whatever, on the surface of their minds, they thought, the people of the North knew, even if they denied it to themselves, that chattel slavery was impossible in the modern world; and furthermore that the people of the South were justified in that instinct which told them that the institution, fatally menaced, was to be saved only by secession. The kernel of the matter, to my thinking, lay in the fugitive slave question. The provision of the Constitution for the return of fugitive slaves, though it may seem a matter of detail, was, I think, in reality the keystone of the arch. Make it inoperative, and the institution was doomed. Now many of the Northern States, by 'personal liberty laws' and the like, had long been picking at that keystone. Whatever were the professions of politicians and people as to non-interference, they shrank from the logical corollary, which would have been the sincere, whole-hearted and cheerful carrying out of Article IV., Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution. They were even, I think, logically bound to accept loyally the Dred Scott decision, which was absolutely constitutional. To protest against it, to seek to evade it, was to insist on a revision of the Constitution. But it was inconceivable that a civilised community, not blinded by local Southern prejudice, could loyally accept the Dred Scott decision, or could cheerfully assist the Southern slaveholder to capture and carry off from their own hearthstones, as it were, his runaway chattel. Therefore, the position and the protestations of the North were mutually contradictory. It was a case of trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds; and the North was bound to the hare by fundamental considerations of humanity and self-interest, to the hounds, only by a compact accepted at a time when its consequences could not possibly be foreseen. I do not doubt that the North, on the surface of its will, sincerely desired to keep this compact; but the South, with an instinct which was really that of self-preservation, looked, as I am trying to look, beneath the conscious surface to the unconscious sweep of current. It is not with reference to the struggle for Western expansion that I call the South the conservative and constitutional party. There, as it seems to me, the question was entirely an open one, the power of Congress over territories being undefined in the Constitution; and no doubt the South, in the course of the struggle, often took up violent and extravagant positions. My argument is that the attitude of the North, whatever its protestations, virtually threatened the institution of slavery in the old slave States, and that therefore the South had virtual, if not formal, justification for holding the constitutional compact broken."

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