A man supremely endowed narrows his mind when he is less than universally human. What he says and does should make laws for all-those diviner laws which have their sanction in the common sense which makes the whole world akin. Patriotism as understood by the ancients is but a partial virtue. When it is most intense it is most narrow and intolerant. In Jerusalem, in Athens, in Rome, the city was the fatherland. It was the thought of Zion, and of Ziola's brook that flowed fast by the oracle of God, of the Acropolis, with its marvelous setting in the midst of the Attic plan, of the world mother, looking from her seven hills on the Tiber's tawny wave, that made the exiles waste away with repinings for home; and their passionate devotion to their country was rarely separable from a hatred of the foreign nature. Whoever was not a citizen was an enemy or a slave. The captive foe was treated with pitiless cruelty and the slave had. no rights. We are separated from these ancient patriots less by the long lapse of time which has intervened than by the difference of spirit in which we look upon and love our country. For us the man is more than the citizen, humanity more sacred than nationality. To lead a man's life one must live for some one or something other than self. As we can see ourselves only in what is other, so we can find and love. ourselves only in what is other than ourselves. To escape from the starved condition of the isolated, the individual is impelled to identify himself with larger unities-with the family, with the state, with mankind, with God. Now for the ancients the state was the ultimate unity in which a man could find and feel himself. Hence their aims and sympathies were partial and narrow. Their patriotism was more intense, but it was less rational, less moral, and therefore less enduring and less beneficent than ours. It was not possible for them to identify themselves with the race, to recognize that all men are made of one blood, and that whenever one suffers injustice, wrong is done to all. But for us nationality has ceased to be the limit of individual sympathy, and the oppression of peoples, however remote, often affects us as though we ourselves had been injured; while noble words and heroic deeds, wherever and by whomever spoken or done, fill us with enthusiasm and gratitude. Many causes, of which the Christian religion is the deepest and. most far-reaching, have led to the wider views and more generous appreciativeness of modern men. In looking to the one heavenly Father they are drawn together and held by ties, consecrated by faith and approved by reason. Science, which deals with laws that are universal, that act alike upon the farthest star and the grain of sand at our feet, on the face as on individuals, promotes this catholicity of feeling and interest. Our machinery, too, in bringing the ends of the world together, facilitates the intercourse of the peoples of the earth and thereby weakens their immemorial prejudices and hatreds. The commercial interdependence of the nations has a like tendency; while the constantly increasing influence of woman. makes for a larger sympathy and love. No great movement can now long remain within the boundaries of the nation in which it originates. The questions of education, of labor, of the rights of woman, rouse attention and discussion in every civilized country. A new discovery or invention is at once heralded from land to land. The telegraph and the printing press. mediate a rapid and continuous interchange of thought throughout the world, and thus help to make us all, in a way never before possible, citizens of the world. At the present moment America, if simple truth may be uttered without incurring the suspicion of conceit, represents the general tendency and sentiment of the modern age more than any other country. Here the national feeling is larger and more hospitable than anywhere else; here men of all tongues and races. more easily find themselves at home than anywhere else. No other country is so attractive, no other affords in such fullness opportunity for self-activity in every sphere of endeavor, no other insures such complete civil and religious liberty. Nowhere else is there. so much freedom from abuses which, because they are inveterate, seem to be sacred; nowhere else is there so much good will, so much readiness to help, so much general intelligence, such sanguine faith in the ability of an enlightened and religious people, who govern themselves, to overcome all obstacles and to find a remedy for whatever mishaps or evils may befall them. Here, too, more than elsewhere possibly, men feel that there is a higher love than the love of country, that the citizen can serve his country rightly only when he holds himself in vital communion with the eternal principles on which human life rests, and by which it is nourished. The American's loyalty to his country is first of all loyalty to truth, to justice, to humanity. He feels that its institutions can be enduring only when they are founded on religion and morality. He is less inspired by the fortune of the Republic, its material advantages and possibilities, than by his spiritual significance and destiny. He is, indeed, filled with a sense of gladness when he beholds it stretch from ocean to ocean, from the lakes to the gulf; when he sees the northern pine salute the |