unfold
itself and expand in the great field of Humanity among all colours and
races.

Personally, I am probably more International by temperament than
Patriotic. I feel a strange kinship and intimacy with all sorts of queer
and outlandish races--Chinese, Egyptian, Mexican, or Polynesian--and
always a slight but persistent sense of estrangement and
misapprehension among my own people. Flag-waving certainly, does not
stir me. Still, I feel that, whatever one's country may be, the love of
it has value and is not to be scoffed at. The Nation is bigger than the
Parish; and to a man of limited outlook it is a means of getting him out
of his own very narrow and local circle of life; to rob him of that in
order to jump him into a cosmopolitan attitude (which to him may be
quite empty and arid) is a mistake. It is easy enough to break the shell
for the growing chick, but if you break it too soon your chick, when
hatched, will be dead.

If you look at the great majority of those who are enthusing just now
about our country and patriotically detesting the Germans, you will see
that notwithstanding lies and slanders and cant galore, and much of
conceit and vanity, their patriotism _is_ pulling them together from one
end of Britain to another, causing them to help each other in a thousand
ways, urging them to make sacrifices for the common good, helping them
to grow the sinews and limbs of the body politic, and even the wings
which will one day transport that body into a bigger world. Really, I
think we ought to be very grateful to the Germans for doing all this for
us; and the Germans ought to be grateful to us for an exactly similar
reason. You will see plainly enough that the great majority of those who
are at this moment giving their thoughts and lives for their countrymen
and neighbours either in Germany or in England could not by any manner
of possibility be expected to act with similar self-surrender and
enthusiasm in an International cause. They are not grown to that point
of development yet, and it is better that they should learn helpfulness
and brotherhood within somewhat narrow bounds than perhaps not learn
these things at all in the open and indiscriminate field of universal
equality. After all, to stimulate love and friendship there is nothing
like a common enemy!

It is an old story and an old difficulty. There comes a time when every
institution of social life becomes rotten and diseased and has to be
removed to