ll as the greatest, on the rights of a
State, means slavery;" this remark occurring early in an article of
twenty-five columns, in which _negro_ slavery is not so much as
mentioned until the twenty-first column.]

[Footnote J: See _Postscript_ to this article.]

IV

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