_is_ one's natural place, I wonder? For the Chinese it is
the inner side of the wall. For the red man it is the forest. The
natural place of everybody, I believe, is within the crust of all manner
of prejudices, social, religious, literary. That is as men conceive of
'natural places.' But, in the highest sense, I ask you, how _can_ a man
or a woman leave his or her natural place. Wherever God's universe is
round, and God's law above, there is a natural place. Circumstances, the
force of natural things, have brought me here and kept me; it is my
natural place. And, intellectually speaking, having grown to a certain
point by help of certain opportunities, my way of regarding the world is
also natural to me, my opinions are the natural deductions of my mind.
Isn't it so? Still I do beg to say both to you and to others accusing
that Italy is not my 'adopted country.' I love Italy, but I love France,
too, and certainly I love England. Because I have broken through what
seems to me the English 'Little Pedlingtonism,' am I to be supposed to
take up an Italian 'Little Pedlingtonism'? No, indeed. I love truth and
justice, or I try to love truth and justice, more than any Plato's or
Shakespeare's country.[73] I certainly do not love the egotism of
England, nor wish to love it. I class England among the most immoral
nations in respect to her foreign politics. And her 'National Defence'
cry fills me with disgust. But this by no means proves that I have
adopted another country--no, indeed! In fact, patriotism in the narrow
sense is a virtue which will wear out, sooner or later, everywhere. Jew
and Greek must drop their antagonisms; and if Christianity is ever to
develop it will not respect frontiers.

As to Italy, though I nearly broke my heart over her last summer, and
love the Italians deeply, I should feel passionately any similar crisis
anywhere. You cannot judge the people or the question out of the 'Times'
newspaper, whose sole policy is, it seems to me, to get up a war between
France and England, though the world should perish in the struggle. The
amount of fierce untruth uttered in that paper, and sworn to by the
'Saturday Review,' makes the moral sense curdle within one. You do not
_know_ this as we do, and you therefore set it down as matter of
Continental prejudice on my part. Well, time will prove. As to Italy, I
have to put on the rein to prevent myself from hoping into the ideal
again. I am on my guard against another f