en from you by all the natural
estrangements of the present life, this common life of all the loyal,
this cause which is the one cause of all the loyal, is that for which
you live. In spirit you are really sundered from none of those who
themselves live in the spirit.

All this, I say, is what it is the faith of all the loyal to regard as
the real life in which we live and move and have our being, precisely in
so far as men come to understand what loyalty is. Thus, then, in
general, to be loyal is to believe that there are real causes. And to be
universally loyal is to believe that the one cause of loyalty itself,
the invisible church of all the loyal, is a reality; something as real
as we are. But causes are never detached human beings; nor are causes
ever mere crowds, heaps, collections, aggregations of human beings.
Causes are at once personal (if by person you mean the ordinary human
individual in his natural character) and _super_-personal. Persons they
are, because only where persons are found can causes be defined.
Super-personal they are, because no mere individual human creature, and
no mere pairs or groups or throngs of human beings, can ever constitute
unified causes. You cannot be loyal to a crowd as a crowd. A crowd can
shout, as at a game or a political convention. But only some sort of
organized unity of social life can either do the work of an unit or hold
the effective loyalty of the enlightened worker who does not merely
shout with the throng. And so when you are really loyal to your country,
your country does not mean to you merely the crowd, the mass of your
separate fellow citizens. Still less does it mean the mere organs, or
the separate servants of the country,--the custom house, the War
Department, the Speaker of the House, or any other office or official.
When you sing "My country, 'tis of thee," you do not mean, "My
post-office, 'tis of thee," nor yet, "My fellow citizens, 'tis of you,
just as the creatures who crowd the street and who overfill the railway
cars," that I sing. If the poet continues in his own song to celebrate
the land, the "rocks and rills," the "woods and templed hills," he is
still speaking only of symbols. What he means is the country as an
invisible but, in his opinion, perfectly real spiritual unity. General
Nogi, in a recent Japanese publication about Bushido, expressed his own
national ideal beautifully in the words: "Here the sovereign and the
people are of one family a