of the fundamental elements of
patriotism. Such an education would be very different, however, from
the state planned and authorized education that has been carried on
under autocratic regimes. The difference is one of spirit and result,
rather than of method. In one case the State becomes a kind of
Nirvana, in the thought of which personality and individuality are
negated. Patriotism produced in the minds of the young under the
influence of a democratic spirit tends to become a creative force
rather than a blind devotion to an accepted order. Institutions are
made and advanced rather than merely obeyed and defended in this
educational process. The widest scope and the freest opportunity are
allowed for superior qualities of leaders and for right principles to
have an effect upon society (and the result we invite indeed is a
profound hero worship on the part of the young), but the conditions
would be such that no other kind of authority would be able to exert a
wide influence. To secure these conditions is, of course, one of the
chief tasks of all the administrative branches of our educational
service.

The final factor of patriotism, according to our analysis, is loyalty
to country as an historical object. The ideas and the feelings
centering about the conception of country as personal, as living, as
having rights and experience, duties and individuality are likely to
be vivid and intense. They are the inspirers of supreme devotion to
country, and also at times, of morbid national pride and fanatical
country-worship. The education of this idea of country we should
suppose would be one of the fundamental problems of the development of
patriotism. Presumably we are not to try to destroy this idea of
country that all people seem to have, or to show it as one of the
illusions of personification. Country is, of course, different from
the mere sum of the people. It has continuity and it performs
functions and it is an historic entity. Modernize and reform this
idea, we must, but we cannot do away with it as something archaic and
superstitious. Country is real, the concepts of honor and right belong
to it, and country is something to which the mind must do homage.

Boutroux says that a nation is a _person_, and has a right to live and
to have its personality recognized as its own. Granting this to be
true, and that we must think of country as personal and active, the
question arises whether this concept of country is somet