ools, if it is to be
edifying, involves one practical consequence of dominant importance.
Everybody within the school-house--masters, teachers, pupils and
janitors, old pupils and young, good pupils and bad, must feel one to
another an indestructible loyalty. Such loyalty is merely the subjective
aspect of their inevitable mutual association; it is merely the
recognition that as a worldly body they must all live or die and conquer
or fail together. The existence of an invincible loyalty is a condition
of the perpetuity of the school. The man who believes himself wise is
always tempted to ignore or undervalue the foolish brethren. The man who
believes himself good is always tempted actively to dislike the perverse
brethren. The man who insists at any cost upon having his own way is
always twisting the brethren into his friends or his enemies. But the
teaching of the national school constantly tends to diminish these
causes of disloyalty. Its tendency is to convert traditional patriotism
into a patient devotion to the national ideal, and into a patient
loyalty towards one's fellow-countrymen as the visible and inevitable
substance through which that ideal is to be expressed.

In the foregoing characteristic of a democratic nation, we reach the
decisive difference between a nation which is seeking to be wholly
democratic and a nation which is content to be semi-democratic. In the
semi-democratic nation devotion to the national ideal does not to the
same extent sanctify the citizen's relation in feeling and in idea to
his fellow-countrymen. The loyalty demanded by the national ideal of
such a country may imply a partly disloyal and suspicious attitude
towards large numbers of political associates. The popular and the
national interests must necessarily in some measure diverge. In a
nationalized democracy or a democratic nation the corresponding dilemma
is mitigated. The popular interest can only be efficiently expressed in
a national policy and organization. The national interest is merely a
more coherent and ameliorating expression of the popular interest. Its
consistency, so far as it is consistent, is the reflection of a more
humanized condition of human nature. It increases with the increasing
power of its citizens to deal fairly and to feel loyally towards their
fellow-countrymen; and it cannot increase except through the overthrow
of the obstacles to fair dealing and loyal feeling.

The responsibility and loyalty whi