k or die for
our country, and will, while life lasts, bring us home at last.

To those who know the local narrowness, the jealousies and pettiness of
much of our own national life, it will seem a primary duty in education
to present the country as an object of education and service, imperfect
indeed and limited by larger ends, but yet supreme over the selfish
interests of trade, town, or individual. This, with all its terrible
losses, the war is doing for us with mighty and irresistible strokes,
and it is a tragic truth that in our present imperfect social state, it
is only a war, hurling us against other great and really co-operating
communities of men, which can make us bear with comparative ease and
cheerfulness the most serious burdens of loss and suffering. We act
instantly as one people in war, we haggle and hesitate about the most
moderate sacrifices to secure an advance in peace. It is this quality in
patriotism, and in war as its stimulus, which largely and naturally
biases our view. But to the ideal of a united Western civilization or a
united mankind it is only one step. We cannot do without patriotism, but
we must immediately proceed beyond it. We cannot reform the troubles and
conflicts of mankind by attempting to root up some of our most tenacious
passions; we progress by mastering and not mutilating our being. We have
to advance beyond the limits of patriotism by wider sympathy, by seeing
analogies, by recognizing the facts of common interests and co-operation
in the world.

But here again, looking at the question from an educational rather than
an abstract point of view, we have to recognize that actual realization
of the life and services of other nations is a slow, difficult, and, at
best, a limited process. It was really easier for the travelling student
of the Middle Ages to enter into the simple and similar life of
universities abroad than for the modern traveller to grasp the complex
relations of a great foreign city or state. We have therefore, in
practice, to select and concentrate. For the modern Englishman a
knowledge of one or two other countries and languages is as much as the
pressure of life will permit, and it is greatly to be regretted that
poverty and hard work limit even this acquisition to very few. A
_Wanderjahr_ for the working-man would do much to cement the unity of
western civilization.

Until the recent acute rivalry with Germany developed, English
sympathies were fairly evenl