irable in a limitation of sympathy which confines it to a fragment
of the human race. Diversities of manners and customs and traditions
are, on the whole, a good thing, since they enable different nations
to produce different types of excellence. But in national feeling
there is always latent or explicit an element of hostility to
foreigners. National feeling, as we know it, could not exist in a
nation which was wholly free from external pressure of a hostile kind.

And group feeling produces a limited and often harmful kind of
morality. Men come to identify the good with what serves the
interests of their own group, and the bad with what works against
those interests, even if it should happen to be in the interests of
mankind as a whole. This group morality is very much in evidence
during war, and is taken for granted in men's ordinary thought.
Although almost all Englishmen consider the defeat of Germany
desirable for the good of the world, yet nevertheless most of them
honor a German for fighting for his country, because it has not
occurred to them that his actions ought to be guided by a morality
higher than that of the group.

A man does right, as a rule, to have his thoughts more occupied with
the interests of his own nation than with those of others, because his
actions are more likely to affect his own nation. But in time of war,
and in all matters which are of equal concern to other nations and to
his own, a man ought to take account of the universal welfare, and not
allow his survey to be limited by the interest, or supposed interest,
of his own group or nation.

So long as national feeling exists, it is very important that each
nation should be self-governing as regards its internal affairs.
Government can only be carried on by force and tyranny if its subjects
view it with hostile eyes, and they will so view it if they feel that
it belongs to an alien nation. This principle meets with difficulties
in cases where men of different nations live side by side in the same
area, as happens in some parts of the Balkans. There are also
difficulties in regard to places which, for some geographical reason,
are of great international importance, such as the Suez Canal and the
Panama Canal. In such cases the purely local desires of the
inhabitants may have to give way before larger interests. But in
general, at any rate as applied to civilized communities, the
principle that the boundaries of nations ought t