permanence. It may be that each of its ideas
was, as it were, mixed with immortality. Certainly something of this
kind can be seen in the conception which turned marriage from a contract
into a sacrament. But whatever the cause, it is certain that even for
the most secular types of our own time their relation to their native
land has become not contractual but sacramental. We may say that flags
are rags, that frontiers are fictions, but the very men who have said it
for half their lives are dying for a rag, and being rent in pieces for a
fiction even as I write. When the battle-trumpet blew in 1914 modern
humanity had grouped itself into nations almost before it knew what it
had done. If the same sound is heard a thousand years hence, there is no
sign in the world to suggest to any rational man that humanity will not
do exactly the same thing. But even if this great and strange
development be not enduring, the point is that it is felt as enduring.
It is hard to give a definition of loyalty, but perhaps we come near it
if we call it the thing which operates where an obligation is felt to be
unlimited. And the minimum of duty or even decency asked of a patriot is
the maximum that is asked by the most miraculous view of marriage. The
recognized reality of patriotism is not mere citizenship. The recognized
reality of patriotism is for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in
sickness and in health, in national growth and glory and in national
disgrace and decline; it is not to travel in the ship of state as a
passenger, but if need be to go down with the ship.

It is needless to tell here again the tale of that earthquake episode in
which a clearance in the earth and sky, above the confusion and
abasement of the crowns, showed the commanding figure of a woman of the
people. She was, in her own living loneliness, a French Revolution. She
was the proof that a certain power was not in the French kings or in the
French knights, but in the French. But the fact that she saw something
above her that was other than the sky, the fact that she lived the life
of a saint and died the death of a martyr, probably stamped the new
national sentiment with a sacred seal. And the fact that she fought for
a defeated country, and, even though it was victorious, was herself
ultimately defeated, defines that darker element of devotion of which I
spoke above, which makes even pessimism consistent with patriotism. It
is more appropriate in this p