ethodical diabolism--which this obsession has
produced in Germany. It has startled us because we thought that the
civilised world had got beyond such insanity; but it is of course no new
thing. Machiavelli said, 'I prefer my country to the salvation of my
soul'--a sentiment which sounds noble but is not; it has only a
superficial resemblance to St. Paul's willingness to be 'accursed' for
the sake of his countrymen. Devil-worship remains what it was, even when
the idol is draped in the national flag. This obsession may be in part a
survival from savage conditions, when all was at stake in every feud;
but chiefly it is an example of the idealising and universalising power
of the imagination, which turns every unchecked passion into a
monomania. The only remedy is, as Lowell's Hosea Biglow reminds us, to
bear in mind that

our true country is that ideal realm which we represent to
ourselves under the names of religion, duty, and the like.
Our terrestrial organisations are but far-off approaches to
so fair a model; and all they are verily traitors who resist
not any attempt to divert them from this their original
intendment. Our true country is bounded on the north and the
south, on the east and west, by Justice, and when she
oversteps that invisible boundary-line by so much as a
hair's breadth, she ceases to be our mother, and chooses
rather to be looked upon _quasi noverca_.

So Socrates said that the wise man will be a citizen of his true city,
of which the type is laid up in heaven, and only conditionally of his
earthly country.

The obsession of patriotism is not the only evil which we have to
consider. We may err by defect as well as by excess. Herbert Spencer
speaks of an 'anti-patriotic bias'; and it can hardly be disputed that
many Englishmen who pride themselves on their lofty morality are
suffering from this mental twist. The malady seems to belong to the
Anglo-Saxon constitution, for it is rarely encountered in other
countries, while we had a noisy pro-Napoleonic faction a hundred years
ago, and the Americans had their 'Copperheads' in the Northern States
during the civil war. In our own day, every enemy of England, from the
mad Mullah to the mad Kaiser, has had his advocates at home; and the
champions of Boer and Boxer, of Afridi and Afrikander, of the Mahdi and
the Matabele, have been usually the same persons. The English, it would
appear, differ from other