I sat down again at his side, and for many minutes silently scratched
lines upon the road.

Fully ten minutes passed, and he turned his face to me.

"Listen!" he said. "Can you hear those distant guns? They tell me
there's no Socialism in the world to-day. That war came in and smashed
the barriers. At Ghent, not long before the war, an International
Congress met and formed an Association for the best development of the
world's cities; at Paris, one month before the strife broke out, 2000
delegates from Chambers of Commerce, representing 31 nations, met to
ensure the world's commercial peace and commercial prosperity; and just
before the war a World's Congress of Socialists met in Berlin, and
Jaures won every heart with his denunciation of human strife.

"Within a month a city-destroying army passed through Ghent and wrecked
the greatest constructional glories of the world. Within a month the
world's commerce was paralysed. Within a month Jaures was shot and
Socialists the world over became blood-blinded. To-day they 'see red.'
They know not what they are fighting for, but there they fight like
bloodthirsty fiends because they're told to. What are they fighting for?
Will life be any harder for them what flag flies above their city? The
people fight and the people suffer, and when their job is done those
left are given scraps of metal to wear and are sent back to clear up the
mess."

"Stop!" I said. "Don't forget there is such a thing as Patriotism.
Listen!

"'Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land.'"

Then he looked at me for a moment with his grave grey face--and smiled.

"Listen, my boy, I am not a Frenchman, though born in Lorraine--I am not
a German, though living most of my life in Germany--I am a Worldsman. I
am a Christian. To me all men are as brothers. I do not love any country
more than any other. I prove that by making a friend of you. I should,
in the casual order of things just now, hate you with the awful German
hate of England. Patriotism is the love of the land in which you
accidentally happened to be born. Why should any one love a particular
geographical district upon the face of the earth because there he
happened to first see the light?

"Let me tell you," he continued, with a strange fire in his eyes and
slashing at a flower by the way, "God, or Nature if you like, will enact
a punishment to fit this awful crime of th