omising beginning. To-day when you hear a man
speaking loudly about "_my_ country," or "_my_ family," or "_my_
society," as the case may be, you may be perfectly sure that he is
projecting himself into his patriotism, or into his loyalty to family
or society; and indeed this was the lowly beginning of what has come to
be an excellent virtue. We have had to learn benevolence by
concentrating unselfish attention upon the few rather than the many.
The farther back you go in history, the sterner does the operation of
that law appear, and the less promising the future of mankind. If
people tell me the world is not getting better, I suggest that it might
be worth their while to read a chapter of mediaeval or primitive
history. In the "Odyssey," for instance, Homer sketches for us the
career of a strong and remarkable man. His hero, supposed to be a
paragon of virtue, is capable of things you would call scoundrelism
to-day. He and his band of storm-tossed companions land upon an island
of the Grecian Archipelago and find a city there. They promptly sack
it and kill all the inhabitants--men, women, and children. It seemed
to be the proper thing to do, and found its way into verse, and they
boasted about such heroic exploits. It was brutal murder, and the men
who were capable of it were nothing more or less than pirates. Yet
that stern, terrible tendency thus illustrated is just one with that
inscrutable law under which nature herself has come to be what she is.
It is what I call the self-ward tendency, the desire to grasp and keep
at the expense of other individualities other societies than our own.

But in history, and from those very earliest times down to our own,
another tendency has shown itself at work, a counter tendency. The two
have been so intertwined frequently--as I have indicated in showing
where patriotism comes from--that it has been difficult to dissociate
them; but they are quite distinct. Take, for instance, the magnificent
devotion of Arnold von Winkelried on the field of Sempach. Switzerland
has not existed as a political unit for many centuries, but during that
time her roll of heroes has been large. In the formative hour of Swiss
independence, when that tiny folk were struggling for their liberty
against the overweening power of Austria, it must have seemed a
hopeless undertaking--this group of mountaineers against the chivalry
of an empire. The great battle of Sempach was fought. The Swiss,