service and devotion to a (fortuitously) given sovereign--or at least so
it is commonly believed. Still one can without blame, and without
excessive shame, shift one's allegiance on occasion. What is not
countenanced among civilised men is to shift out of allegiance to any
given nationality or dynasty without shifting into the like complication
of gainless obligations somewhere else. Such a shifting of national or
dynastic base is not quite reputable, though it is also not precisely
disreputable. The difficulty in the case appears to be a moral
difficulty, not a mental or a pecuniary one, and assuredly not a
physical difficulty, since the relation in question is not a physical
relation. It would appear to be of the moral order of things, in that
sense of the term in which conventional proprieties are spoken of as
moral. That is to say, it is a question of conforming to current
expectations under a code of conventional proprieties. Like much of the
conventional code of behavior this patriotic attachment has the benefit
of standardised decorum, and its outward manifestations are enjoined by
law. All of which goes to show how very seriously the whole matter is
regarded.

And yet it is also a matter of common notoriety that large aggregates of
men, not to speak of sporadic individuals, will on occasion shift their
allegiance with the most felicitous effect and with no sensible loss of
self-respect or of their good name. Such a shift is to be seen in
multiple in the German nation within the past half-century, when, for
instance, the Hanoverians, the Saxons, and even the Holsteiners in very
appreciable numbers, not to mention the subjects of minuscular
principalities whose names have been forgotten in the shuffle, all
became good and loyal subjects of the Empire and of the Imperial
dynasty,--good and loyal without reservation, as has abundantly
appeared. So likewise within a similar period the inhabitants of the
Southern States repudiated their allegiance to the Union, putting in its
place an equivalent loyalty to their new-made country; and then, when
the new national establishment slipped out from under their feet they
returned as whole-heartedly as need be to their earlier allegiance. In
each of these moves, taken with deliberation, it is not to be doubted
that this body of citizens have been moved by an unimpeachable spirit of
patriotic honour. No one who is in any degree conversant with the facts
is likely to question th