s not
easy to detect any element of material loss involved in such a move. In
the material respect no individual would be any the worse off, with the
doubtful and dubious exception of the expatriate fortune-hunter, who
aims to fish safely in troubled waters at his compatriots' expense. But
the case stands otherwise as regards the balance of immaterial assets.
The scaffolding of much highly-prized sentiment would collapse, and the
world of poetry and pageantry--particularly that of the tawdrier and
more vendible poetry and pageantry--would be poorer by so much. The Man
Without a Country would lose his pathetic appeal, or would at any rate
lose much of it. It may be, of course, that in the sequel there would
result no net loss even in respect of these immaterial assets of
sentimental animation and patriotic self-complacency, but it is after
all fairly certain that something would be lost, and it is by no means
clear what if anything would come in to fill its place.

An historical parallel may help to illustrate the point. In the movement
out of what may be called the royal age of dynasties and chivalric
service, those peoples who have moved out of that age and out of its
spiritual atmosphere have lost much of the conscious magnanimity and
conviction of merit that once characterised that order of things, as it
still continues to characterise the prevalent habit of mind in the
countries that still continue under the archaic order of dynastic
mastery and service. But it is also to be noted that these peoples who
so have moved out of the archaic order appear to be well content with
this change of spiritual atmosphere, and they are even fairly well
persuaded, in the common run, that the move has brought them some net
gain in the way of human dignity and neighbourly tolerance, such as to
offset any loss incurred on the heroic and invidious side of life. Such
is the tempering force of habit. Whereas, e.g., on the other hand, the
peoples of these surviving dynastic States, to which it is necessary
continually to recur, who have not yet moved out of that realm of
heroics, find themselves unable to see anything in such a prospective
shift but net loss and headlong decay of the spirit; that modicum of
forbearance and equity that is requisite to the conduct of life in a
community of ungraded masterless men is seen by these stouter stomachs
as a loosening of the moral fiber and a loss of nerve.

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