commonly happen that the common man is unable, without
advice, to see that any given hostile act embodies a sacrilegious
infraction of the national honour. He will at any such conjuncture
scarcely rise to the pitch of moral indignation necessary to float a
warlike reprisal, until the expert keepers of the Code come in to
expound and certify the nature of the transgression. But when once the
lesion to the national honour has been ascertained, appraised and duly
exhibited by those persons whose place in the national economy it is to
look after all that sort of thing, the common man will be found nowise
behindhand about resenting the evil usage of which he so, by force of
interpretation, has been a victim.

CHAPTER II

ON THE NATURE AND USES OF PATRIOTISM

Patriotism may be defined as a sense of partisan solidarity in respect
of prestige. What the expert psychologists, and perhaps the experts in
Political Science, might find it necessary to say in the course of an
exhaustive analysis and definition of this human faculty would
presumably be something more precise and more extensive. There is no
inclination here to forestall definition, but only to identify and
describe the concept that loosely underlies the colloquial use of this
term, so far as seems necessary to an inquiry into the part played by
the patriotic animus in the life of modern peoples, particularly as it
bears on questions of war and peace.

On any attempt to divest this concept of all extraneous or adventitious
elements it will be found that such a sense of an undivided joint
interest in a collective body of prestige will always remain as an
irreducible minimum. This is the substantial core about which many and
divers subsidiary interests cluster, but without which these other
clustering interests and aspirations will not, jointly or severally,
make up a working palladium of the patriotic spirit.

It is true, seen in some other light or rated in some other bearing or
connection, one and another of these other interests, ideals,
aspirations, beatitudes, may well be adjudged nobler, wiser, possibly
more urgent than the national prestige; but in the forum of patriotism
all these other necessaries of human life--the glory of God and the good
of man--rise by comparison only to the rank of subsidiaries,
auxiliaries, amenities. He is an indifferent patriot who will let "life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness" cloud the issue and get in the way
of