the main business in hand.

There once were, we are told, many hardy and enterprising spirits banded
together along the Spanish Main for such like ends, just as there are in
our day an even greater number of no less single-minded spirits bent on
their own "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness," according to their
light, in the money-markets of the modern world; but for all their
admirable qualities and splendid achievements, their passionate quest of
these amenities has not entitled these Gentlemen Adventurers to claim
rank as patriots. The poet says:

"Strike for your altars and your fires!
Strike for the green graves of your sires!
God and your native land!"

But, again, a temperate scrutiny of the list of desiderata so enumerated
in the poet's flight, will quickly bring out the fact that any or all of
them might drop out of the situation without prejudice to the plain call
of patriotic duty. In the last resort, when the patriotic spirit falls
back on its naked self alone, it is not reflection on the merits of
these good and beautiful things in Nature that gives him his cue and
enforces the ultimate sacrifice. Indeed it is something infinitely more
futile and infinitely more urgent,--provided only that the man is imbued
with the due modicum of patriotic devotion; as, indeed, men commonly
are. It is not faith, hope or charity that abide as the irreducible
minimum of virtue in the patriot's scheme of things; particularly not
that charity that has once been highly spoken of as being the greatest
of these. It may be that, viewed in the light of reason, as Doctor
Katzenberger would say, patriotic devotion is the most futile thing in
the world; but, for good or ill, the light of reason has nothing to do
with the case,--no more than "The flowers that bloom in the spring."

The patriotic spirit is a spirit of emulation, evidently, at the same
time that it is emulation shot through with a sense of solidarity. It
belongs under the general caption of sportsmanship, rather than of
workmanship. Now, any enterprise in sportsmanship is bent on an
invidious success, which must involve as its major purpose the defeat
and humiliation of some competitor, whatever else may be comprised in
its aim. Its aim is a differential gain, as against a rival; and the
emulative spirit that comes under the head of patriotism commonly, if
not invariably, seeks this differential advantage by injury of the rival
rather than by an increa