s held in as high esteem.

The continued prevalence of this archaic animus among the modern
peoples, as well as the fact that it is universally placed high among
the virtues, must be taken to argue that it is, in its elements, an
hereditary trait, of the nature of an inborn impulsive propensity,
rather than a product of habituation. It is, in substance, not
something that can be learned and unlearned. From one generation to
another, the allegiance may shift from one nationality to another, but
the fact of unreflecting allegiance at large remains. And it all argues
also that no sensible change has taken effect in the hereditary
endowment of the race, at least in this respect, during the period known
by record or by secure inference,--say, since the early Neolithic in
Europe; and this in spite of the fact that there has all this while been
opportunity for radical changes in the European population by
cross-breeding, infiltration and displacement of the several racial
stocks that go to make up this population. Hence, on slight reflection
the inference has suggested itself and has gained acceptance that this
trait of human nature must presumably have been serviceable to the
peoples of the earlier time, on those levels of savagery or of the lower
barbarism on which the ancestral stocks of the European population first
made good their survival and proved their fitness to people that quarter
of the earth. Such, indeed, is the common view; so common as to pass for
matter-of-course, and therefore habitually to escape scrutiny.

Still it need not follow, as more patient reflection will show. All the
European peoples show much the same animus in this respect; whatever
their past history may have been, and whatever the difference in past
experience that might be conceived to have shaped their temperament. Any
difference in the pitch of patriotic conceit and animosity, between the
several nationalities or the several localities, is by no means wide,
even in cases where the racial composition of the population is held to
be very different, as, e.g., between the peoples on the Baltic seaboard
and those on the Mediterranean. In point of fact, in this matter of
patriotic animus there appears to be a wider divergence,
temperamentally, between individuals within any one of these communities
than between the common run in any one community and the corresponding
common run in any other. But even such divergence of individual temper
in resp