16. PATRIOTISM1

BY MOST REV. JOHN LANCASTER SPALDING, D.D.

There is a higher love than love of country, the love of truth, the love of justice, the love of righteousness; and he alone is a patriot who is willing to suffer obloquy and the loss of money and friends, rather than betray the cause of truth, justice, and righteousness, for only by being faithful to this can he rightly serve his country. Moral causes govern the standing and the falling of States as of individuals; and conquering armies move forward in vain, in vain the fleeting fabric of trade is spread, if a moral taint within slowly moulder all. The national life is at fault if it be not in harmony with the eternal principles on which all right human life rests. The greatest and the noblest men when they meet rise into regions where all merely national distinctions are forgotten and transcended. In studying the works of a philosopher, a poet, or a man of science, we give little heed to what country he was born and lived in, so eager are we to learn the truth and beauty he reveals, -truth and beauty, which are of no country, which are wide and all-embracing as the universe. In the presence of heroic virtue also, the national limitations disappear, that the godlike man, who belongs to all countries and ages, may stand forth in his proper light. A man supremely endowed narrows his mind when he is less than universally human. What he says and does should make laws for all,-those diviner laws which have their sanction in the common sense which makes the whole world akin.

'Excerpts from an address delivered at the Crève-Coeur Club banquet, Peoria, February 22, 1899. Reprinted through the kindness of A. C. McClurg & Co., from the volume entitled "Opportunity and Other Essays.''

Patriotism as understood by the ancients is but a partial virtue. When it is most intense, it is most narrow and intolerant. In Jerusalem, in Athens, in Rome, the city was the fatherland. It was the thought of Zion, and of "Siloa's brook that flowed fast by the oracle of God"; of the Acropolis, with its marvelous setting in the midst of the Attic plain; of the world-mother, looking from her seven hills on the Tiber's tawny wave,-that made the exiles waste away with repinings for home; and their passionate devotion to their country was rarely separable from a hatred of the foreign nature. Whoever was not a citizen was an enemy or a slave; the captive foe was treated with pitiless cruelty, and the slave had no rights.

We are separated from those ancient patriots less by the long lapse of time which has intervened than by the difference of spirit in which we look upon and love our country. For us the man is more than the citizen, humanity more sacred than nationality. To lead a man's life, one must live for some one or some thing other than self. As we can see ourselves only in what is other, so we can find and love ourselves only in what is other than ourselves. To escape from the starved condition of the isolated, the individual is impelled to identify himself with larger unities,-with the family, with the State, with mankind, with God.

Now, for the ancients the State was the ultimate unity in which a man could find and feel himself. Hence their aims and sympathies were partial and narrow. Their patriotism was more intense, but it was less rational, less moral, and therefore less enduring and less beneficent than ours. It was not possible for them to identify themselves with the race, to recognize that all men are made of one blood, and that whenever one suffers injustice, wrong is done to all. But for us nationality has ceased to be the limit of individual sympathy, and the oppression of peoples, however remote, often affects us as though we ourselves had been injured; while noble words and heroic deeds, wherever and by whomever spoken and done, fill us with enthusiasm and gratitude.

Many causes, of which the Christian religion is the deepest and most far-reaching, have led to the wider views and more

generous appreciativeness of modern men. In looking to the one heavenly Father, they are drawn together and held by ties consecrated by faith and approved by reason. Science, which deals with laws that are universal, that act alike upon the farthest star and the grain of sand at our feet, on the race as on individuals, promotes this catholicity of feeling and interest. Our machinery, too, in bringing the ends of the world together, facilitates the intercourse of the peoples of the earth and thereby weakens their immemorial prejudices and hatreds. The commercial interdependence of the nations has a like tendency; while the constantly increasing influence of woman makes for larger sympathy and love. No great movement can now long remain within the boundaries of the nation in which it originates. The questions of education, of labor, of the rights of woman rouse attention and discussion in every civilized country. A new discovery or invention is at once heralded from land to land. The telegraph and the printing-press mediate a rapid and continuous interchange of thought throughout the world, and thus help to make us all, in a way never before possible, citizens of the world.

At the present moment America, if simple truth may be uttered without incurring the suspicion of conceit, represents the general tendency and sentiment of the modern age more than any other country. Here the national feeling is larger and more hospitable than anywhere else; here men of all tongues and races more easily find themselves at home than anywhere else. No other country is so attractive, no other affords in such fulness opportunity for self-activity in every sphere of endeavor, no other insures such complete civil and religious liberty. Nowhere else is there so much freedom from abuses which, because they are inveterate, seem to be sacred; nowhere else is there so much good will, so much readiness to help, so much general intelligence, such sanguine faith in the ability of an enlightened and religious people, who govern themselves, to overcome all obstacles and to find a remedy for whatever mishaps or evils may befall them. Here too, more than elsewhere possibly, men feel that there is a higher love than the love of country, that the citizen can serve his country rightly only when he holds

himself in vital communion with the eternal principles on which human life rests, and by which it is nourished.

The American's loyalty to his country is first of all loyalty to truth, to justice, to humanity. He feels that its institutions can be enduring only when they are founded on religion and morality. He is less inspired by the fortune of the Republic, its material advantages and possibilities, than by its spiritual significance and destiny. He is, indeed, filled with a sense of gladness when he beholds it stretch from ocean to ocean, from the Lakes to the Gulf; when he sees the northern pine salute the southern palm as a fellow-citizen; when he looks on its prairies teeming with harvests sufficient to feed the world, on its mountains and plains filled with silver and gold, with iron and copper, with coal and oil.

But he is less impressed by this geographical and material greatness and splendor than by the intellectual and moral conditions which America presents. Nature is fruitful in vain where man is contemptible. The palace makes ridiculous the occupant who is a beggar in mind and spirit. To no purpose is the country great, if the men are small. Life is more than life's circumstance, man more than his environment. The American patriot, then, more than others seeks grounds for his love of country chiefly in the world of man's higher being. For him freedom, knowledge, truth, justice, good will, humanity, are the essential needs; and it is a little thing that America offers facilities for satisfying the physical and material wants, if here the soul is starved.

Democracy itself is not an end, but a means. The end is a nobler, wiser, stronger, more beneficent kind of man and woman. How shall such men and women be formed except by opportunity, opportunity for all of worship, of education, of culture, of work that strengthens and purifies, while it creates material comfort and independence? If a nobler race is to spring forth in this new world, all the influences that are active and potent in the national life must conspire to form public opinion, by which in the end we are all ruled,-a public opinion which shall be favorable to pure religion, to the best education, and to sound morality. The better kind, however otherwise they may dis

agree, must unite and support one another in ceaseless efforts to create such a public opinion. They must not merely lead loyal, brave, chaste, and helpful lives, but they must so live that the atmosphere in which they move shall receive from them a magnetic quality,-the power to stimulate all who breathe it to nobler thoughts and loves, to a deeper and more tender solicitude for the rights and needs of all men, of women and children, of the sick and forsaken, of the criminal and captive.

Goethe, who never utters a foolish thing, says that in time of peace patriotism properly consists merely in this,-that each one sweep before his own door, attend to his own business, learn his own lesson, that it may be well in his own household; and what he says, if but partial, is nevertheless essential truth. He himself, indeed, even in times of war and disaster for the fatherland, seemed to act on this principle, and he has consequently been accused by some of his own countrymen of a lack of patriotism, though in fact he did more to make possible the political union of Germany than any other man; for he more than any other awakened the self-consciousness of the German people and thus inspired them with a more intense longing for national unity.

A good patriot is first of all a good man,-true to himself and true to his relations to his fellowmen. If false to himself, he is false to all. If he love not rightly his father and mother, his wife and child, the neighbor who dwells beside him, how shall he rightly love his country? If he respect not the dignity of human nature in himself, but degrade it by drunkenness or lying or sensuality or dishonesty, how shall he feel a genuine and generous interest in the common weal, and earnestly strive to do his part in correcting the evils and abuses which impair or threaten the national life and prosperity? It will, indeed, be easy for him to make his patriotism a theme for declamation, and easy, too to throw suspicion on the loyalty of others; but if he is not a real man, it is not possible that he should be a real lover of his country.

Whoever deliberately wrongs an American, wrongs America. The worst enemy of the country is not the drunkard, but the buyer of votes, whether at the polls or in council chambers or in