best the pity of a real patriot rather than his active love. Our country is something more than the single procession which passes across its borders in one generation; it means the land with all its people in all their periods; the ancestors whose exertions made us what we are, and whose memory is precious to us; the posterity to whom we are to transmit what we prize, unstained as we received it; and he who loves his country truly and serves her rightly must act and speak not for the present generation alone, but for all that rightly live, every event in whose history is inseparable from every other. If we pray, as does the seal of Boston, that God will be to us as he was to the fathers," then we must be to God what our fathers were.

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But after Philosophy has forced the vociferous patriot to define what he means by his country, she has a yet more searching question to ask: What will you do and what will you suffer for this country you love? How shall your love be shown?

There is one of the old Greek maxims which says in four words of that divine language what a modern tongue can scarcely stammer in four times four: Sparta is thine allotted home; make her a home of order and beauty." Whatever our country needs to make her perfect, that she calls on us to do.

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I have run over to you some of the great sacrifices and great exertions which patriots have made to make their dear home perfect and themselves perfect for her sake. But everything done or renounced to make her perfect must recognize that she is not perfect yet; and what our country chiefly calls on us for is not mighty exertions and sacrifices, but those particular

ones, small or great, which shall do her real good and not harm.

That her commerce should whiten every sea; that her soil should yield freely vegetable and mineral wealth; that she should be dotted with peaceful homes, the abode of virtue and love; that her cities should be adorned with all that is glorious in art; that famine and poverty and plague and crime should be fought with all the united energy of head and hand and heart; that historians and poets and orators should continue to make her high achievements and mighty aims known to all her children and to the world; that the oppressed of every land may find a refuge within her borders; that she may stand before her sister nations indeed a sister, loved and honored, these are the commonplaces, tedious, if noble to recount, of what patriotism has sought to do in many ages.

Yet every one of these things when actually achieved, has had a worm at the core of the showy fruit, which has made their mighty authors but little better than magnificent traitors.

For every one of these has been achieved at the expense of other nations, as ancient, as glorious, as dear to their own children, as worthy of patriotic love as their triumphant antagonists; and every one has been achieved at the still worse price of corruption and tyranny at home.

Every country has in times mistaken material for moral wealth, and has grown corrupt as she grew great; and every country in time has fancied that she could not be great and honored while her sisters were great and honored too; and has gone to war with

them hoping to enlarge her borders at their expense and to gain by their loss.

It is here, again, at this very point, that the philosopher calls upon the patriot to say what he means by his cry, Our country, right or wrong," the maxim of one who threw away an illustrious life in that worst of wicked encounters, a duel.

If there are such words as right and wrong, and those words stand for eternal realities, why shall not a nation, why shall not her loving sons, be made to bow to the same law, the utterance of God in history and in the heart? Can a king, can a president, can a congress, can a whole nation, by its pride or its passions turn wrong into right; or what authority have they to trifle or shuffle with either?

We are told that if we ever find ourselves at war with another country, no matter how that war was brought on, no matter what folly or wickedness broke the peace, no matter how completely we might oppose and deprecate it up to the moment of its outbreak, no matter how, as truthful historians, we may condemn it after it is over, no matter how iniquitous or tyrannical our sense and our conscience tells us are the 1 terms on which peace has been obtained, we ought, during the war, to be heartily and avowedly for it.

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We must not desert the flag." Patriotism demands that we should always stand by our country as against every other.

And what are the patriots in our rival country to be doing the while? Are they to support the war against us whether they think it right or wrong? Are they cheerfully to pay all taxes? Are they to volun