savage families joined hands in tribal loyalty, just as the scattered clans and tribes united under national government, so nations must clasp hands around the globe in a new spirit of "worldism" that shall make war impossible. But we cannot gain a world-spirit by a sudden destruction of our patriotism. We will never usher in tranquillity with a crash. The nihilism of Tolstoy would plunge us into lawlessness and anarchy, for the chief element of patriotism we must keep. "What is that element?" you ask. It is the willingness of the individual to sacrifice his welfare for the welfare of the group. There we have the stem of the world-spirit of to-morrow. But the blossom will not burst forth in a night. It must come by an unfolding and a growth. We cannot climb to universal peace upon a golden ladder and cut the rungs beneath us. Evolution builds on the past. The final spirit of worldism" will be a broadening and a deepening and a humanizing of the spirit of sacrifice which is the noblest element in our patriotism. ee ee ee But," you ask, "if the evolution of patriotism is inevitable, what have we to do with it? Why should we meddle with the course of nature?" We reply that the evolution must come through you. We are not "puppets jerked by unseen wires." "Consciousness," says Bergson, is essentially free." Man the savage or man the philosopher — he alone can decide. Let him purify patriotism with Christianity and he has brotherhood; adulterate it with avarice and he has war. The evolution of patriotism is not a physical thing. Listen to Huxley, "Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of the ethical process.' The evolution of patriotism, then, is a moral thing, and morality is man-made. We are men, but we can be supermen. We are patriots of a nation. We can be patriots of the world. The evolution of patriotism is no theorist's dream. It is a palpable fact. The patriot of one age may be the scoundrel of the next. A turn of the kaleidoscope and Paul the convict trades places with Nero the Emperor. Who was the ideal ancient patriot? The statesman, Pericles? The thinker, Plato? No. The most efficient murderer, a Macedonian boy. "I must civilize," he says. So he starts into his neighbor's country with forty thousand fighters at his back. Does Persia yield its banner? No. Then crush it. Does Thebes resist? Then burn it to the ground. Do the women prate of freedom? Load them with slave chains. What? Do they still hold out? Then slaughter the swine. And as men watch him wading through seas of blood, riding roughshod over prostrate lives and dead hopes and shattered empires, the blind age cries out, "O godlike Alexander!" "Godlike!" Oh, but there's new meaning in that word to-day. How much nobler a picture our modern patriot presents! Not waving the brand of destruction, not a king of murder will you find the great patriot of to-day. His thunderbolt of conquest was a host of righteousness. His empire was built in the hearts of men. In the teeming slums of the world's greatest city he lifted the standard of the Christ. Haggard children stretched out hands for bread. He fed them with his last crust. Thousands were dying in the city's filth. He pointed them to a more Beautiful City where pain should be no more. And when the body of William Booth was borne through the silent throngs of London streets, a million heads were bowed in reverence to this patriot of a purer day. In every hamlet of civilization some heart called him godlike. Is not the trend of patriotism clear? Are not the seeds of a new world-loyalty already in our soil? The trumpet call to war can never rouse this newer patriotism. The summons "peace on earth and good will to men that is the future bugle call. And for us the task is clear. To take our destiny into our own hands, to throw off the prejudices of nationalism, to turn our faces resolutely to the future and strive for that summit of brotherhood and universal peace, that "One far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves." |