Now love is apt to express itself in praise, and praise commonly asserts that a thing is good of its kind or superior at least to the average of its peers. Hence the patriot, as lover of his country, is expected to say and believe that his is a good country, or even the best of countries, and that many or most of its peculiarities are so many proofs of its superiority to others. So long as he maintains this general attitude, he is granted the lover's privilege of occasional criticism. Radical and persistent criticism, however, will, it seems, prove a man no patriot. Fichte, writing in the days when Germany (as distinct from Prussia) was a mere possibility, tells us of an acquaintance who made a habit of devoting half-an-hour every afternoon to what he called the practice of patriotism. Being asked by Fichte how he employed it, he explained that he searched the news sheet until he found some act of the government which he could praise; and on this he fastened his mind in joyful contemplation for the remainder of the allotted time. If none of its acts were quite satisfactory, he chose the best he could find. "For a patriot," he said, “ must praise." The incident is intended to be farcical; but the test of patriotism suggested by it is still widely accepted. A man is expected to believe that his wife and his country are the best of wives and countries, as the platoon commanders of the British Army in France were repeatedly told during the war 44 that each must consider his platoon the best in the Army. However much one may sympathise with the attitude of which such phrases are the expression, when it is genuine and not mere affectation, it is evident that it is open to the charge of irrational partiality, and it is not surprising that the critics of patriotism have pressed the point. "It is clear," says Tolstoy,*** that if each people and each State considers itself the best of peoples and States, they all dwell in a gross and harmful delusion." It is also clear that it is not good manners to go about boasting of the excellence of one's wife, family, or country. Tedious at home, it becomes offensive abroad. On the other side may be cited the instructive, but no doubt apocryphal, saying—“ I do not like my mother, but of course I love her." If love and liking are not inseparable companions, there is hope that patriotism, considered as love of country, may be found to be separable from praise. § 3. PATRIOTISM AS DESIRE FOR THE GOOD OF ONE'S COUNTRY The second element recognised in patriotism was the desire for the good of one's country. Here, of course, all the old quarrels as to the meaning of the word " good break out and threaten to confuse the issue. It may * Patriotism and Government, tr. by Aylmer Maude. The other quotations from Tolstoy in this chapter are from the same essay. 證 " be true that all men in every action in some sense seek their own good: it may also be true that a good man in his most characteristic act follows what is in a sense another's good. It may be doubtful whether "good can be distinguished from "useful" or whether it has any definite meaning at all apart from an accompanying will to pursue it. But we shall do well to evade these problems in this place. Let us therefore say that the patriot desires that his country shall be wealthy, powerful, civilised and just. Everything, probably, which a patriot commonly desires for his country, and rejoices that it should obtain, can be grouped under one of these four heads, and each term seems to have a definite and distinct meaning. There is however, a difficulty in the application of these terms to countries or nations, which must be here noted. It is not at all certain what is meant when a country is said to deserve any of these epithets. If the aggregate income of its individual citizens makes a country rich, then one fabulously rich man might make a community of miserably poor people the richest in the world. If, again, the test is the amount of money raised annually, per head of population, in taxes, then the country which spends most lavishly on armaments of war will almost certainly appear to be the richest. Similar difficulties may be raised concerning the attributes of power and civilisation, turning mainly on the question whether each is thought to belong to the State, to the community as politically organised, or to its individual members, and if the latter, whether an average may be struck, or whether a test should not rather be found in the state of the least prosperous section of the country's population. These are real difficulties, and their solution cannot here be attempted. They are, however, answered sufficiently for our present purpose, if we remark, first, that common opinion in these matters is uncritical, not to say confused. The patriotic press will boast of the colossal size of private fortunes as disclosed by the Death Duties, and the unprecedented magnitude of receipts and expenditure in the latest Budget, or of the increased value of the exports from British ports; it will rejoice in the successes of British rowing or boxing, in the discoveries of a British chemist or engineer, and in a triumph of British diplomacy or an extension of the British Empire. All that will bear the epithet British is fuel to its patriotism, whether the State has a hand in it or not. And, secondly, it is plain that to the patriot his country is personified as a kind of paterfamilias, who enjoys, and in a sense owns, the achievements of any of his children. My country's good is therefore not to be distinguished from the good of its citizens; and the founder of a flourishing manufacturing business can be regarded as the benefactor of his town and country, on the one hand as making a fortune for himself, thus increasing his country's wealth, on the other hand as providing regular and well-paid employment for a number of its citizens, thus adding to his country's power, and in virtue of both facts as enhancing the dignity and importance of the town in which he elected to establish his business. No direct profit to town or country as politically organised need be implied. Of the four attributes above enumerated, power seems to be that most commonly claimed and desired by the patriot for his country. Increases of wealth, of territory, or of population seem to be welcomed in the main more or less uncritically, as evidence of increased power. Quantities of patriotic poetry of all dates could be cited as evidence of this. Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free, God, Who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet. Power, however, is not generally accepted as its own justification. Strength divorced from wisdom and unaccompanied by virtue is a temptation to its possessor and a danger to others. The praise of power, therefore, is commonly accompanied by the assumption that the power is and will be wisely used. The patriot feels bound to credit his country with a civilisation superior to any other and a morality which is beyond reproach. Sometimes the claim is explicitly made. Englishmen |