IV: What is true Patriotism?—Our Corrupt Stage—Superstition in the Newspaper.
HAVE you ever noticed the strange persistence with which a calumny, oft-times refuted, is again and again repeated? How often, to take a modern political instance, has it been boldly, nay, shamelessly asserted that the advanced wing of the great Liberal Party (to which I have the honour to belong) is indifferent, or indeed, hostile to the British Empire, its fame and its prosperity. We have seen this slander refuted each time it has been advanced, for from the dark days of the Boer War, to the recent troubles in South Africa and Egypt, who but the Advanced Liberals have come forward on every occasion to denounce the Mother Country, to heap well-deserved shame on the British Empire, to prove their countrymen invariably
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