“serve one's country faithfully” means not only to profess love for it, or to have a sentimental attachment to it, but to consider with conscientious care what is best for its welfare and its honor, and then to do one's duty to it according to that understanding, honestly, with courageous devotion and in a spirit of self-sacrifice.
We are apt to admire as the highest exhibition of patriotism the voluntary sacrifice of one's life in battle for one's country. Inasmuch as life may ordinarily be assumed the possession we should be least inclined to part with, and as the deliberate sacrifice of it is justly thought to require a high degree of devotion and courage, the popular appreciation of the spirit which prompts such an offering is certainly well merited. But the peculiar luster in which this kind of patriotism appears, and which seizes upon the popular imagination, easily makes us depreciate another kind, which, although less brilliant, may be no less heroic, no less self-sacrificing and some times even far more useful to the common good. The glory surrounding warlike achievement and the homage lavished upon the martial hero are apt to make especially the young and ardent forget that while sometimes the interests of a country may be furthered and its honor protected by means of war, of all the means by which such objects can be accomplished, war is the most cruel, barbarous and abominable, and should be resorted to only in the last extremity, when there is no more hope of any other means succeeding. The man who in times of popular excitement boldly and unflinchingly resists hot-tempered clamor for an unnecessary war, and thus exposes himself to the opprobrious imputation of a lack of patriotism or of courage, to the end of saving his country from a great calamity, is, as to “loving and faithfully serving his country,” at least as good a patriot as the hero of the most daring feat of arms, and a far
