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12
PATRIOTISM AND GOVERNMENT

which have already entered into the consciousness of the Christian world.


Chapter III

Patriotism as a feeling of exclusive love for one's own people, and as a doctrine of the virtue of sacrificing one's tranquillity, one's property, and even one's life, in defence of the weak among them from slaughter and outrage hy their enemies, was the highest idea of the period when each nation considered it feasible and just, to subject to slaughter and outrage the people of other nations for its own advantage.

But already, some two thousand years ago, humanity, in the person of the highest representatives of its wisdom, began to recognise the higher idea of a brotherhood of man; and that idea penetrating man's consciousness more and more, has in our time attained most varied forms of realisation. Thanks to improved means of communication, and to the unity of industry, of trade, of the arts, and of science,—men to-day are so bound one to another that the danger of conquest, massacre, or outrage by a neighbouring people has quite disappeared, and all peoples (the peoples, but not the governments) live together in peaceful, mutually advantageous, friendly, commercial, industrial, artistic, and scientific relations, which they