" It NEVER means or
can mean anything good or true. For if a cause be just, like
Ireland's, or once Italy's, then 'tis a good man's duty to espouse
it with warmth, be it his own or another's. And if a cause be bad,
then 'tis a good man's duty to oppose it, tooth and nail,
irrespective of your patriotism. True, a good man will feel more
sensitively anxious that strict justice should be done by the
particular community of which chance has made him a component member
than by any others; but then, people who feel acutely this joint
responsibility of all the citizens to uphold the moral right are not
praised as patriots but reviled as unpatriotic. To urge that our
own country should strive with all its might to be better, higher,
purer, nobler, more generous than other countries,--the only kind of
patriotism worth a moment's thought in a righteous man's eyes, is
accounted by most men both wicked and foolish.
Then comes the monopolist instinct of property. That, on the face
of it, is a baser and more sordid one. For patriotism at least can
lay claim to some sort of delusive expansiveness beyond mere
individual interest; whereas property stops short at the narrowest
limits of personality.
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