amount of territory overrun and subdued, were not the 'great blonde beasts' of Nietzsche, but little yellow monsters with black hair, the Huns and Tartars.* The causes of Tartar ascendancy had not the remotest connexion with any moral or intellectual qualities which we can be expected to admire. Nor can the Nordic race, well endowed by nature as it undoubtedly is, prove such a superiority as this theory claims for it. Some of the largest brains yet measured have been those of Japanese; and the Jews have probably a higher average of ability than the Teutons. Again, the Germans are not descended from a pure Nordic stock. The Northern type can be best studied in Scandinavia, where the people share with the Irish the distinction of being the handsomest race in the world. The German, like ourselves, is a mixture of various anatomical types, including, in some parts, distinct traces of Mongolian blood, which indicate that the raiding Huns meddled, according to their custom, with the German women, and bequeathed to a section of the nation the Turanian cheek-bones, as well as certain moral characteristics. Lastly, the German race has never shown much aptitude for governing and assimilating other peoples. The French, by virtue of their greater sympathy, are far more successful. The only part of this chauvinistic ethnology which demands careful and indeed anxious consideration is that which asserts the decay and ultimate disappearance of the Northern type of man when he wanders too far from his home. It is a very serious question for ourselves, because it threatens the future of that kind of imperialism on which Britons now pin their hopes-the prospect of greater Englands beyond the seas. It has not been proved that either Australia or South Africa, or even the greater part of North America, is climatically fit to be the permanent home of the Anglo-Saxon. It is said that the second generation of Australians is weedy and anæmic; and that the Anglo-American, who is no longer increasing except by immigration, ages quickly and is less healthy than his English cousins. The greater part of our

The reasons of their irresistible strength have been explained in a most brilliant manner by Dr Peisker in the first volume of the Cambridge Medieval History.'

colonies is probably more suited to the Mediterranean race than to ourselves.

The French have their own form of this pseudoscience in their doctrine of the persistence of national characteristics. Each nation may be summed up in a formula: England, for example, is the country of will.' A few instances may, no doubt, be quoted in support of this theory. Julius Cæsar said: 'Duas res pleraque Gallia industriosissime prosequitur, rem militarem et argute loqui'; and these are still the characteristics of our gallant allies. And Madame de Staël may be thought to have hit off the German character very cleverly about the time when Bismarck first saw the light. The Germans are vigorously submissive. They employ philosophical reasonings to explain what is the least philosophic thing in the world, respect for force and the fear which transforms that respect into admiration.' But the fact remains that the characters of nations frequently change, and that what we call national character is usually only the policy of the governing class, forced upon it by circumstances, or the manner of living which climate, geographical position, and other external causes have made necessary for the inhabitants of a country.

To found patriotism on homogeneity of race is no wiser than to bound it by frontier-lines. As the Abbé Noël has lately written about his own country, Belgium,

'the race is not the nation. The nation is not a physiological fact; it is a moral fact. What constitutes a nation is the community of sentiments and ideals which results from a common history and education. The variations of the cephalic index are here of no great importance. The essential factor of the national consciousness resides in a certain common mode of conceiving the conditions of the social life.'

Belgium, the Abbé maintains, has found this national consciousness amid her sufferings; there are no longer any distinctions between French-speaking Belgians and Walloons or Flemings. This is in truth the real basis of patriotism. It is the basis of our own love for our country. What Britain stands for is what Britain is. We have long known in our hearts what Britain stands for; but we have now been driven to search our thoughts

and make our ideals explicit to ourselves and others. The Englishman has become a philosopher malgré lui. 'Whatever the world thinks,' writes Bishop Berkeley, 'he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human soul, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman.' These words, which were quoted by Mr Arthur Balfour a few years ago, may seem to make a large demand on the average citizen; but in our quiet way we have all been meditating on these things since last August, and we know pretty well what our summum bonum is for our country. We believe in chivalry and fair play and kindliness-these things first and foremost; and we believe, if not exactly in democracy, yet in a government under which a man may think and speak the thing he wills. We do not believe in war, and we do not believe in bullying. We do not flatter ourselves that we are the supermen; but we are convinced that the ideas which we stand for, and which we have on the whole tried to carry out, are essential to the peaceful progress and happiness of humanity; and for these ideas we have drawn the sword. The great words of Abraham Lincoln have been on the lips of many and in the hearts of all since the beginning of the great contest: With malice towards none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right-let us strive on to finish the work we are in.'

Patriotism thus spiritualised and moralised is the true patriotism. When the emotion is once set in its right relations to the whole of human life and to all that makes human life worth living, it cannot become an immoral obsession. It is certain to become an immoral obsession if it is isolated and made absolute. We have seen the appalling perversion--the methodical diabolism -which this obsession has produced in Germany. It has startled us because we thought that the civilised world had got beyond such insanity; but it is of course no new thing. Machiavelli said, 'I prefer my country to the salvation of my soul'-a sentiment which sounds noble but is not; it has only a superficial resemblance to St Paul's willingness to be accursed' for the sake of his countrymen. Devil-worship remains what it was, even

when the idol is draped in the national flag. This obsession may be in part a survival from savage conditions, when all was at stake in every feud; but chiefly it is an example of the idealising and universalising power of the imagination, which turns every unchecked passion into a monomania. The only remedy is, as Lowell's Hosea Biglow reminds us, to bear in mind that

'our true country is that ideal realm which we represent to ourselves under the names of religion, duty, and the like. Our terrestrial organisations are but far-off approaches to so fair a model; and all they are verily traitors who resist not any attempt to divert them from this their original intendment. Our true country is bounded on the north and the south, on the east and west, by Justice, and when she oversteps that invisible boundary-line by so much as a hair's breadth, she ceases to be our mother, and chooses rather to be looked upon quasi noverca.'

So Socrates said that the wise man will be a citizen of his true city, of which the type is laid up in heaven, and only conditionally of his earthly country.

The obsession of patriotism is not the only evil which we have to consider. We may err by defect as well as by excess. Herbert Spencer speaks of an 'anti-patriotic bias'; and it can hardly be disputed that many Englishmen who pride themselves on their lofty morality are suffering from this mental twist. The malady seems to belong to the Anglo-Saxon constitution, for it is rarely encountered in other countries, while we had a noisy pro-Napoleonic faction a hundred years ago, and the Americans had their 'Copperheads' in the Northern States during the civil war. In our own day, every enemy of England, from the mad Mullah to the mad Kaiser, has had his advocates at home; and the champions of Boer and Boxer, of Afridi and Afrikander, of the Mahdi and the Matabele, have been usually the same persons. The English, it would appear, differ from other misguided rascals in never being right even by accident. But the idiosyncrasy of a few persons is far less important than the comparative insensibility of whole classes to the patriotic appeal, except when war is actually raging. This is not specially characteristic of our own country. The German Emperor has complained

of his Social Democrats as 'people without a fatherland'; and the cryÀ bas la patrie' has been heard in France.

It is usual to explain this attitude by the fact that the manual workers 'have no stake in the country,' and might not find their condition altered for the worse by subjection to a foreign power. A few of our workingmen have given colour to this charge by exclaiming petulantly that they could not be worse off under the Germans; but in this they have done themselves and their class less than justice. The anti-militarism and cosmopolitanism of the masses in every country is a profoundly interesting fact, a problem which demands no superficial investigation. It is one result of that emancipation from traditional ideas, which makes the most important difference between the upper and middle classes on the one side and the lower on the other. We lament that the working-man takes but little interest in Christianity, and rack our brains to discover what we have done to discredit our religion in his eyes. The truth is that Christianity, as a dogmatic and ecclesiastical system, is unintelligible without a very considerable knowledge of the conditions under which it took shape. But what are the ancient Hebrews, and the Greeks and Romans, to the working-man? He is simply cut off from the means of reading intelligently any book of the Bible, or of understanding how the institution called the Catholic Church, and its offshoots, came to exist. As our staple education becomes more 'modern' and less literary, the custodians of organised religion will find their difficulties increasing. But the same is true about patriotism. Love of country means pride in the past and ambition for the future. Those who live only in the present are incapable of it. But our working-man knows next to nothing about the past history of England; he has scarcely heard of our great men, and has read few of our great books. It is not surprising that the appeal to patriotism leaves him cold. This is an evil that has its proper remedy. There is no reason why a sane and elevated love of country should not be stimulated by appropriate teaching in our schools. In America this is done-rather hysterically; and in Germany-rather brutally. The Jews have always made their national history a large part of their education, and even of their religion. Nothing has helped