to cosmopolitan ideas and influences, are becoming aware, as never before, that the national heritage is the national responsibility. How indeed could it be otherwise, when the fact is brought home to them, in the burdens of armaments, and in intensified national rivalries, bursting out at times into sanguinary wars, which the international situation has developed? Small wonder that it should be dawning upon the minds of even the least militant of citizens that, in the absence of any power higher than the nation to enforce the dictates of a cosmopolitan justice, it still rests with themselves and their fellow-countrymen, and with no one else, to conserve, defend, and transmit their national heritage inviolate to their posterity. What other conclusion can be drawn, so long as every nation of the world appears to act upon the settled conviction that its own continued existence, and the fulfilment of its own destinies, are essential to civilisation? Those who adventure on the darkly veiled paths of political prophecy may descry the advent of another dispensation. They may dream with Cobden of the coming of a time when the barriers between nations will be broken down by commerce; or with some of the Socialists, of a day when the common cause of Labour all the world over will swamp the rival interests that divide peoples; or with Mazzini, of the realisation of an international system in which the several nations, more intensely national than с ever, will hold their organised strength as a trust for mankind. Be it so. Yet the point remains that, if such a transformation of Europe is to come, it does not yet at any rate seem to be coming through that cosmopolitanism by negation of patriotism which Burke so dreaded and denounced. It is needful to dwell on these considerations because they carry in them a criticism of Burke. They convict him of a mistaken, and even an alarmist, emphasis. All his insight, knowledge, and wisdom did not save him, in his horror of French fraternity, from over-rating the strength and dangers of the cosmopolitanism of his day. His fears for his country, which were the other side of his passion of patriotism, drove him to hurl against the cosmopolitans a whole arsenal of flouts, sarcasms, and invectives, which may all too readily be appropriated by the Machiavellian apostles of blood and iron who recognise no wider interests than the greeds, and no higher law than the needs, of the self-centred and self-seeking nation. Not that Burke was without his provocations either. It unfortunately happens that, in the ranks of cosmopolitanism, there are individuals who seem unable to indulge their humanitarian sympathies without setting themselves in aggressive hostility to the patriotic spirit, and even denouncing it as a 'bias,' a superstition, or a crime. Nor is it a sufficient plea for such that their attitude may be prompted by lofty motives, and by the entirely true perception that patriotism, like every other great human passion, may go wrong. For at no time is a nation more in need of the loyalty of a citizen than when he believes it to have gone wrong. It is precisely then that he is called upon, not to indulge in general declamations against patriotism, which is the strength and security of every people, but rather to sit' with Burke by the bedside of his delirious country,' and to spare no patriotic effort to restore it to what he believes to be a saner and a juster mind. It is pardonable to indulge the hope that it is possible to hold fast to cosmopolitan ideas and sentiments, and yet to turn away, with Burke and Mazzini, from the cosmopolitanism of apostate patriotism. Nor is it to be forgotten that there were facts before Burke's eyes which go far to explain the virulence of his antipathies here. Apart from the excesses of the 'homicide philanthropy' of the revolutionists, in the groves of whose Academy,' as he savagely said, 'at the end of every vista you see nothing but the gallows,' there were conspicuous figures before his eyes, in whom the cosmopolitan confession of faith was suspect because it seemed to come so easily. When Tom Paine capped Franklin's 'Where is liberty, there is my country,' by the amended version, Where is not liberty, there is mine,' the sentiment was noble. It is worthy of a political crusader. Who does not wish to re-echo it from his heart? But it has a less impressive force, when we remember that it came from a political soldier-of-fortune whose allegiance to any country in particular was so loose that, in his shallow-rooted, nomadic life, he played, not without self-glorification, the rôle of citizen of three. This was what Burke distrusted and abhorred. It was in sharpest contradiction, as must now be evident, to all he believed and felt about the growth of the social and political affections. That no cold relation can be a zealous citizen, that the locality of the affections enriches life, that personal friendship can be grafted upon political comradeship, that the combined and mutually reflected charities' of our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars' must be inseparably interwoven in the national life these were amongst his most passionate convictions. And, true to the same spirit, he held the faith that a single-minded and unfaltering patriotism must needs be the normal path to the service of mankind. But as the idea of mankind, the species, the race, was still, in his day as in ours, vague, undefined, and imperfectly realised, it is not to be wondered at that, to a mind like his, intent upon actualities and impatient of abstractions, it was still in the idea of the nation, say rather in the realised idea of the British people, 1 Reflections. |