The identification of oneself with his country is greatly helped out by the fact that the country is an outgrowth of the family. The idea of kinship has been extended to the national group. The nation is believed to be of one race. McDougall in speaking of the self-regarding instinct calls attention to the fact that it is extended to others, and says: “... This extension should not, and usually does not, stop short at the family; in primitive societies the tribe and the clan, which are the collective objects of the regards of other tribes and clans, become also the objects of this sentiment; and among ourselves the growing child is led on in the same way to identify himself with, and to extend his self-regarding sentiment to his school, his college, his town, his profession as a class or collective unit, and finally to his country or nation as a whole.[97] The extension of the sentiment culminates in its application to the country, and this application has been historically possible because the country has been believed to be the organization of a homogeneous race.
But the feeling of oneness with the country does not rest solely upon the belief in blood kinship. Ethnologists are now pretty well agreed that there are no pure races, and that nationality does not coincide with race homogeneity. C. D. Burns points out that the Belgians, at the time they were seeking nationality, were of different blood. “The group had asserted their common ambition and their distinction from all other groups. They were not all the same blood or language, but their traditions and purposes were the same.”[98] It is not exclusively a common ancestry, then, that provides the basis for one to feel at one with his country. It is not so much a question of genesis as of condition. One feels at home in a country which in general has the same sort of character and life as his own. The largest factor is that of a common consciousness, no matter how produced. What this means may be understood from the words of Bosanquet: “Broadly speaking, the limit of a country or nation is the limit of a common experience, such that the people share the same mind and feelings, and can understand each other’s ways of living and make allowance for each other so that the same laws and institutions are acceptable and workable for all of them.”[99] The patriot in a foreign land feels truly like an innocent abroad, but his own country is home, sweet home to him.
The love of the country as one’s objectified self coincides with the desire for attachment. Man, in other words, wants to objectify himself. He is not satisfied with solipcism. He wants a world, and a world that somehow represents himself. Without that he is a lost soul. “The man without a country” is pathetic because he has no attachment, no fixed world that he can call his own. The country provides a satisfying object of attachment, in which the patriot’s soul can be at rest.
Patriotism is devotion to a cause, and the cause is one’s own. The patriot has made it his by his own choice. It is a part of himself. Royce in speaking of patriotic loyalty says: “This plan of the patriot has two features: (1) It is through and through a social plan, obedient to the general will of one’s country, submissive; (2) it is through and through an exaltation of the self, of the inner man, who now feels glorified through his sacrifice, dignified in his self-surrender, glad to be his country’s servant and martyr,—yet sure that through this very readiness for self-destruction he wins the rank of hero.”[100] The call of war is not only a call to sacrifice, but also a call to self-expression. Royce continues: “This war-spirit, for the time at least, makes self-sacrifice seem to be self-expression, makes obedience to the country’s call seem to be the proudest sort of display of one’s own powers. Honor now means submission, and to obey means to have one’s way. Power and service are at one. Conformity is no longer opposed to having one’s own will. One has no will but that of the country.”[101] Patriotism in this character simplifies the problem of duty. It provides a cause into which one can throw himself with all his heart, avoid the conflict of a divided mind, and it is able to do all this for a man for the reason that the cause is his own. It makes a joy out of a duty. An expression of the joy that comes to one in the service of his country’s cause is to be found in the words supposed to have been uttered by Epaminondas when he was dying upon the battlefield. Zimmermann cites the incident: “Epaminondas, the Theban, when lying on the ground mortally wounded with a spear at the battle of Leuctra, all that troubled him was the event of the battle, and what was to become of his arms; but on his shield being held up to him, and with assurances that the day had gone for the Theban side, he said to the bystanders with a cheerful countenance, ‘Let not this day, friends, be considered as the end of my life, but as the beginning of my happiness and the consummation of my glory. I have the satisfaction of leaving my country victorious, haughty Sparta humbled, and Greece freed.’ Then drawing the spear out of his breast, he expired.”[102] Even if Epaminondas did not express any such dramatic sentiment, it was a common enough experience among mankind to be the subject of a credible bit of fiction. The joy was in the fact that the cause had triumphed, a cause that he had made his own. The patriot identifies himself with his country; in it he sees himself; and he shares its sorrows and successes.
The patriot is provincial. He begins his life of attachment by being loyal to what is nearest the center of his own interests. And such attachment is natural. We are not likely to be so vitally interested in far-away things as in the things that are near. It is simply a case of where the power of gravitation varies in inverse ratio to the distance between the gravitating bodies. Now, the patriot’s own nation is nearer to him than is any other, and consequently to it he renders his warmest devotion. Even many who deplore the narrowness of nationalism and themselves do not share that narrowness, do nevertheless have a warm devotion for their own country. This devotion, strong in spite of a consciousness of the country’s shortcomings, shows itself in Cowper’s line:
“England, with all thy faults, I love thee still.”[103]
The patriot believes that he is an unnatural son if he is not devoted to his country. To turn against the country is comparable to turning against his own mother. And of course no real man of flesh and blood and the ordinary feelings of normal human beings, would do such a thing as that. The traitor is abnormal, and is something amounting to almost a monster. All normal men are believed to thrill to the sentiment,
“This is my own, my native land!”[104]
The country is so close that it is felt to be inhuman baseness not to be true to the ties that bind one to it.
Patriotism is, then, in part a clinging to the nation as an expression of one’s own life. The patriot fiercely resents attacks upon the nation, for they are attacks upon himself. They assail the periphery of his personality. He wants his country to be free because in it he finds himself expressed, and because he claims the right to continue his self-expression through the country. Therefore he hates conquest by an enemy. He would rather die fighting than be subjugated, because in dying for his country he asserts himself in one last final defiant act. It is a supreme act of self-assertion. The country is the patriot’s, it is vital to him, and while life lasts he will not see it perish from the earth.