But as the storms of war beat about these little savage families, the sense of common danger welded them into one. Out of grim necessity friendship came, and friendship gave birth to patriotism. Loyalty and sacrifice were not limited to the family; men fought and died for their tribe.
And now let us turn the microscope upon ourselves. We would fight for our country. We say because we love our country. We call that feeling patriotism. It is more extended than the savage love of tribe; it gives loyalty to a great government and democratic principles. We speak of that feeling as divine, but it is terribly human. Its expression is the same harsh ferocity that inspired the life of the savage.
To-morrow America goes to war. In great black type we read the call for men, and a sense of common danger thrills us. In the evening by a street lamp's glare we watch a passionate agitator who points to a flag that we have learned to love. The tramp, tramp of passing regiments and the sound of martial music thrill us. We lay down our tool or pen and march to the front. And then comes the first engagement. The air is blackened with rifle smoke; the roar of cannonry deafens us. Dazed, we crouch behind an earthwork while the enemy creeps through the smoke. Suddenly they charge. We fire, but they surge on through the smoke. They mount the earthwork. We leap together! Men scream hoarsely! Musket butts crash! Daggers plunge into quivering flesh! Divine feeling! Glorious patriotism!
The passing of this savage patriotism is inevitable. The whole course of nature is against it. The very history of development will tell you that. Loyalty has never been an immutable thing. It has been a ceaseless and irresistible growth from the individual to the family, to the tribe, to the nation. The time for a world-patriotism has come. Why should men limit their loyalty by a row of stones and trees that we call a boundary? Why are men patriots, anyway, except to save their privileges and their government? The primitive patriot had no choice but to fight. He was put down in a little plot of cleared ground hemmed in by mighty forests, and made to hew out a home in a vast world of enemies. But how far we have come from him! The twentieth-century world is a little world. Our earth is like an open book. We have cut through the jungle wastes of Africa; we have photographed the poles. We sell and buy things from Greenland and Java. In such a civilization war-patriotism has no place. It is no longer the only guide to self-preservation; it has become the most terrible instrument of self-destruction. And for just this reason war-patriotism must go. It runs counter to the whole trend of nature itself. It is diametrically opposed to the mission of patriotism in the world. Just as those little savage families joined hands in tribal loyalty, just as the scattered clans and tribes united under national government, so nations must clasp hands around the globe in a new spirit of "worldism" that shall make war impossible.
But we cannot gain a world-spirit by a sudden destruction of our patriotism. We will never usher in tranquillity with a crash. The nihilism of Tolstoy would plunge us into lawlessness and anarchy, for the chief element of patriotism we must keep. "What is that element?" you ask. It is the willingness of the individual to sacrifice his welfare for the welfare of the group. There we have the stem of the world-spirit of to-morrow. But the blossom will not burst forth in a night. It must come by an unfolding and a growth. We cannot climb to universal peace upon a golden ladder and cut the rungs beneath us. Evolution builds on the past. The final spirit of "worldism" will be a broadening and a deepening and a humanizing of the spirit of sacrifice which is the noblest element in our patriotism.
"But," you ask, "if the evolution of patriotism is inevitable, what have we to do with it? Why should we meddle with the course of nature?" We reply that the evolution must come through you. We are not "puppets jerked by unseen wires." "Consciousness," says Bergson, "is essentially free." Man the savage or man the philosopher—he alone can decide. Let him purify patriotism with Christianity and he has brotherhood; adulterate it with avarice and he has war. The evolution of patriotism is not a physical thing. Listen to Huxley, "Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of the ethical process." The evolution of patriotism, then, is a moral thing, and morality is man-made. We are men, but we can be supermen. We are patriots of a nation. We can be patriots of the world.
The evolution of patriotism is no theorist's dream. It is a palpable fact. The patriot of one age may be the scoundrel of the next. A turn of the kaleidoscope and Paul the convict trades places with Nero the Emperor. Who was the ideal ancient patriot? The statesman, Pericles? The thinker, Plato? No. The most efficient murderer, a Macedonian boy. "I must civilize," he says. So he starts into his neighbor's country with forty thousand fighters at his back. Does Persia yield its banner? No. Then crush it. Does Thebes resist? Then burn it to the ground. Do the women prate of freedom? Load them with slave chains. What? Do they still hold out? Then slaughter the swine. And as men watch him wading through seas of blood, riding roughshod over prostrate lives and dead hopes and shattered empires, the blind age cries out, "O godlike Alexander!"
"Godlike!" Oh, but there's new meaning in that word to-day. How much nobler a picture our modern patriot presents! Not waving the brand of destruction, not a king of murder will you find the great patriot of to-day. His thunderbolt of conquest was a host of righteousness. His empire was built in the hearts of men. In the teeming slums of the world's greatest city he lifted the standard of the Christ. Haggard children stretched out hands for bread. He fed them with his last crust. Thousands were dying in the city's filth. He pointed them to a more Beautiful City where pain should be no more. And when the body of William Booth was borne through the silent throngs of London streets, a million heads were bowed in reverence to this patriot of a purer day. In every hamlet of civilization some heart called him godlike.
Is not the trend of patriotism clear? Are not the seeds of a new world-loyalty already in our soil? The trumpet call to war can never rouse this newer patriotism. The summons "peace on earth and good will to men"—that is the future bugle call. And for us the task is clear. To take our destiny into our own hands, to throw off the prejudices of nationalism, to turn our faces resolutely to the future and strive for that summit of brotherhood and universal peace, that
"One far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves."