My Country, Right or Wrong?

DECEMBER 1931

VOLUME 148

BY EARNEST ELMO CALKINS

IT was the ancient custom of English churches during Rogation week, a custom still followed in remote country parishes, to assemble the whole congregation, particularly the younger element, under the leadership of the beadle and church officers, and trace from bourn to bourn the limits of the parish. The straggling procession followed the line like a pack of hounds on the scent of a fox. They scaled garden walls, crossed private grounds, and sometimes the whole merry troop went in one door and out the other when a house stood exactly on the line. It was a great day for the children, but the elders too had some entertainment, for when an old moss-covered stone post was discovered one of them would pick up a likely lad and bump his head so severely against it that he would always remember it. It was essential that future beadles and churchwardens should be able to hand on to their successors exact knowledge of the limits of the parish. Remembered pain is a great quickener of the memory.

Something like these mediæval ceremonies are the activities of the superpatriots who are constantly reëstablishing the geographical boundaries of patriotism. They are forever unearthing some old moss-grown bourn and bumping our heads against it lest we forget and allow our so-called love of country to stray outside and cover too much territory. There is more danger of this than ever now that the world has grown smaller and we are apt to find out that the inhabitants of other countries are just folks like ourselves. The art of hating a man who happens to live just the other side of an imaginary line is likely to die out unless cultivated. So we have a host of societies and numerous individuals on the watch to see that our love or even tolerance of our fellow men keeps within the parochial bounds.

This introverted patriotism was taught in the public schools when I was a boy, and may be yet, for all I know, though I imagine it is not so easy to bamboozle the modern skeptical youth as it was our generation.

When I was quite young I read in an old bound volume of Atlantic Monthlies a story which made a profound impression. ‘The Man without a Country,’ by Edward Everett Hale, was a typical war-time stimulator of patriotism. Philip Nolan, a young naval officer, was on trial before his superiors for some questionable connection with Aaron Burr’s plots. ‘Damn the United States!’ he exclaimed. ‘I wish I may never hear of the United States again.’ The court was properly shocked, and its sentence was that Nolan should have his wish. He was confined on a war vessel bound for foreign waters and transferred from time to time as his prison ship was ordered home. His fellow officers saw to it that he never heard the name of his country or even saw it in print. His reading matter was edited; even maps were censored. By deft touches the author makes a pathetic figure of Nolan, who can think of nothing else but the country about which he is denied all information. After forty years of homesickness he finally dies on the last of his prison ships.

Copyright 1931, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.

This tract was a part of my education in patriotism. It was published during the Civil War, which ended three years before I was born. The aftermath of hatred toward the South engulfed me, a feeling as bitter as that which followed the World War, though the Germans are foreigners, while the Southerners were our own people. But in 1875 we were still singing ‘We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree,’ the G. A. R. was marching in full strength, and the bloody shirt was waved in every Memorial Day and Fourth of July oration. I pored over the harrowing stories of Andersonville and Libby prisons and learned, not that war was despicable and made beasts of men, bat that war was glorious and the ‘secesh’ monsters. Imagine my surprise when some years later I met boys from the South and found them human and kind and very much like other boys, only politer.

Long before we reached the formal study of history in school we had learned the full measure of England’s turpitude. Our school readers were full of it, prose and verse, beginning in the earliest with the stirring story of the Boston boys who waited upon General Gates when his soldiers prevented their skating on the frog pond. We spouted extracts from the speeches of the Revolutionary patriots and poems in the same vein, the moral of which was, ‘My country is always right — but, right or wrong, my country.’ I learned to hate the English as I had learned in turn to hate the Indians and the Southerners. It was years before I knew there was anything favorable to be said of England. I supposed she always went about roaring like a lion, seeking whom she might devour. Patriotism, I found, was not so much loving one’s own country as hating other countries. It did not flourish in time of peace. It was always martial.

While on the playground we damned Jeff Davis, in the schoolroom we venerated George Washington. He was the ideal figure of my youth, for Lincoln’s legend had not yet begun to grow. But Washington was the Father of his Country, because he had thrown off the yoke of England and made us free. How the Mother Country felt about it was never taken into consideration. It was probably very much as we felt toward the South. The parallel between Washington the hero and Davis the traitor did not strike us then, or we should have perceived the inconsistency of what was taught us — that Washington rebelled against what he considered the tyranny of England, and Davis rebelled against what he considered the tyranny of the United States. One seceded and succeeded; the other seceded and failed. Washington was a hero to us, but a rebel to England. Davis was a rebel to us, but a hero to the South. History had two sides — our own and the enemy’s. It was not until I read histories written by the enemy that I began to get things in their true perspective.

Our minds were filled with such customary catch phrases and slogans as ‘Dulce et decorum,’ ‘Don’t fire until you see the whites of the enemies’ eyes,’ ‘Don’t give up the ship,’ ‘I have not yet begun to fight,’ ‘A little more grape, Captain Bragg,’ ‘We’ll whip the redcoats or Molly Stark’s a widow,’

Schoolbooks were written and edited with this thought in mind. It was unthinkable that youth should suspect that their country was ever wrong, or any country that opposed it ever right, or that the men who founded it were anything but grand and noble — in short, demigods. Nothing was further from the minds of our patriotic beadles and churchwardens in the good old days than that children were sent to school to learn the truth about anything; least of all about history. Even to-day there are sharp outcries against liberalizing school textbooks to approximate at least something like the truth.

II

The Cadmean seeds of patriotism thus sown have produced a bumper crop, even more embarrassing than the surplus wheat. It has kept us from any purposeful international coöperation, has stultified disarmament conferences, and stepped up military expenditures to ridiculous altitudes. It has even had a hand in shaping our tariff policy, with the result that our tariffs have become walls by which we shut ourselves in and the world out — culminating in the Hawley-Smoot Act which has inspired the reprisals that deepen the depths of the depression. It has made ridiculous jingoes of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a society founded to perpetuate the memory of men who believed and behaved quite differently. It has burdened us with such liabilities as the militaristic activities of the American Legion, the suspicious watchfulness of the American Security League, the footless Red hunt of the Hamilton Fish Commission, Senator Caraway, passports and visas, Flag Day, the deportation of aliens, Big Bill Thompson, Mother’s Day, General Smedley D. Butler, the Saturday Evening Post, barring from citizenship candidates who will not promise to bear arms (how many native-born citizens would make that promise, I wonder?), national flowers, Representative Britten of Illinois, Senator Bingham, ugly and meaningless war memorials in nearly every village, General MacArthur, good-will excursions, billion-dollar battleship programmes, the Chicago Tribune, protests against the circulation of books like All Quiet on the Western Front and moving pictures like ‘The Big Parade,’ Senator Grundy, God’s country, and 100 per cent Americanism. These are some of the men and movements and phrases engendered by a narrow and parochial patriotism the object of which is to keep us out of friendly coöperation with other countries and in a warlike state of mind. ‘Patriotism,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’

The little group of willful men who so successfully kept us out of the League of Nations did not defeat the will of the people. They fulfilled it. The majority are in favor of isolation. President Hoover’s moratorium received some brickbats as well as bouquets from the home folks. Country Home, one of the leading farm papers, recently sent a questionnaire to its subscribers to ascertain lines of editorial interest. One query concerned some form of international relations, probably the World Court. Ninetyeight per cent were firmly opposed. Our slang names for foreigners are concrete evidence of our dislike. ‘Wop, Dago, Chink, Greaser, Bohunk, Frog,’ are terms of contempt. During the war, while it was expedient to hate our enemies, the Central Powers, it was politic to love our allies for the time being; but now that the war is over, officious busybodies are coming forward to make sure that our love is changed back into the old reliable suspicion and dislike.

It is not a new thing, this contempt for foreigners, nor is it peculiar to this country. It is as old as civilization. To the Greeks all outsiders were barbarians. That, by the way, was where college fraternities got the idea of calling non-members ‘barbs.’ College is a world in miniature. The Greeks despise the barbs, but join them in despising rival colleges; the college world looks down on men who never went to college; and we have that variety of patriotism known as college spirit — ‘I would die for dear old Siwash.’

That splendid virtue, love of country, that strange hold which one’s native land has upon the heartstrings, is perverted and distorted into a socalled patriotism warped with suspicious hostility, a mingling of pride and defiance, which has no more place in the modern world with its wide travel, rapid transportation, quick communication, mingling of many races in one country, and the economic interdependence of all countries upon each other, than Voliva’s theory of celestial cosmography has beside that of Einstein. It is perpetuated, taught, promoted, because such a patriotism is a necessary preliminary to war. Until the world learns to dispense with war, patriotism must be artificially pumped up for the benefit of those who profit by war. Some day we shall know that war is no more necessary than poverty or yellow fever.

III

As one who has traveled more or less, I have come up against those visible evidences of the barriers erected between nations by the distrust and suspicion that so-called patriotism produces — passports and customs examinations. We are told that passports are a precaution of safety and the tariff an economic necessity, but few Americans have sufficient love of country to endure the examinations they entail. The most ferocious I have ever experienced was at a minor port and for a ship coming from another American port. The ship was the California of the Panama-Pacific Line from New York through the Canal to San Diego. The ship stopped a few hours at Havana and half a day at Panama. Even the most acquisitive tourist could not accumulate a very great quantity of foreign goods at either place.

It was a very hot day when we arrived at San Diego. My wife was in her berth under the care of the ship’s nurse with a temperature of 103 degrees. But four inspectors were on duty to take care of one hundred passengers, and they went about their duties with a leisureliness which added to the exasperation of the sweating passengers, some of whom stood in line for over three hours. Each piece of baggage was relentlessly searched. Handbags were turned upside down and dumped on the pier. The strings of packages were cut and their contents left strewn for the passenger to gather up. Golf bags were beaten against the iron pillars, obviously to smash any glass bottles they might contain. You may ask why I did not file a complaint. The answer is that I had a very sick wife on my hands. I had to get her to a hotel, engage doctors and nurses, and begin a three weeks’ fight for her life.

This is merely a more flagrant instance of one standing drawback of travel. There are examinations at all frontiers, but none, I believe, which exhibit such traces of sadism as ours. Allegedly the examinations are for the purpose of assisting our manufacturers to get all that is coming to them under the tariff law, and the tariff law is to protect our manufacturers from foreign competition and our workmen from the pauper labor of Europe. But evidence is not wanting that Congress enjoys our predicament. When the matter of scaling down the passport fees was under discussion, the members were frankly critical of Americans who spend large sums of money abroad. One patriot whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, for it deserves perpetuation here, replied to the contention that passports impose a burden on tourists: —

‘We want to impose burdens. We want to make it just as difficult to go abroad as possible. Let them stay home and spend their money in their own country.’

One might almost revise Macaulay’s famous epigram that the Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Congress prefers rigorous customs examinations not because these encourage manufacturers, but because they discourage tourists. That Senators and Representatives mind the rigors of customs inspections when they have to endure them was made evident by the roar they sent up when the State Department threatened to deprive them of the courtesy of the port, so that they might no longer railroad in their own purchases scotfree, including a judicious supply of the liquor they drink but vote against.

IV

The relation between patriotism and tariffs may not be obvious, but it is there. All barriers to intercourse between nations retard that understanding which is necessary before a world patriotism can exist. The United States is the largest area in the world with unrestricted free trade. What would be the condition of this country if each state had a tariff and a passport requirement? The ‘Buy in New England’ movement is a mild form of the same complex that produces passports and tariffs, the effort to wall off one’s own domain from the remainder of the world and keep one’s prosperity to one’s self, a thing impossible in this day of far-reaching trade relations.

Business talks to politics as the Scotch porter to the traveler who complained that the porter had neglected to put his luggage in his compartment: ‘Aye, yer luggage is no sic a fule as ye. Ye’re on the wrang train.’ Business has already gone in for international relations without waiting for government. It is involved everywhere, and the marines must be sent to fill the breach where government and diplomacy have failed to do their part. Even Republicans are beginning to doubt the wisdom of their policy of high protection. Even tariff-protected manufacturers are dismayed by the ruthless selfishness of Grundy’s tariff. Never did we need a world market more than right now, and never have we done so much to alienate it.

An amusing aspect of the matter is the hurt surprise with which we regard any move by a foreign country to give us a dose of our own medicine. Let any other nation propose a higher tariff, and what a clamor is made to the State Department to do something about it! I wish that the United States of Europe were something more than an iridescent dream. A good stiff reprisal would do us more good than reams of talk. As an advertising man I have heard and read much about Canada’s tax on American advertising matter, but we have for years been taxing one form of foreign advertising matter by classing it as books. I was compelled recently to pay seventy-five cents duty on a catalogue of secondhand books (the contents of which were none of them dutiable) and thirty cents on a booklet advertising a London hotel.

In this connection, the far-flung lines on which business is already conducted in spite of the obstacles of a narrow and provincial economic patriotism, the words of Sir Ernest J. P. Benn are wise words. He says (in the Stockholm, Sweden, Index): —

It is the duty of everyone in these days to study the great questions of the distribution of wealth and of what constitutes wealth. Pick up any odd bit of wealth that happens to be at your hand and think about it in a vein similar to that in which I have been thinking — for instance, about the collar I am wearing. I bought it in London for 1/and was told it was made in Leicester, with machinery from Germany, America, and Scotland, from Irish linen put together in Belfast with flax grown in Russia. Half the world has been involved in the exchange that has been operating to provide a small thing like that.

Further, through the intricate machinery of credit, banking, and finance, a portion of the 1/-I paid in London has in some marvelous way helped to provide a peasant in Russia with a cup of tea from China.

What is the very essence of this everyday wonder, the result of centuries of experience, if not exchange? And still there are people who imagine that wealth can be increased by putting obstacles in the way of exchange!

These barriers exist not only between but just as much inside the countries. Only a free and unhampered exchange will enable us to carry on our work with equality one with the other, thereby raising the standard of life for all. There was never a time when freedom of trade was more wanted and the preaching of free trade more necessary. Why buy ‘Empire Goods’? Why Canada for the Canadians, Australia for the Australians, and so on the world over, until you finally get Bromley for the Bromleyans? To be logical I should at last buy nothing but my own goods.

The United States of Europe may be a long way off, but nothing could be more urgent than the breaking down of all those national and international barriers that are rendering intercourse more and more difficult, rendering it more difficult for each of us to help ourselves and others.

Do not think that I do not value nationalism, that I am not a patriot. Only I think patriotism can find a better expression than in economic restrictions and hindrances. Patriotism should express itself through language, literature, poetry. We have had too much politics in business. It is high time that the business men got in a word or two in order to make the people realize that business men are more likely than politicians to understand business. Economics is a matter of business.

V

The predisposition to think ill and speak ill of foreigners because they are foreigners breaks out in many disturbing ways and produces numerous absurd stories, none more grotesque than that which Senator Caraway gave out to a goggle-eyed press when he returned from a European trip not long ago. The French were desecrating the graves of American soldiers in France, the Senator solemnly asserted, by scribbling scurrilous epithets on the crosses, such as ‘To hell with America!' The story was afterward denied and disproved, and withdrawn by the Senator, but it was obviously false on its first telling. No Frenchman ever wrote, ‘To hell with America!’ He has his own scurrilous epithets far more devastating than ours. The story was obviously one told in the smoke room by some Francophobe without sufficient imagination to give his anecdote verisimilitude. Senator Caraway is too intelligent to be taken in by such guff, except that he wanted to believe it. It was wish fulfillment.

Readiness to believe and circulate derogatory stories about the French, or English, or Germans, is one of the attributes that have been foisted upon patriotism. We, having fought beside the French, were in danger of liking them too well for the preservation of that aloofness and suspicion by which nations are kept in the mood for future wars. It was time to get back to the status quo and put the French beside the Germans as our natural enemies, because they call bread pain and eat frogs and otherwise behave in outlandish ways. Patriotism should begin at home — and end there.

Americans traveling abroad are superior and critical. They take it for granted that everything is done better at home, though, if they really think so, why don’t they stay home? Recently a Western editor went abroad and wrote letters about his experiences which were printed in his paper. In one of them I read: —

And as for water, to ask for it develops a grimace, and in Paris the propaganda has gone so far about the city water supply that one really is afraid to drink it. Hence the necessity for bottled waters — another holdup. The night we arrived, I rang for the floor man and asked him to bring a bottle of mineral water of a certain brand that had been recommended to us on the trip from the station. He brought it. ‘Seven francs!’ Next day I prospected in a neighboring market and bought two bottles of the same for less than five francs. How they do love Americans!

Let that editor step into any firstclass hotel in the United States and order, say, a bottle of ginger ale. The check will be fifty cents. Then let him go to the nearest grocery store, where it is sold for two dollars a dozen, or, say, sixteen cents a bottle. Does that mean that the Mayflower, Ritz-Carlton, or Blackstone does not love Americans?

Perhaps it is a form of patriotism which makes many people turn so confidingly to the government in every trouble and expect something to be done about it, by passing a law, or making an appropriation or something. If this is love of country, it bears a suspicious resemblance to the definition of gratitude — a lively expectation of favors to come. It is nothing more than cupboard love. But it does have the effect of dragging politics into business, and the two will not mix, any more than water and oil. The function of government is to govern so all may have an equal chance, while as for politics, that seems to be largely what the world is suffering from.

The selfishness of group loyalty, which is one form of patriotism, reveals itself when groups demand the remittance of taxes. ‘The real-estate men,’ says Merle Thorpe, ‘want the terms of mortgages eased and their tax burden lifted. When they say “lifted” they mean “shifted,” for someone must pay the taxes.’ The same cry goes up from other interests, — amusements, lumber, gasoline, — but these taxes must fall somewhere on other groups inside the country; so what becomes of national patriotism?

A timely example bobs up in the day’s news. The Associated Cigar Manufacturers and Leaf Tobacco Dealers complain to the Navy Department that the sailors on our battleships are smoking Cuban cigars. The Navy diplomatically replies that when the ships are in Cuban waters they do buy cigars at Havana, but these cigars must be, as the saying is, smoked on the premises. They cannot be brought into the United States. And it points with pride to the requirement that ‘the Navy purchase or contract for within the United States only articles of the growth, production or manufacture of the United States, notwithstanding that such articles may cost more.’

VI

Recently the New York Times printed the letter of a lady who was unduly agitated because some person did not rise when the national anthem was played. Where was his patriotism, she demanded. Oh, well, the war is over, and exhibitionistic patriotism is not quite so insistent as it was. Patriotism, as Young Lochinvar said of love, ‘flows like the Solway but ebbs as its tide.’ Perhaps he was tone deaf, like that chap who could recognize but two tunes, one of which was not the ‘Star-Spangled Banner.’

During the war I had a taste of the perils a deaf man might undergo when the patriotism of the people had been whipped to fanaticism by war propaganda. I was seated in the writing room of a Syracuse hotel, which was an alcove opening out of the lobby. Several men were in the room, probably traveling salesmen making out reports or preparing alibis for their sales managers. Suddenly the man next me stood up. He did not walk away, but simply stood there giving me the uncomfortable feeling that he was trying to read what I wrote. I stole a cautious glance at him and discovered that all the men in the room were standing, and, what is more, regarding me with unfriendly, not to say hostile, glares. I was immediately overwhelmed with what Briggs has called the guiltiest feeling. What was wrong with me? What had I done? Here was my cue to be nonchalant and light a cigarette. But I am not so unselfconscious as all that. I gathered up my letter and left the room.

No sooner had I stepped into the lobby than the situation explained itself. Everyone was standing. In the far corner of the room a three-piece orchestra was playing what I now guessed must be that martial air popularly known as the national anthem. At any rate it was playing whatever is played when people feel called upon to rise, and I was under suspicion which might, had it not resolved itself so quickly, have given me a bad time. It would not have been easy for anyone to tell me what it was all about, and would have been even more difficult, I imagine, for me to explain to an excited mob that, since I could not hear the music, it was to me as if it had not been played. The experience often repeated itself during the war, but I soon learned to conform. What, I wondered, would be the predicament of a blind man when the national colors were carried past? It ought to be arranged that the blind could stand for the anthem and the deaf salute for the flag. Since we could neither of us fight, we could thus do our bit to make the world safe for democracy.

Legally there was no such thing as a national anthem then, for it was only recently that Congress took time off during a busy session to give official standing to the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’ which at least had the merit of not plagiarizing the national air of England. There was objection, of course, from literary purists, for the style is not one that should be immortalized; but the real menace of this, as of all such martial hymns, is that it glorifies war. It is militaristic, written around an incident of a battle in the now obscure War of 1812, and helps to perpetuate the military spirit and keep the people in a warlike frame of mind. Have we nothing in our history of which we are more proud than our wars, nothing greater to look forward to than more wars?

Then there are the local subdivisions of patriotism. How the South feels when its sectional patriotism is challenged by an expression of national patriotism is well shown by a contribution from the news in to-day’s paper. The Georgia legislature is determined to make Lincoln’s birthday a legal holiday in that state, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy are united against it. ‘It would,’ they say, ‘dishonor the memory of the gallant dead of our state.’ How do the Daughters of the American Revolution stand on this issue? There must be chapters in the South. Do they go together as far as the Civil War and then part company, to come together again on the more modern wars, particularly that comic war, our little tiff with Spain, which was wished on us by yellow journalism and which produced two heroes — Admiral Dewey, who tactlessly sold the house an admiring nation gave him, and Lieutenant Hobson, who was kissed into oblivion?

Most patriotic activities are directed toward the end of preparation for war. They are our defense mechanism against internationalism. It is as absurd for a nation as big as ours to attempt to keep out of world affairs as for an elephant to try to hide in the grass. We are too big. But it is the purpose of hosts of wrong-headed people to keep alive our national selfconsciousness on the note of disparagement of all the rest of the world.

One old bitter-ender out in Los Angeles hired a broadcasting station with his own money to voice a series of impassioned protests against the showing of the film made from All Quiet, though why he directed his blasts against the picture when the book was read by millions is a mystery. Perhaps he never heard of the book. And did he base his objections on the untruthfulness of the film, on the ground that it gave a false idea of war? On the contrary, just the opposite. ‘ If our youth see this picture, we shan’t be able to make them fight,’ he implored. Was there ever a more damaging admission? Would to God it were true. But the military tradition dies hard. Before another war can be staged it is to be feared that a new crop of cannon fodder (or should we say poison-gas victims?) will have arrived who have never heard of Erich Remarque. By then the new school histories will have their accounts telling how gallant General Pershing and his A. E. F. won the war, with nothing said of the vermin and gangrene, the futility and squalor. There will be no account of the colossal blunders at headquarters by which thousands of young lives were needlessly wiped out.

VII

In my boyhood the piece most popular with elocutionists for public readings was Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade,’ which celebrated the gallantry of six hundred who died because of an officer’s error, with only a line, and not a word of criticism, for the blundering fool who sent them to their deaths.

Most of the selections we spouted on Friday afternoons were martial in spirit. They were part of our education in patriotism. Naturally we believed that nothing was more glorious than war. ‘Sheridan’s Ride,’ ‘How They Brought the Good News,’ ‘Paul Revere’s Ride.’ No one knew, certainly the patriotic beadles never told us, that Paul Revere’s ride was all in the day’s work for him, for which he was duly and fairly paid. ‘Casabianca’ celebrated the triumph of duty over common sense, that blind obedience so necessary to army discipline. I remember one that began, ‘Out of the North the wild news came,’ which contained the lines: —

What was the Primate of all England doing while the Lord of Hosts was arming the American rebels? We have not yet got over the old Hebrew idea that war is one of God’s chief preoccupations. Just the other day the head of the Red Cross startled and amused the world by explaining that his organization could not help the starving miners’ families because its ministrations are confined to what are legally known as ‘acts of God.’ War, evidently, is an act of God, but when the children of striking miners die for lack of food, that is presumably nature taking her course.

I remember those old patriotic poems because they were taught me as no other poetry was. They were in all Readers and Speakers. I can quote them without stint. I would gladly exchange my memory of those resounding martial chants for a few remembered lines from the ode ‘To a Skylark’ or ‘Kubla Khan.’ I regard with alarm the continued efforts of the super-patriots to keep the younger generation from losing the illusion that war is glorious.

Compulsory military drill in colleges is one of their methods. It is refreshing to observe signs of rebellion. Cornell, where the first unit was established, has been compelled to revoke the compulsory feature. Without it, military drill will disappear exactly as chapel does when the obligation to attend is removed. Ohio State University, which has the largest unit, with fifty-two United States commissioned officers in charge, is engaged in a fight right now which can have but one outcome, for the youth of to-day are wiser than my generation. The ostensible purpose is preparedness, but the real reason is propaganda, to keep the young in line by dangling the military trappings before them. A uniform is potent. It is said that many Negroes will work for nothing as doormen if only the uniform is gorgeous enough.

Each successive generation of youth of military age holds in its hands the fate of war. If the youth of the world refuse to fight, there will be no wars. That is what the militaristic propagandists fear; that is why they fight the books that tell the truth about war. They believe, with Napoleon, that four hostile newspapers are more dangerous than battalions.

Youth is learning that it is neither dulce nor decorum to die for one’s country when one knows it means leaving his entrails hanging to a barbed-wire entanglement to advance some noncombatants’ economic interests. There never was a cause of war, aside from those which were frankly freebooting and piracy, that could not be settled peacefully, just as disputes between man and man are settled in all civilized countries. Fighting settles nothing but which is the best fighter. There was a time when dueling was allowed even in this country. If a man called you a liar, you challenged him and ran him through. He died, and your honor was satisfied. But you might be an expert swordsman and still be a liar.

I have no patience with those who say, ‘I don’t want war, but I believe in preparedness.’ Preparedness makes wars. General Tasker Bliss said that the real cause of the World War was the large number of men in Europe under arms. You can no more expect a nation with an army not to want to use it than you can expect a boy with a toy hatchet not to try it on the first piece of furniture he finds.

VIII

But after all, what is patriotism? The dictionary defines it as love of country. But what is one’s country? Is it the United States, or is it Illinois? Or Knox County? Or Galesburg? Or the Fifth Ward? There is authority for each of these geographical limitations. In every state, county, town, and ward are societies and groups and individuals plugging for the growth, prosperity, and interests of each, regardless of how adversely its advantage may affect other communities. The hand of each small unit is against that of every other unit, but all are expected to unite in one grand, glorious outburst of patriotism for all the units combined. It is a form of patriotism to boom your town, or district, or state, as the case may be.

Los Angeles is full of people drawn from the Middle West, and full of pride at its growth — mere population, strangely enough, being a source of gratification. Is Los Angeles patriotic in the national sense? If it believes in ' my country, big or little, but may she always grow bigger,’ Los Angeles is n’t helping much merely by moving people around inside the boundaries. It is prospering at the expense of the country it is patriotically bound to love and boost. And if growth in population is such a boon to cities, why is not our immigration policy all wrong? Why do we not admit more prospective citizens to fill up those cities whose greatest achievements are recorded by the census?

Patriotism as practised in these United States seems to be egocentric, radiating from a point occupied by the patriot and diminishing in intensity as it gets farther from home. The hub of the universe, to paraphrase the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, sticks up visibly in the centre of every community with a wide-awake chamber of commerce. Rivalry of districts, rivalry of cities, rivalry of states, all come under the label of patriotism. ‘Patronize home industries,’ ‘Buy in New England,’ fight the chain stores because they are owned in Wall Street (is n’t Wall Street part of ‘My country, ’t is of thee’?), Minneapolis against St. Paul, the West against the East, the North against the South, agriculture against industry, uptown against downtown, build up, fight for, promote your own community, even at the expense of other communities, all loosely assembled within another geographical boundary known as our country.

Thus it is obvious that a patriotic citizen is one who believes that his is the best home and the best family in Galesburg, and that Galesburg is the best city in Knox County, while Knox is the best county in Illinois and Illinois is the best state in the Union. All of which climaxes in the grand finale that the United States is the best country in the world.

Since patriotism is able to embrace so much and overleap so confidently so many barriers and include so many conflicting and incompatible interests, why stop there? Why cannot we go on and logically complete the egocentric curves, so that the United States, instead of being the best country in the world, is merely the best country in North America, while North America is obviously the best continent in the Western Hemisphere, and the Western Hemisphere the best on the globe, and the world the best planet in the solar system, and our solar system the best solar system in the universe? We cannot go further than that without permission from Mr. Einstein, and by the time our patriotism has reached the sweet influences of the Pleiades it will be so attenuated as to be a subject for the researches of the physicists who have conceived, if not isolated, the electron.

This extended flight of imagination is no more absurd than what is actually taught and promoted by our superpatriots, militarists, chambers of commerce, and boosters. Patriotism, which really was a virtue in a small compact country about as large as one of our city wards, where all the people were of the same mind and all acquainted, becomes a pretty thin solvent for the problems of a complex and heterogeneous country in a world that is actually smaller, as far as our daily awareness of it goes, than the Greek peninsula was to Pericles.

Although we know more to-day about our fellow inhabitants of the globe, this knowledge has not yet had time to undo the effects of centuries of education in patriotism, still maintained by active bodies. We still do not realize that this country cannot permanently prosper unless the other countries of the world prosper along with it; that force, moral or physical, while it can distort and delay the working of economic laws, can never abrogate them; that fuller intercourse with the whole world is coming, and with it will come a new definition, or rather a better interpretation, of patriotism.

We do not need a new definition. The old word is still good enough to designate whatever virtue is in the idea. But we need a word for those hectic activities which are making the country ridiculous, the kind of patriotism that is not love of country but cupboard love, the kind that is merely a smoke screen for militarism, and the kind that is nothing but exhibitionism. Let us call such activities ‘patriotics,’ the sound of which does justice to their perfervid and hysterical qualities.

I hope and believe that I am a patriot. I love my country and am proud of it. It is the only country I have. My forbears have lived in it three hundred years. But I do not feel bound to admire every phase of it, to abstain from all criticism, or to believe that admiration for other countries implies a breach of loyalty. I am sure that if I can love and feel proud of a country as large as the United States, I could with a little effort stretch that love and pride to include more of the earth’s surface.