ve, that lust was
rapacious and love pitiful, that lust was blind and love vigilant, that
lust sated itself and love was insatiable. So it is with the 'love of
the city,' that high and ancient intellectual passion which has been
written in red blood on the same table with the primal passions of our
being. On all sides we hear to-day of the love of our country, and yet
anyone who has literally such a love must be bewildered at the talk,
like a man hearing all men say that the moon shines by day and the sun
by night. The conviction must come to him at last that these men do not
realize what the word 'love' means, that they mean by the love of
country, not what a mystic might mean by the love of God, but something
of what a child might mean by the love of jam. To one who loves his
fatherland, for instance, our boasted indifference to the ethics of a
national war is mere mysterious gibberism. It is like telling a man that
a boy has committed murder, but that he need not mind because it is only
his son. Here clearly the word 'love' is used unmeaningly. It is the
essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone
who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. This
sensitiveness, rising sometimes to an almost morbid sensitiveness, was
the mark of all great lovers like Dante and all great patriots like
Chatham. 'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would
think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My
mother, drunk or sober.' No doubt if a decent man's mother took to drink
he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be
in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or
not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.

What we really need for the frustration and overthrow of a deaf and
raucous Jingoism is a renascence of the love of the native land. When
that comes, all shrill cries will cease suddenly. For the first of all
the marks of love is seriousness: love will not accept sham bulletins or
the empty victory of words. It will always esteem the most candid
counsellor the best. Love is drawn to truth by the unerring magnetism of
agony; it gives no pleasure to the lover to see ten doctors dancing with
vociferous optimism round a death-bed.

We have to ask, then, Why is it that this recent movement in England,
which has honestly appeared to many a renascence of patriotism, seems to
us to have