nd creeds because there are no longer any detailed and
definite public opinions, but they will for all that require some
ostensible purpose to explain their cohesion, some hold upon the common
man that will ensure his appearance in numbers at the polling place
sufficient to save the government from the raids of small but determined
sects. That hold can be only of one sort. Without moral or religious
uniformity, with material interests as involved and confused as a heap
of spelicans, there remains only one generality for the politician's
purpose, the ampler aspect of a man's egotism, his pride in what he
imagines to be his particular kind--his patriotism. In every country
amenable to democratic influences there emerges, or will emerge, a party
machine, vividly and simply patriotic--and indefinite upon the score of
any other possible consideration between man and man. This will hold
true, not only of the ostensibly democratic states, but also of such
reconstituted modern monarchies as Italy and Germany, for they, too, for
all their legal difference, rest also on the grey. The party conflicts
of the future will turn very largely on the discovery of the true
patriot, on the suspicion that the crown or the machine in possession is
in some more or less occult way traitorous, and almost all other matters
of contention will be shelved and allowed to stagnate, for fear of
breaking the unity of the national mechanism.

Now, patriotism is not a thing that flourishes in the void,--one needs a
foreigner. A national and patriotic party is an anti-foreign party; the
altar of the modern god, Democracy, will cry aloud for the stranger men.
Simply to keep in power, and out of no love of mischief, the government
or the party machine will have to insist upon dangers and national
differences, to keep the voter to the poll by alarms, seeking ever to
taint the possible nucleus of any competing organization with the
scandal of external influence. The party press will play the watch-dog
and allay all internal dissensions with its warning bay at some adjacent
people, and the adjacent peoples, for reasons to be presently expanded,
will be continually more sensitive to such baying. Already one sees
country yelping at country all over the modern world, not only in the
matter of warlike issues, but with a note of quite furious commercial
rivalry--quite furious and, indeed, quite insane, since its ideal of
trading enormously with absolutely ruined and