ment like the loyalty which binds a man to his public school and
university, an affection purged of all rancour and jealousy, a stimulus
to all honourable conduct and noble effort, a part of the poetry of
life. It is so already to many of us, and has been so to the noblest
Englishmen since we have had a literature. If Henry V's speech at
Agincourt is the splendid gasconade of a royal freebooter, there is no
false ring in the scene where John of Gaunt takes leave of his banished
son; nor in Sir Walter Scott's 'Breathes there a man with soul so dead,'
etc. 'If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her
cunning.' We cannot quite manage to substitute London for Zion in
singing psalms, though there are some in England--Eton, Winchester,
Oxford, Cambridge--which do evoke these feelings. These emotions of
loyalty and devotion are by no means to be checked or despised. They
have an infinite potency for good. In spiritual things there is no
conflict between intensity and expansion. The deepest sympathy is,
potentially, also the widest. He who loves not his home and country
which he has seen, how shall he love humanity in general which he has
not seen? There are, after all, few emotions of which one has less
reason to be ashamed than the little lump in the throat which the
Englishman feels when he first catches sight of the white cliffs of
Dover.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] In his _Introduction to Social Psychology_.

[9] The reasons of their irresistible strength have been
explained in a most brilliant manner by Dr. Peisker in the
first volume of the 'Cambridge Medieval History.'

THE BIRTH-RATE

(1917)

The numbers of every species are determined, not by the procreative
power of its members, which always greatly exceeds the capacity of the
earth to support a progeny increasing in geometrical progression, but by
two factors, the activity of its enemies and the available supply of
food. Those species which survive owe their success in the struggle for
existence mainly to one of two qualities, enormous fertility or parental
care. The female cod spawns about 6,000,000 eggs at a time, of which at
most one-third--perhaps much less--are afterwards fertilised. An
infinitesimal proportion of these escapes being devoured by fish or
fowl. An insect-eating bird is said to require for its support about
250,000 insects a year, and the number of such birds must amount to
thousands of millions. As a rule