aker nationalities, all inferior races!" It
_never_ means anything good. For if a cause is just, like Ireland's, or
once Italy's, then 'tis the good man's duty to espouse it with warmth,
be it his own or another's. And if a cause be bad, then 'tis the good
man's duty to oppose it tooth and nail, irrespective of your
"Patriotism." True, a good man will feel more sensitively anxious that
justice should be done by the particular State of which he happens
himself to be a member than by any other, because he is partly
responsible for the corporate action; but then, people who feel deeply
this joint moral responsibility of all the citizens are not praised as
patriots but reviled as unpatriotic. To urge that our own country should
strive with all its might to be better, higher, purer, nobler, juster
than other countries around it--the only kind of Patriotism worth a
brass farthing in a righteous man's eyes--is accounted by most men both
wicked and foolish.

Patriotism, then, is the collective or national form of the Monopolist
Instincts. And like all those Instincts, it is a relic of savagery,
which the Man of the Future is now engaged in out-living.

Property is the next form. That, on the very face of it, is a viler and
more sordid one. For Patriotism at least can lay claim to some
expansiveness beyond mere individual interest; whereas property stops
dead short at the narrowest limits. It is not "Us against the world!"
but "Me against my fellow-citizens!" It is the final result of the
industrial war in its most hideous avatar. Look how it scars the fair
face of our England with its anti-social notice-boards, "Trespassers
will be prosecuted!" It says, in effect, "This is my land. God made it;
but I have acquired it and tabooed it. The grass on it grows green; but
only for me. The mountains rise beautiful; no foot of man, save mine and
my gamekeepers', shall tread them. The waterfalls gleam fresh and cool
in the glen: avaunt there, you non-possessors; _you_ shall never see
them! All this is my own. And I choose to monopolise it."

Or is it the capitalist? "I will add field to field," he says, in
despite of his own scripture; "I will join railway to railway. I will
juggle into my own hands all the instruments for the production of
wealth that I can lay hold of; and I will use them for myself against
the producer and the consumer. I will enrich myself by 'corners' on the
necessaries of life; I will make food dear for the poor,