good, the true in some shape, never the utterly false or
vile, will this national tradition hold and keep, as an influence and a
power for time.

Unseen, unfelt, but strong like God's hand, this power surrounds the
cradle of the child. He finds it waiting for him. He does not know about
it or reason about it. It takes him, soft and plastic as it finds him,
and calls out his powers, and fashions them after its own forms. Before
he is twenty-one he is made up for good and all, an American, an
Englishman, or a Frenchman, _for life_. The creating influence was like
the air. He breathed it into his circulation.

There are people who think it very wise to quarrel with this state of
things. They think it philosophic to sneer at national prejudices, as
they call them, to call national pride and national feeling narrow and
bigoted. It is simply very silly to quarrel with any divine and
unalterable order of life. Better work under it and with it. Does not
love of country exalt and ennoble, and all the more because of its
prejudices? Does not the very meanest feel himself higher, more worthy,
more self-respecting, because he is one of a strong, great, free people,
with a grand inheritance of heroism from the past, and grand
possibilities for the future? Who will quarrel with the Frenchman, the
Englishman, or the Japanese, for holding his land the fairest land, his
nation the noblest nation the sun shines on? Is it not my fixed faith
that he is utterly deluded? Do I not _know_ that my own land is the
garden of the Lord? Do I not see that its valleys are the holiest, and
its mountains the loftiest, its rivers the most majestic, and its seas
the broadest, its men the bravest, and its women the purest and fairest
on the broad earth's face? Even Fourth of July orations have their uses.

No! thank Heaven for this virtue of patriotism! It lifts a man out of
his lower nature, and makes his heart beat with the hearts of heroes.
There are two or three things in the world men will die for. The Nation
is one. They will die for the land where their fathers sleep. They will
fling fortune, hope, peace, family bliss, life itself, all into the
gulf, to save its hearths from shame, its roof trees from dishonor. They
will follow the tattered rag they have made the symbol of its right,
through bursting shells and hissing hail of rifle shot, and serried
ranks of gleaming bayonets, 'into the jaws of death, into the mouth of
Hell,' when they are calle