ed, because there is really nothing like them in the world. That
is why I have suggested a note of nationalism rather than patriotism for
the English; the power of seeing their nation as a nation and not as the
nature of things. We say of some ballad from the Balkans or some peasant
costume in the Netherlands that it is unique; but the good things of
England really are unique. Our very isolation from continental wars and
revolutionary reconstructions have kept them unique. The particular kind
of beauty there is in an English village, the particular kind of humour
there is in an English public-house, are things that cannot be found in
lands where the village is far more simply and equally governed, or
where the vine is far more honourably served and praised. Yet we shall
not save them by merely sinking into them with the conservative sort of
contentment, even if the commercial rapacity of our plutocratic reforms
would allow us to do so. We must in a sense get far away from England in
order to behold her; we must rise above patriotism in order to be
practically patriotic; we must have some sense of more varied and remote
things before these vanishing virtues can be seen suddenly for what they
are; almost as one might fancy that a man would have to rise to the
dizziest heights of the divine understanding before he saw, as from a
peak far above a whirlpool, how precious is his perishing soul.

_The Future of Democracy_

The title of this final chapter requires an apology. I do not need to be
reminded, alas, that the whole book requires an apology. It is written
in accordance with a ritual or custom in which I could see no particular
harm, and which gives me a very interesting subject, but a custom which
it would be not altogether easy to justify in logic. Everybody who goes
to America for a short time is expected to write a book; and nearly
everybody does. A man who takes a holiday at Trouville or Dieppe is not
confronted on his return with the question, 'When is your book on France
going to appear?' A man who betakes himself to Switzerland for the
winter sports is not instantly pinned by the statement, 'I suppose your
History of the Helvetian Republic is coming out this spring?' Lecturing,
at least my kind of lecturing, is not much more serious or meritorious
than ski-ing or sea-bathing; and it happens to afford the holiday-maker
far less opportunity of seeing the daily life of the people. Of all this
I am only too