"worldism" that shall make war impossible.

But we cannot gain a world-spirit by a sudden destruction of our
patriotism. We will never usher in tranquillity with a crash. The
nihilism of Tolstoy would plunge us into lawlessness and anarchy, for
the chief element of patriotism we must keep. "What is that element?"
you ask. It is the willingness of the individual to sacrifice his
welfare for the welfare of the group. There we have the stem of the
world-spirit of to-morrow. But the blossom will not burst forth in a
night. It must come by an unfolding and a growth. We cannot climb to
universal peace upon a golden ladder and cut the rungs beneath us.
Evolution builds on the past. The final spirit of "worldism" will be a
broadening and a deepening and a humanizing of the spirit of sacrifice
which is the noblest element in our patriotism.

"But," you ask, "if the evolution of patriotism is inevitable, what
have we to do with it? Why should we meddle with the course of
nature?" We reply that the evolution must come through you. We are not
"puppets jerked by unseen wires." "Consciousness," says Bergson, "is
essentially free." Man the savage or man the philosopher--he alone can
decide. Let him purify patriotism with Christianity and he has
brotherhood; adulterate it with avarice and he has war. The evolution
of patriotism is not a physical thing. Listen to Huxley, "Social
progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the
substitution for it of the ethical process." The evolution of
patriotism, then, is a moral thing, and morality is man-made. We are
men, but we can be supermen. We are patriots of a nation. We can be
patriots of the world.

The evolution of patriotism is no theorist's dream. It is a palpable
fact. The patriot of one age may be the scoundrel of the next. A turn
of the kaleidoscope and Paul the convict trades places with Nero the
Emperor. Who was the ideal ancient patriot? The statesman, Pericles?
The thinker, Plato? No. The most efficient murderer, a Macedonian boy.
"I must civilize," he says. So he starts into his neighbor's country
with forty thousand fighters at his back. Does Persia yield its
banner? No. Then crush it. Does Thebes resist? Then burn it to the
ground. Do the women prate of freedom? Load them with slave chains.
What? Do they still hold out? Then slaughter the swine. And as men
watch him wading through seas of blood, riding roughshod over
prostrate lives and dead hopes and sh