ng of national
greatness. And among those who have best preserved this warlike ideal of
worth, the patriotic ambition is likely to converge on the prestige of
their sovereign; so that it takes the concrete form of personal loyalty
to a master, and so combines or coalesces with a servile habit of mind.

But peace hath its victories no less renowned than war, it is said; and
peaceable folk of a patriotic temper have learned to make the best of
their meager case and have found self-complacency in these victories of
the peaceable order. So it may broadly be affirmed that all nations look
with complacency on their own peculiar Culture--the organised complex of
habits of thought and of conduct by which their own routine of life is
regulated--as being in some way worthier than the corresponding habits
of their neighbors. The case of the German Culture has latterly come
under a strong light in this way. But while it may be that no other
nation has been so naive as to make a concerted profession of faith to
the effect that their own particular way of life is altogether
commendable and is the only fashion of civilisation that is fit to
survive; yet it will scarcely be an extravagance to assert that in their
own secret mind these others, too, are blest with much the same
consciousness of unique worth. Conscious virtue of this kind is a good
and sufficient ground for patriotic inflation, so far as it goes. It
commonly does not go beyond a defensive attitude, however. Now and
again, as in the latterday German animation on this head, these
phenomena of national use and wont may come to command such a degree of
popular admiration as will incite to an aggressive or proselyting
campaign.

In all this there is nothing of a self-seeking or covetous kind. The
common man who so lends himself to the aggressive enhancement of the
national Culture and its prestige has nothing of a material kind to gain
from the increase of renown that so comes to his sovereign, his
language, his countrymen's art or science, his dietary, or his God.
There are no sordid motives in all this. These spiritual assets of
self-complacency are, indeed, to be rated as grounds of high-minded
patriotism without afterthought. These aspirations and enthusiasms would
perhaps be rated as Quixotic by men whose horizon is bounded by the main
chance; but they make up that substance of things hoped for that
inflates those headlong patriotic animosities that stir universal
admir