emper and be attached by ties of loyalty to some particular national
establishment, ordinarily the particular establishment which is formally
identified with the land in which they live; although it is always
possible that a given individual may be an alien in the land, and so may
owe allegiance to and be ruled by a patriotic attachment to another
national establishment, to which the conventionalities governing his
special case have assigned him as his own proper nation. The analogy of
the clam evidently does not cover the case. The patriotic citizen is
attached to his own proper nationality not altogether by the accident of
domicile, but rather by the conventions, legal or customary, which
assign him to this or that national establishment according to certain
principles of use and wont.
Mere legal citizenship or allegiance does not decide the matter either;
at least not by any means unavoidably; as appears in the case of the
Chinese subject under Manchu or Japanese rule; and as appears perhaps
more perspicuously in the case of the "hyphenate" American citizen,
whose formal allegiance is to the nation in whose land he prefers to
live, all the while that his patriotic affection centers on his
spiritual Fatherland in whose fortunes he has none but a non-resident
interest. Indeed, the particular national tie that will bind the
affections--that is to say the effectual patriotic attachment--of any
given individual may turn out on closer scrutiny to be neither that of
domicile or of formal legal allegiance, nor that of putative origin or
pedigree, but only a reflex of certain national animosities; which may
also turn out on examination to rest on putative grounds--as illustrated
by a subsidiary class of hyphenate American citizens whose affections
have come to be bound up in the national fortunes of one foreign Power
for the simple, but sufficient, reason that, on conventional grounds,
they bear malice against another equally foreign Power.
Evidently there is much sophistication, not to say conventionalised
affectation, in all this national attachment and allegiance. It will
perhaps not do to say that it is altogether a matter of sophistication.
Yet it may not exceed the premises to say that the particular choice,
the concrete incidence, of this national attachment is in any given case
a matter of sophistication, largely tempered with fortuity. One is born
into a given nationality--or, in case of dynastic allegiance, into
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