ture
experience. The language, religion, education, and prejudices acquired
in youth bias character and predetermine the directions in which
development may go on. A child might possibly change his country; a man
can only wish that he might change it. Therefore, among the true
interests which a government should represent, nationality itself must
be included.

[Sidenote: They are conditions and may contribute something.]

Mechanical forces, we must not weary of repeating, do not come merely to
vitiate the ideal; they come to create it. The historical background of
life is a part of its substance and the ideal can never grow
independently of its spreading roots. A sanctity hangs about the sources
of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginative. The ancients who
kissed the earth on returning to their native country expressed nobly
and passionately what every man feels for those regions and those
traditions whence the sap of his own life has been sucked in. There is a
profound friendliness in whatever revives primordial habits, however
they may have been overlaid with later sophistications. For this reason
the homelier words of a mother tongue, the more familiar assurances of
an ancestral religion, and the very savour of childhood's dishes, remain
always a potent means to awaken emotion. Such ingrained influences, in
their vague totality, make a man's true nationality. A government, in
order to represent the general interests of its subjects, must move in
sympathy with their habits and memories; it must respect their
idiosyncrasy for the same reason that it protects their lives. If
parting from a single object of love be, as it is, true dying, how much
more would a shifting of all the affections be death to the soul.

[Sidenote: They are not ends.]

Tenderness to such creative influences is a mark of profundity; it has
the same relation to political life that transcendentalism has to
science and morals; it shrinks back into radical facts, into centres of
vital radiation, and quickens the sense for inner origins. Nationality
is a natural force and a constituent in character which should be
reckoned with and by no means be allowed to miss those fruits which it
alone might bear; but, like the things it venerates, it is only a
starting-point for liberal life. Just as to be always talking about
transcendental points of reference, primordial reality, and the self to
which everything appears, though at first it might p