Patriotism is the one of these lowest vices which most often masquerades in false garb as a virtue. But what after all _is_ patriotism? “My country, right or wrong, and just because it is my country!” This is clearly nothing more than collective selfishness. Often enough, indeed, it is not even collective. It means merely, “_My_ business interests against the business interests of other people, and let the taxes of my fellow-citizens pay to support them.” At other times it means pure pride of race, and pure lust of conquest: “_My_ country against other countries! _My_ army and navy against other fighters! _My_ right to annex unoccupied territory against the equal right of all other peoples! _My_ power to oppress all weaker nationalities, all inferior races!” It _never_ means or can mean anything good or true. For if a cause be just, like Ireland’s, or once Italy’s, then ’tis a good man’s duty to espouse it with warmth, be it his own or another’s. And if a cause be bad, then ’tis a good man’s duty to oppose it, tooth and nail, irrespective of your patriotism. True, a good man will feel more sensitively anxious that strict justice should be done by the particular community of which chance has made him a component member than by any others; but then, people who feel acutely this joint responsibility of all the citizens to uphold the moral right are not praised as patriots but reviled as unpatriotic. To urge that our own country should strive with all its might to be better, higher, purer, nobler, more generous than other countries—the only kind of patriotism worth a moment’s thought in a righteous man’s eyes, is accounted by most men both wicked and foolish.
Then comes the monopolist instinct of property. That, on the face of it, is a baser and more sordid one. For patriotism at least can lay claim to some sort of delusive expansiveness beyond mere individual interest; whereas property stops short at the narrowest limits of personality. It is no longer “Us against the world!” but “Me against my fellow-citizens!” It is the last word of the intercivic war in its most hideous avatar. Look how it scars the fair face of our common country with its anti-social notice-boards, “Trespassers will be prosecuted.” It says in effect, “This is my land. As I believe, God made it; but _I_ have acquired it, and tabooed it to myself, for my own enjoyment. The grass on the wold grows green; but only for me. The mountains rise glorious in the morning sun; no foot of man, save mine and my gillies’, shall tread them. The waterfalls leap white from the ledge in the glen; avaunt there, non-possessors; your eye shall never see them. For you the muddy street; for me, miles of upland. All this is my own. And I choose to monopolise it.”