Nationality may be merely instinctive. It is characterized by the my-country-right-or-wrong attitude, and knows not the difference between Beelzebub and Michael. It is primitive and unreasoning. Nationality may be compulsory--a sore grievance and a bitter reproach to existence. It may be a matter of choice, free and deliberate, a source of joy and social energy. Such nationality--whether inborn or acquired--is the best and safest asset which a State can possess. It is generally supposed that the naturalized subject must be disloyal in a case of conflict between his country of adoption and his country of birth. Such a view assumes that all sense of nationality is of the primitive and unreasoning kind. It precludes all the psychological factors of attraction, education, friendship, adoption, amalgamation. It is ignorant of the fact that some of the bitterest enemies of Germany are Germans, who have left Germany because they could stand her no longer. These men have a much keener knowledge of her weak spots than the visitors who give romantic accounts in newspapers of her internal state. The whole process of naturalization may be rendered unnecessary and undesirable by future developments in international co-operation. As things are, it is a formal and legal confirmation of an allegiance which must exist before the certificate of citizenship is sought. Once given, the certificate should be honoured and the oath respected. To treat it as a scrap of paper is unworthy of a State which upholds constitutional rights. There are doubtless scoundrels amongst naturalized people. It would be strange if there were not. But to proclaim that a naturalized subject cannot love the country of his choice as much as the country of his birth is as rational as the statement that a man cannot love his wife as much as he loves his mother. Now I have touched on a delicate point. He may love his wife, but he must repudiate his mother, curse her, abuse her, disown her. In time of war some do, and some do not. I am not sure that the deepest loyalty is accompanied by the loudest curses.
There is a class of people--I have met them in every country--who are devotees of the simple creed that you should stay at home and not interfere in the affairs of others. Travel you may, with a Baedeker or a Cook's guide, and stay you may in hotels provided for the purpose, but you must do it in a proper way and at proper times, and preserve a strict regard for your national prerogatives. But you should not go and live in countries which are not your own. To such people there is something almost indecent in the thought that any one should deliberately wish to shed his own nationality and clothe himself in another. They form the unintelligent background against which the wild and lurid nationalists of every tribe disport themselves in frenzied movements of hate and antagonism. An irate old colonel (very gouty) said to me the other day: "A man who forgets his duties to his own country and settles in another is a damnable cur. So much for these dirty foreigners who overrun England."