What we do one year we undo the next, and do over
again the year following. Our energy is wasted in, and our prosperity
suffers from, experiments endlessly repeated.
Every patriot believes his country better than any other country. Now,
they cannot all be the best; indeed, only one can be the best, and it
follows that the patriots of all the others have suffered themselves to
be misled by a mere sentiment into blind unreason. In its active
manifestation--it is fond of killing--patriotism would be well if it
were simply defensive; but it is also aggressive, and the same feeling
that prompts us to strike for our altars and our fires impels us over
the border to quench the fires and overturn the altars of our neighbors.
It is all very pretty and spirited, what the poets tell us about
Thermopylae, but there was as much patriotism at one end of that pass as
there was at the other.
Patriotism deliberately and with folly aforethought subordinates the
interests of a whole to the interests of a part. Worse still, the
fraction so favored is determined by an accident of birth or residence.
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