The belief in the value of one’s country sometimes expresses itself in the conviction that the country embodies lofty ideals. Patriots believe that their nation represents a great tradition, and stands for ideals that are important to the human race. A country may be said to be organized about these beliefs. A people is not really effectively unified until it is held together by the power of a common ideal. And that ideal is a source of strength to patriotism. This idealistic character has impressed itself upon even the warlike temper of peoples. They do not usually fight over causes that are avowedly materialistic and predatory. It takes a big idea to appeal to the people. “... Peoples in their larger corporate activities are not mercenary, but idealist. They know that wars do not ‘pay’ in the low, material sense. They are not seeking present ease and comfort, seldom a present good of any kind, but the triumph of an ideal which they associate with their national life. Their _method_ may be wrong, but their _purpose_ is essentially altruistic, perhaps the least selfish of any activity we know.”[114] And the ideal that moves a people must be a morally high ideal, or at least must seem to be so. A government could scarcely hope to win a hard war without having first enlisted the community’s moral convictions. Ideals are in part inherited from the nation’s past. What has united in the past has been these common ideals; and it is because there were such that the memory of the past is so valuable. But for the idealist the future is fully as important as the past. A people is held together by what Green calls its “social expectation.”[115] What binds us together in America is not so much the past as the future. Our past is a vital factor in our unity. It is remarkable how the various elements in our population can apparently so naturally appropriate “the Puritan fathers” as their own. The Puritan fathers were only one element in the founding of the United States, and at least three-quarters of the present inhabitants of this land have no physical inheritance from them, but a far greater proportion of the American people count themselves as their spiritual progeny. Nevertheless, the American people contains great heterogeneous groups and masses who have never been assimilated to the Puritan ideals or traditions. There is no common past for all our people. We root back into many lands and many traditions. The tie that really binds is what we believe to be our common destiny, the ideals that we believe ourselves to be progressively realizing. The roots of our unity are in the sky.