And patriotism involves just this demand for liberty. The patriot wants his country to be free. It must, to satisfy him, be not only a recognizable separate unit as among the peoples of the world, but must run its own affairs. He wants it to be self-directing and autonomous. He cannot bear to have his country used as a thing, or a mere piece of mechanism at the mercy of another’s will. Any one who is patriotic in China will not be satisfied with a situation where any foreign power has concessions over parts of his country’s soil. Weak governments frequently find it necessary to guard their neutrality, and they do it jealously because the patriotic spirit will not permit them to allow others to put them in subjection as a means to the furtherance of alien designs. Belgium is an instance. Belgium does not want to be a roadway or the battlefield of Europe. She does not want to be a pawn in a game. She wants her territory to be the expression of her own free life. To stand for her neutrality is to stand for her sovereignty, and to assert herself. Belgium might utterly perish, but in doing so, she would have asserted herself, and she would rather die in that magnificent self-assertion than to be the tool of another. It is not often that a supposedly sovereign power will, like Luxemburg, allow its neutrality to be disregarded without a struggle. President Wilson understood the sensitiveness of patriots when he insisted that no foreign troops should be landed in Russia without her consent. Patriotism is often thought of altogether as the fight for freedom. The patriot insists upon the freedom, the autonomy, the sovereignty of his country; the will to self-direction is one of the moving forces of patriotism. To be a true individual is to have some significance of one’s own. Individuality comes to mean marked individuality. It stands for the opposite of the quality of being common. The phrase “have some individuality” often means to have something for which one stands, and something that is really significant in the world. It means that one’s activities should be the expression of a life plan which is his, and which has real value. This characteristic takes a step beyond those of mere separateness and independence. When we say of one that he has no individuality, we do not mean that he is not numerically separate from other men, but, in part at least, that he has no _life plan_ which is specially his own. He has no significance. The man who is an individual is one who has a specific character. And if he prides himself upon being an individual he wants to “be somebody.” He has “self-respect.” He regards himself as significant. He wants not only to count as one; he wants to _count_.