“One’s own” includes the people of his group, _i. e._, the people who are most like himself. These people share many things in common with himself. They have similar habits and customs, and all this conduces to render them one’s own. “One’s own” also includes the soil. It is that which is beneath one’s very feet; it sustains one; it nourishes one. Furthermore, one knows it as he cannot know any strange land, and as no stranger can know his land. He lives in it throughout the whole year, and knows it intimately in all its peculiarities and changing moods. Consequently, his patriotism has in it a love of the “land where his fathers died.” Virgil understood the meaning of this love of the soil. He himself felt it keenly, and because of it refused to accept the old home estate of a Roman sent into exile. It was characteristic that he made Æneas lament Troy even when he was going out to establish Rome itself. It was because of this understanding, in part at least, that he was led to urge the Romans to get back to the soil, realizing that from a love of _the soil_ to a love of _our soil_ is but a step.[11] However, what one has been used to should not be taken as the only kind of the patriotism of attachment that there is. If adhesion to one’s own could not be overcome, loyalty to one’s earliest home would quite uniformly be stronger than patriotism. But sometimes one begins to feel that his childhood was spent in cramped quarters, and that his early opinions were inadequate. The emotion that he may be very likely to feel under such conditions is not that of affection but that of contempt and disgust. Quite often when there is a conflict between loyalty to the nation and loyalty to the community, loyalty to the nation proves the stronger. Another indication that men are not inseparably bound to what they have been used to is that they change their nation, adopt another country, and side with it even against the country of their birth. Some time ago there appeared in one of the large newspapers a letter from a naturalized German in which was this sentence: “Perhaps you would appreciate your American citizenship better if, like me, you had been born and brought up in Germany.”[12]