useless not only to humanity, but to our country itself. Before men can _associate_ with the nations of which humanity is composed, they must have a National existence. There is no true association except among equals. It is only through our country that we can have a recognized _collective_ existence.”[165] This, then, patriotism quite often actually is. And once more, in its positive recognition of the country as truly one of a community, patriotism turns out to be the working of the will to national individuality. This last phase is an altruistic form of the will. The concept of the will to national individuality, derived from the popular definition of patriotism as the love of country and wrought out in the light of the data which clusters about that popular idea, proves to be a seminal principle. If one follows out the various forms of the will, he comes to the main forms of patriotism. He could, by a knowledge of the characteristics of the will to individuality, foretell in general what the manifestations of patriotism would be found to be. CHAPTER IX THE NATION AS AN INDIVIDUAL Patriotism is the will to national individuality. What justification for its existence is there in the groundwork of fact? Is there really any individuality for the will to rest itself upon? Is the country an individual? There are those who deny that patriotism really has anything objective to feed upon. It is hard, they say, to find anything that the flag stands for or to which one addresses his choral chant when he sings, “My Country! ’tis of thee.” They ask what one’s country can mean to him. When one speaks of country, is he not thinking of that spot of earth which he calls home, those activities and institutions which he has seen working in his own community, or perhaps only the map? A country as big as the United States, for example, can hardly be said to be appreciated by the mind of a single man. Most of the country no one has ever even seen. The “collective mind” is shown to be a fiction. A people does not form a “person,” but remains only a group of individuals. And the corollary seems to be that the only ground on which to posit a nation has been taken away. The state is said to be unreal and artificial. Peoples may be the product of history; a state can be made in a day. Ponsonby looks upon a nation as such a construction: “A nation is not in its composition primarily a geographical nor a racial, but a political unit.... It must be able to uphold its independent political sovereignty.”[166] Without the necessity for a common defense, that is, there would be no nation. Charles Kingsley remarked in the preface to one of his books that while there can be loyalty to a king or a queen, there cannot be loyalty to one’s country.[167] And so it is that a “country” is an abstraction. For the ordinary patriot at least there really is no such thing. The country is not an individual, and there is no individuality in it for