One of the essential centers of life is a community, a neighborhood, those who live near enough to one another that the interests of their lives are closely interwoven by the fact of association in space. This would seem to be a self-evident proposition. Mazzini hit the truth when he said that mankind had been placed in groups or nuclei upon the face of the earth. The community is an irreducible minimum of association among mankind. It is a permanent association, and the sentiments that grow out of it will be permanent. There is true reason why one of the fundamental virtues is that of being a good neighbor. And Veblen was right in saying, “Even with no patriotism, love of country, and use and wont as it runs in one’s home area and among one’s own people, would not pass.”[183] Patriotism seems to be vitally connected with a permanent sentiment, community spirit. A community is attached to the soil. It has its basis in a local area. That is what makes a community. In other words, it is organized upon the geographical principle. The geographical principle is one of the permanently necessary principles of human association. Now a nation is so associated. A country must have a territory, and it is the only institution of which this can be said. “A nation ... is primarily a group of men and women related physically.... The state represents not the common interests of those who are intellectual, or musical, or religious, but chiefly the common interest of those who live in the same district.”[184] Patriotism is loyalty to one’s _native land_. At least one fundamental principle of a country is a permanent one, the geographical principle. We have here a suggestion as to why the soil is so important in patriotism. Patriotism is nourished by the soil. The soil not only is what sustains the vital economic interests of those who live upon it, but is the basis of the existence of the nation itself. Without the land, and land is _country_, there would be no patriotism.