It will have to be admitted first of all that patriotism may be the kind of force that its critic describes it to be. And if it were irrevocably and wholly committed to be such a spirit, one would have to pass an unfavorable verdict upon it. Whatever its benefits might otherwise be, the world would not tolerate it, if that meant to be forever confronted with the possibility of another conflict such as the present one. It may, however, be pleaded that the present internecine conflict of patriots is not a permanent condition of mankind. It is a stage through which the race is having to pass in its development towards world-wide organization. And it is not altogether strange that in the process, patriotism should be a temporary difficulty, just as family, clan, and provincial pride once were. The factors making for a world integration have not yet fully found themselves, and of course, are not adequate for the job of overcoming the prejudices of patriots. Moreover, it is natural for any stage of progress gained to be a bar to further progress. Each stage has to be sharply and definitely conceived in order to be reached, but that in turn makes it a bar to further development. The vision of the next step simply doesn’t come easily to men’s minds. Moreover, it is easy for them to take achieved results as final. Those results have to be taken seriously, if they are to yield their full value. And besides, a stage of progress doesn’t know itself simply as a link in a single logical line of development; it has many individual interests of its own,--interests which may give it a tendency to fly out of what has been the line of progress. Other things, too, get mixed up with it that tend to pull it out of its straight and narrow path. Patriotism has been mixed up with and betrayed by junkeristic, dynastic, and profiteering interests. Patriotism itself surely should not have to bear the full blame for the faults of those evil companions, although patriotism, it must be admitted, has been in bad company. In the light of all the facts, it seems most accurate to say that patriotism taken as a whole does offer difficulties in the way of welding men into larger peace units. But after all they are only difficulties, and not impassable barriers. They are practical rather than theoretical, not rational and necessary. They offer no grounds for a final condemnation of patriotism. It does not seem to be fair, at any rate, to say that patriotism is a disintegrating factor in world affairs. There is no larger unit of cooperation that it is breaking up. And patriotism can claim for itself that it has come in as a force making for larger groupings of men. If patriotism were at one sudden blow stricken out of the world, we should be set backward rather than forward in the process of winning the conditions of world peace.