A pre-war panacea for curing the ills of unrighteousness which blight society was the amelioration of environment--a sonorous, windy, academic platitude having more sound in it than sense. It was the pet scheme for manufacturing good citizens out of bad ones; it began at the outward condition of mankind and worked inward. It started with the barber, the schoolmaster, and the politician. By pursuing this method they started with folly and ended with failure. It is like telling a man to polish his boots when his heart wants cleaning. The favourite speculation of theorists was that perfect circumstances create perfect character. This is attractive reading in cheap handbooks of political economy for the working classes, but in this wicked world it fails to pan out when put to a working test. It is more important a man should start by mending himself, and his circumstances will quickly mend themselves. To expect by flattening down inequalities, removing temptations, and giving everybody a living wage of £2 per week, England will flower into a Garden of Eden where people are all good and happy and pay no taxes, and where angels will come and converse with us in the cool of the day, is to expect the impossible. To expect by adapting the lot to man instead of adapting man to his lot you will create an earthly paradise out of a world of wickedness is to expose your ignorance of human nature and to admit your incapacity for adjusting its wrongs. They tell us that in the New Democracy patriotism will be scrapped. Love of country is a parochial virtue; it will be swamped in the greater love of humanity which will rise like a swelling flood and cover all. In the new Garden of Eden we shall be a happy brotherhood, for the dangerous serpent will be scotched. This doctrine is maudlin sentimentalism with a tang of grotesque to flavour it. Humanity is an immense crowd to fall in love with _en bloc_; each individual will receive a very thin slice of your affection if all the world is to share in it alike. Love will die of starvation fed on these lean rations. As a _padre_ fresh from the Front persuasively raps out the truth, "the would-be cosmopolitan who will not narrow himself to love of country is rarely capable of any real self-devotion to the international ideal which he worships. The lover of humanity is more often than not utterly miserable travelling in a third-class railway-carriage." Patriotism must survive as a national virtue, however violently the universal brotherhood flourishes, because the love of country is founded on the love of home and family, and the love of home and family is founded on the love of a man and a woman. You can never get over this nature-logic while men and women remain human beings with natural instincts which draw them to love one another and preserve the family feeling. I would rather be the victim of every insular prejudice possible than have no British prejudices to stir my British blood.