"Very true, doctor," answered Mark with a smile. "That _is_ an inducement. You know how devoted I am to its acquisition." "More's the pity, my lad, more's the pity. The sceptre that rules the world in this century is a golden one. However, I was young myself once--long, long ago, I'm sorry to say--and can appreciate your sublime disdain of opulence. But what has started you off on this new path, may I ask?" "The duty I owe my country--patriotism," exclaimed Mark rather proudly. "Patriotism--umph! The last refuge of a scoundrel, as Dr. Johnson said. Have you no worthier motive? Forgive me, my boy, I don't intend any personal application--it's a quotation that occurred to me. But patriotism has an exceedingly bad reputation, permit me to say, and is responsible for more crimes than liberty and religion combined. _Dulce et decorum est_, and so forth, 'Fidelity to one's country right or wrong,' may be fine ringing mottoes; but after all, the incentive is vain and selfish. Patriotism is the parent of national prejudice, and prejudices of all kinds are the greatest foes to justice. In the year A.D. 18,000, when 'man to man the warl o'er shall brithers be for a' that,' patriotism will be looked upon as a species of fetichism. Patriotism! I dislike it almost as much as I do generosity. Still, if you must kill, kill for some other cause. Here you Yankees are breathing fire and slaughter because a portion of your countrymen choose to follow the example of their forefathers. They are rebels and traitors and what not, because they follow in the footsteps of the men of '76, as you call them. The great question which underlies it all is apparently set aside and overlooked. The rallying cry is not the extinction of slavery; not freedom to fellow-beings from an undeserved servitude; not justice; but the Union--whatever that may be--and patriotism forsooth! the slogan that has marshalled unnumbered hosts to the perpetration of so many wrongs, and which is only, if I may so define it, disguised selfishness, as loyalty is after all but refined snobbishness." Now the doctor, although hating slavery, had a lurking sympathy for the South. To his mind, they were abstractly in the right; it was sheer inconsistency for a union of states the outgrowth of secession to prevent those among themselves who desired it from taking a similar action. Mark, it is true, while he had lately become to a certain extent a proselyte to the teachings of the abolitionists, and admitted the wrong of slavery, and the necessity of wiping out that blot from the national escutcheon, made it subordinate to his great desire to preserve the Union and save from destruction "the greatest and freest country on earth, to which he had the honor to belong."