"You don't then agree that we should attempt a world-cosmogony? That the nations should be as brothers, and concern themselves with one another's famines, one another's revolutions, one another's frontiers? But why this curious insistence on the nation as a unit? Why select nationality, rather than the ego, the family, the township, the province, the continent, the hemisphere, the planet, the solar system, or even the universe? Isn't it just a little arbitrary, this stress we lay on nationalism, patriotism, love of one particular country, of the territories united fortuitously under one particular government? What is a government, that we should regard it as a connecting link? What is a race, that queer, far-flung thing whose boundaries march with those of no nation? And when we say we love a country, do we mean its soil, the people under its government, or the scattered peoples everywhere sharing some of the same blood and talking approximately the same tongue? What, in fact, is this _patriotism_, this love of country, that we all feel, and that we nearly all exalt as if it were a virtue? We don't praise egoism, or pride of family, or love of a particular town or province, in the same way. What magic is there in the ring that embraces a country, that we admire it as precious metal and call the other rings foolish or base? You will admit that it is a queer convention." "All conventions are queer, I think," Henry said indifferently. "But there they are. One accepts them. It is less trouble." "It makes more trouble in the end, my young friend.... I will tell you one thing from my heart. If the League of Nations should fail, should go to pieces, it will be from excess of this patriotism. Every country out for its own hand. That has always been the trouble with the world, since we were hordes of savages grouped in tribes one against the other--as, indeed, we still are." "Well, zio mio," said Miss Longfellow breezily, "if you don't look out for number one, no one else will, you may be dead sure. And _then_ where are you? In the soup, sure thing. Nel zuppo!" She gave a gay, chiming, cuckooish laugh. A cheerful girl, thought Henry. "Viva the League of Nations!" she cried, and drank brightly of her marsala. Dr. Franchi, with an indulgent smile for youthful exuberance, drank too. "The hope for the world," he said. "You don't drink this toast, Mr. Beechtree?" "My paper," said Henry, "believes that such hope for the world as there may be lies elsewhere." "Ah, your paper. And you yourself?" "I? I see no hope for the world. No hope, that is to say, that it will ever be an appreciably better world than it is at present. Before that occurs, I imagine that it will have broken its string, as it were, and dashed off into space, and so an end." "And my hopes for it are two--an extension of country-love into world-love, and a purified version of the Christian faith."