We have all seen the breakdown of village standards of morality when the conditions of a great city are encountered. To do “the good lying next at hand” may be a sufficient formula when the village idler and his needy children live but a few doors down the street, but the same dictum may be totally misleading when the villager becomes a city resident and finds his next-door neighbors prosperous and comfortable, while the poor and overburdened live many blocks away where he would never see them at all, unless he were stirred by a spirit of social enterprise to go forth and find them in the midst of their meagre living and their larger needs. The spirit of village gossip, penetrating and keen as it is, may be depended upon to bring to the notice of the kind-hearted villager all cases of suffering--that someone is needed “to sit up all night” with a sick neighbor, or that the village loafer has been drunk again and beaten his wife; but in a city divided so curiously into the regions of the well-to-do and the congested quarters of the immigrant, the conscientious person can no longer rely upon gossip. There is no intercourse, not even a scattered one, between the two, save what the daily paper brings, with its invincible propensity to report the gossip of poverty and crime, perhaps a healthier tendency than we imagine. The man who has moved from the village to the cosmopolitan city and who would continue even his former share of beneficent activity must bestir himself to keep informed as to social needs and to make new channels through which his sympathy may flow. Without some such conscious effort, his sympathy will finally become stratified along the line of his social intercourse and he will be unable really to care for any people but his “own kind.” American conceptions of patriotism have moved, so to speak, from the New England village into huge cosmopolitan cities. They find themselves bewildered by the change and have not only failed to make the adjustment, but the very effort in that direction is looked upon with deep suspicion by their old village neighbors. Unless our conception of patriotism is progressive, it cannot hope to embody the real affection and the real interest of the nation. We know full well that the patriotism of common descent is the mere patriotism of the clan--the early patriotism of the tribe--and that, while the possession of a like territory is an advance upon that first conception, both of them are unworthy to be the patriotism of a great cosmopolitan nation. We shall not have made any genuine advance until we have grown impatient of a patriotism founded upon military prowess and defence, because this really gets in the way and prevents the growth of that beneficent and progressive patriotism which we need for the understanding and healing of our current national difficulties.