We need a new social impulse back of our patriotism. We have come to the point where we even trifle with the idea that nationalism may be an outworn thing, too parochial a survival to stand the white light of the twentieth century. We have a great deal of social emotion of one kind or another in this country. It has put many healthy ideas into circulation, registered many needed protests. But it has been so remote from the actual business of life, so far removed from the job and the polling booth, that it has done little even for those that have served it best. The prevailing idea of social freedom in this country within the last few years has developed among the industrial groups of our large cities especially a kind of intellectual proletariat, whose creed is active social reform, but whose practice is intellectualism. This constitutes a curious menace to Americanism. It seeks to substitute the “brotherhood of man” for all the loyalties and obligations and relationships of life. I saw a month or two ago in a widely circulated magazine a symposium to which many writers and publicists contributed, stating whether or not they “believed in patriotism” and saw any validity in it. Some did and some did not. It was discussed as if it were the protective tariff. The I. W. W.’s urge their followers to ignore national lines and unite only as “Workers of the World.” And a great many of those followers, truly united in their passion for industrial freedom, hoodwink themselves into believing that in this bond all the debts and privileges of a national citizenship are more than included. They come to speak slightingly of those that still hold to so practical a loyalty. The immigrants, wavering between two loyalties and firmly fixed in neither, and especially the immigrants who come from those countries where the social sense is strongly developed, are especially drawn or think they are by the appeal of a loyalty to “no God and no master”--and respond readily to the flexible and not too confining _idea_ of brotherhood. The _idea_ moves and sways the throng. But when they go home to their crowded rooms in tenements, when they go the next morning to the job, when they deal with property, those men and women need a government, understanding and equable, to carry and control the conditions of their lives, to safeguard their rights, to aid them to right their wrongs. It alone can give them the guarantees and the tradition of industrial freedom. They need a loyalty.