to respect their own rights, to maintain their own independence—if in the blindness of our ignorance, our pride, and our presumption, we think of setting up our partial and local attachments as the law of nature and nations—if we practise, or so much as tolerate in theory that ‘exclusive patriotism’ which is inconsistent with the common privileges of humanity, and attempt to dictate our individual caprices, as paramount and binding obligations on those, to whose exaction of the same claims from us we should return only loud scorn, indignation, and defiance—if we are ever so lost to reason, as Vetus would have us, who supposes that we cannot serve our country truly and faithfully but by making others the vassals of her avarice or insolence; we shall then indeed richly deserve, if we do not meet with, the natural punishment of such disgraceful and drivelling hypocrisy. Vetus, who is extremely dissatisfied with our application of the term ‘exclusive patriotism’ to him, is nevertheless ‘at a loss to understand the patriotism which is not exclusive. The word _implies_ a preference of the rights and welfare of our own country to those of other (and above all other) of rival countries. This is not indeed the philanthropy of Anacharsis Cloots—it is not the dreary jargon of metaphysics, nor the shop-boy philosophy of a printer’s devil—nor the _sans-culotterie_ of scholastic virtue.’ We will tell Vetus what we mean by exclusive patriotism, such as (we say) his is. We mean by it then, not that patriotism which implies a preference of the rights and welfare of our own country, but that which professes to annihilate and proscribe the rights of others—not that patriotism which supposes us to be the creatures of circumstance, habit, and affection, but that which divests us of the character of reasonable beings—which fantastically makes our interests or prejudices the sole measure of right and wrong to other nations, and constitutes us sole arbiters of the empire of the world—in short, which, under the affectation of an overweening anxiety for the welfare of our own country, _excludes_ even the shadow of a pretension to common sense, justice, and humanity. It is this wretched solecism which Vetus would fain bolster up into a system, with all the logic and rhetoric he is master of. It is true, this kind of patriotism is not the philanthropy of Anacharsis Cloots; it has nothing to do with philanthropy in any shape, but it is a vile compound of ‘the jargon of metaphysics, with the vulgar notions of a printer’s devil.’ It is an intense union of the grossness and narrowness of ignorance with the dangerous refinement of the most abstracted speculation. It is passion and prejudice, inflamed by philosophy, and philosophy distorted by passion and prejudice.