The liability to patriotism is thus regarded as closely comparable with mankind’s unfortunate liability to drunkenness, to feel the fascination of strong liquor—as merely a natural and inevitable result or by-product of an unfortunate flaw in human nature—a tendency which will have to be sternly repressed and, if possible, eradicated, before men can hope to live in peace and tolerable security and to develop their higher capacities. The fact that patriotism of some degree and form is universally displayed, and that it breaks out everywhere into heat and flame when certain conditions are realized, does not for them in any degree justify it; and it should not, they hold, reconcile us to its continued existence; they draw an indictment not merely against a whole people, but against the whole human race. They attack nationalism, firstly, by describing what in their opinion patriotism is and whence it comes; secondly, by describing what they believe to be the natural consequences and effects of nationalism. The most common mode of attack is to identify patriotism with jingoism; they speak of “jelly-bellied flag-flappers” of flag-wagging and mafficking; they assert that the essence of patriotism is hatred and all uncharitableness towards other countries and their citizens.[93] Less virulent is the criticism of those who, looking coldly upon patriotism, describe it as the mere blind expression of the working of the gregarious instinct among us, and as something therefore quite irrational, which must and will tend to disappear, as men become more enlightened and are guided more by reason and less by instinct.[94] Again, it is said that patriotism is a form of selfishness and therefore bad; that it is a limitation of our sympathies, a principle of injustice; that it stands in the way of the realisation of universal justice, of the universal brotherhood of man, which is the ideal we obviously must accept and aim at. Or in other words, and this is the main indictment, it is alleged that patriotism and nationalism inevitably tend to produce war, that they keep the rival nations perpetually arming for possible wars and actually in commercial and economic war, if not at real war. And of course the evils of warfare and of such perpetual preparation for war are great and obvious enough in modern Europe. In support of this indictment, they point to the golden age of the Roman Empire, when the inhabitants of all its parts were content to sink their differences of race and country and were proud to proclaim themselves citizens of the Roman Empire; and they say that in consequence the civilised world attained then a pitch of prosperity and contentment never known before or since over any large area of the earth.