merely in the righteous cause of self-defense, but in the world's cause in defense of its best tradition, its highest ideals. Their cause is big enough to consecrate them. * * * * * Therefore a new, a larger, a more vital life has already begun for invaded and unconquered France! In order to reap the blessings of war, a nation must have an irreproachable cause, and aside from Belgium, France has the clearest record of all the belligerents in this world war. She will gain most from it, not in land or wealth, but in honor and moral strength, in dignity and pride. She is ready to pay the great price for her soul. This is the one supreme inspiration that the French are giving an admiring world--their readiness to give all rather than yield to the evil that threatens them. With the light of such nobility in one's eyes, it is difficult, indeed, to be patient with the cynical clamor of comfortable neutrals for peace at any price. If there is anything of dignity and meaning in human life, it lies in selfless devotion to beliefs, to principles; it is readiness to sacrifice happiness, life, all, in their defense. And that is patriotism in its larger aspect. Our intellectuals discuss coldly the primitive quality of patriotism and its unexpected recrudescence in this world war. They talk of it in the jargon of social science as "group consciousness." Before I felt its fervor in the crisis of Italy's decision, in the sublime endurance of the French, I did not realize what patriotism might mean. It is not merely the instinctive love for the land of birth, loyalty to the known and familiar. Much more than that! The natal soil is but the symbol. Patriotism is human loyalty to the deeper, better part of one's own being, to the loves and the ideals and the beliefs of one's race. It is the love of family, of land, of tongue, of religion, of the woman who bore you and of the woman you get with child, of the God you reverence. It is loyalty to life as it has been poured into you by your forefathers, to those ideals which your race has conceived and given to the world. "_Viva Italia!_" "_Vive la France!_" is a prayer of the deepest, purest sort that the Italian or the Frenchman can breathe. Without these subconscious devotions and loyalties the human animal would be a forlorn complex of mind and sense. Those amorphous beings who, thanks to our modern economic wealth, have become "citizens of the world," who wander physically and intellectually from land to land, who taste of this and that without incorporating any supreme devotion in their blood, our cosmopolites and expatriates and intellectuals, froth of a too comfortable existence, give forth a hollow sound at the savage touch of war. They become pacifists. They can see neither good nor evil: all is a vague blur of "humanity."