The Higher Patriotism

There is one moral pit into which we continually fall, a sort of hidden pit which the devil digs for the feet of the righteous. It is that we keep on in one way because we have begun that way, and do not have presence of mind enough to change when that path is no longer the right one. The traditional way, the historic way, is the way the Romans used when they went forward into Europe and levied taxes and brought back to Rome all their treasure and all their finest blood. That is the easiest way. But if we have the spirit of [more] moral adventure, if we believe, as we pretend to believe in America, in democracy -- then we shall be ready to take another course, even if it be much more difficult. People can no longer say that we do not believe in democracy in America, but they can say that we no longer trust democracy. Almost every state in Europe has established forts in Africa or Asia or some other place. But here in America is the place for experiment. Let us say, "We will trust the people although they are of a different color, although they are of a different tradition from ours. Perhaps we will be able through our very confidence, to nourish them into another type of government, not Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps we shall be able to prove that some things that are not Anglo-Saxon are of great value, of great beauty. Let us [page 2] not be like the men in commercial life, who say it is easy enough to go into a place after it has been swept clear by warships. You can force anything on natives when they have once been intimidated. But we must proceed in a different way, we must do our work on the hardest plane. We have a higher ideal than the old one which has been incorporated in the rule of first gaining government control by force and making things safe. I can imagine that most young men would say that they will not go into these new regions until a warship has gone first. The man with courage would be the man who would prefer to go without the warships, just as the brave young man walks the street of a city without arms, while the coward carries brass knuckles and a revolver in his hip pocket. Let us see that this more dispassionate idea of self-government, this more modern idea of human life, begins with a few groups of people here and there. Let us declare that just as an individual shows signs of decay when he loses his power of self-mortification, his power of self-surrender, when he begins to be cautious, when he begins to say, "I cannot do this thing because it may injure my future," so it is with a nation. A nation ought to be able, in some way, to arrive at a proper conception of patriotism. The word "economic patriotism" will, I trust, in future years come to have a meaning to us. We cannot afford to be too careful [page 3] of our individual life. We must not forget that there is something in the old idea that the world is a [theater] for noble action, and that nation which yearns for the noble action will be the nation of the future, as the self-forgetting young person is sure to come out ahead of the person who is cautious at an early age. From an address before the Thirtieth ↑Thirteenth↓ International Peace Conference, Chicago, 1904. Used by Courtesy of the Author.

↑{13th at Boston 1904}↓