scantily ripened his hard-earned produce. In the latter case, he would love his little property, not merely as his birth-place, but for the pains which he had bestowed to make it fertile. He would be attached to it as to a creation of his own, and his affection would be more warm and solid.

The reader who has carefully perused the preceding chapters, will at once perceive that the sentiment which, in the latter supposition, is inspired by the field of our birth, is allied to pride; while that which arises in the former case is but vanity. Joining, then, these two conclusions together, and giving them their full extension and application to the more enlarged affection of patriotism, the necessary inference is, that the love of our country always is more warm and solid, more strong and active, when we have conferred benefits upon that country; when we have toiled to make it greater, better, wiser, and happier, than if it had stood in no need of our exertions; and that, in the former case, our patriotism is the patriotism of pride-in the latter, the patriotism of vanity.

And such is the general march of human tenderness. The affection of parents is warmer toward children, than of children toward parents; not merely because provident nature has ordained it so, but because the care, the anxiety of fathers redoubles their love. A mother prays for tenfold blessings on the babe, in reason of the sleepless hours which it costs her; and it is a bountiful law of human nature, that men are even more bound by the benefits which they confer than by those which they receive.

Every labour, every exertion, every thought which we bestow upon the good of our country, makes us desire to do even more for its welfare, and the passion of patriotism is as unsatiable as that of ambition. But ambition is altogether selfish, while patriotism is, next to universal benevolence, the most social feeling of our natures.

The immediate causes which modify patriotism into proud and vain, are the same which modify the self-approbation of nations. Labour employed to overcome the disadvantages of soil and climate, or any difficulty of natural

circumstances; a territory won with hardships from former inhabitants, or wrested from the elements; military exertions; intellectual efforts in any valuable branch of social progress, endear our country to us, and dignify our attachment with all the nobleness of pride. The contrary of these, though they may make us cherish our native land, while we think it is admired and prosperous, the seat of luxury or refinement, will never give that exclusive, that independent spirit to our attachment, which obstacles surmounted confer upon it. Men roused to patriotism by the feeble excitement of easy national splendour, are more subject at all times to prefer their private to the public good, and to abandon their country in distress or in disgrace, than if they had raised it to renown by their own efforts, and made common cause with it in virtue and exertion.

PART II.

On the Development and Progress of the different Modifications of
Patriotism among Nations.

THE feeling which is now expanded into patriotism was known in some of its diminished shapes by the earliest inhabitants of the earth, but it was far from being fully developed in regions so temperate and so fertile. The patriarchs loved the land in which they were born, and, amid the wanderings of unsettled tribes, lamentations were often poured forth by men who had been compelled to quit the field of their fathers. The Scriptures, the poems of Homer and of Ossian, contain many examples of such early affection; and the shepherds of the Mantuan bard were not the first exiles who sung in sorrow,

Nos patriæ fines et dulcia linquimus arva,

Nos patriam fugimus.

But time would be ill-bestowed in investigating such elementary sentiments, when the full-grown heart may be examined.

The Jews were condemned by the Almighty to many migrations before they were permitted to settle in the land of promise; and had they been gifted with very strong feelings in favor of their native land, the necessity of abandoning it would have been too severe a chastisement superadded to their other sufferings. This affliction then was, in pity, withheld from them, and it is not in this nation that any traces of true and worthy patriotism are to be found. Even when they had conquered Canaan, this was not the sentiment which warmed them; and vain of the land which flowed with milk and honey, they received the good things which it produced without bestowing any benefits in return. During their various captivities, indeed, they learned to know its value; and once they fought for national existence with a bitterness which might have well become true patriots. But the fall of their city showed how little they really loved it, when, instead of uniting to defend it, they turned their arms against each other, and committed acts of desperation which, if directed against their foes, would have been admired as deeds of heroism. Since the dispersion of this people, they have had no country, and could have felt no patriotism. Yet there do not, and never did exist men in whom the spirit of nationality was so great. Spread, as they are, over the whole globe, without a settlement or a home; banished from many empires, tolerated in a few, reviled in all, pursuing their gains, very often illicitly, in every corner, and guided by no feeling but interest, the scattered remains of this, the oldest people of the world, are bound together by ties which stretch from pole to pole, yet are stronger than any which unite the subjects of one realm; and when an Israelite in Mesopotamia invokes an unknown brother at the mouth of the Tagus, he is sure to be heard. Common sufferings are the ligament which joins them in every climate; and that which has deprived them of territory has given them general feelings, if not toward fields and tenements, at least toward men who once were the chosen people of God, but are now the outcasts of mankind.

In the early East, the feeling which the natives had for

their country would not now be dignified with the name of patriotism. In such times and circumstances, and in realms so constituted, subjects had, in fact, no country; the monarch was everything. Semiramis was Babylon; the sloth and effeminacy of Sardanapalus were Assyria; the concubines of Darius, the boastings of Xerxes, were the Persian empire; and the Mede who had not bowed before the king of kings, Dejoces or Cyaxares, would not have been a patriot. The sentiments which, in despotic governments, are abstracted from the common weal, and centered in one single person, or rather in the splendour and majesty of that person, when his virtues command them not, are too narrow to be honored with the name which the Romans, in their greatest days, bestowed upon the love of country. An act of devotedness which freed the empire of one vicious tyrant, to put another, and often one more vicious in his place, has, indeed, sometimes occurred in those regions, and the individual who committed it might have been urged by as noble an impulse as that which actuated the first Brutus. But the people at large, capable of no rule but despotism, had no affection but for bondage, and abject submission was their patriotism, which they embellished by blind adulation.

In the latitudes where the Nile had taught so many useful lessons of industry and thought, the sentiment now under consideration was ennobled and expanded more than it had been in the whole preceding world, and the Egyptians were fired by a warmer love of country than any former nation had known. Public virtue was respected; magistrates were esteemed but as they performed their duties; and juries sat in judgment upon the memories of departed monarchs. Yet, even here, patriotism was far from being an enlightened feeling, nor did it become so until it had been mingled with European civilisation.

In Greece the first traces of this sentiment, such as it might at this day be avowed, arose along with many other feelings which belong to modern nations; and the earliest men who really were patriots were Europeans.

It was not, however, in the fabulous, or even in the heroic

that this sentiment received its full expansion; and ages, even Cadmus, however great a benefactor he was of his country and of mankind, can hardly be classed under the denomination of patriot. Still less do Orpheus, Musæus, &c., deserve this title; and all the heroes and all the tribes of Greece may be overlooked, until Lycurgus appeared in Sparta, and formed one of the most patriotic people that ever has existed.

The patriotism of the Spartans was, like their pride and all their other qualities, a result of that education which a very great and good legislator bestowed upon his fellow-citizens; and never could both precept and example be stronger. If, however, Lycurgus had not found a readier disposition toward public virtue in the nation to whom he gave laws, he would not have met with better success than those who had preceded him in the generous work of reformation. Before him men had travelled into distant countries to bring home foreign improvements to their native land-before him men had laid down their lives for the public good; but not one had ever undertaken a task so vast and so enlightened as did this man, when, evading the overtures of his sister-in-law, he preserved the crown for his nephew-when, after travelling into Crete, Ionia, and Egypt, he returned to Lacedæmon with all the intellectual treasures of those countrieswhen, having instituted the code which made his republic the most celebrated of antiquity, he went into voluntary exile, after binding his countrymen by oath not to change his laws till he should return, and then made that exile perpetual by starving himself to death in the temple of Delphi. Certainly, as Plutarch justly observes, nothing in history surpasses these acts of patriotism; and never was obligation more binding than that which compelled the Spartans to observe his institutions, and which, for many centuries, raised his city to the summit of eminence among so many rival states.

One fundamental fault existed in the Spartan constitution, which, had it not been for the corrective of patriotism, would have been sufficient to overturn the state-the monarchy was divided, not merely between two men-it was shared by