Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/131

 the Johnsonian sense of the word. Moreover, in a land where the freedom of the spirit, even the freedom of the citizen, has not yet been realized, one can better serve one's country from a safe distance. I have often given it absent treatment with little or no result. My subject and I are not en rapport. Enough said of patriotism. But whence comes it, this love for one's country? One's language? English to me is as dear, though not as explicable in some of its idiosyncracies, as the Arabic. Domestic life? the customs and traditions of the hearth? I did not love my own home when I lived in it; I little appreciated the domestic peace and beauty of it; and I was glad to say good-bye to mine own people when I left it. Does it consist of one's national faith, of the religion of one's ancestors, this love for one's country? I would not be so irresistably attracted by it, if it did. For my race, ever since the days of Antiochus the Great, nay, back to the times of my fellow-scrivener, Sanchuniathon the Phoenician, never had a real