Page:Whymenfightameth00russuoft.djvu/47

Rh fact, the common purpose survives, and remains a strong tie, after the instinctive liking has faded.

A nation, when it is real and not artificial, is founded upon a faint degree of instinctive liking for compatriots and a common instinctive aversion from foreigners. When an Englishman returns to Dover or Folkestone after being on the Continent, he feels something friendly in the familiar ways: the casual porters, the shouting paper boys, the women serving bad tea, all warm his heart, and seem more "natural," more what human beings ought to be, than the foreigners with their strange habits of behavior. He is ready to believe that all English people are good souls, while many foreigners are full of designing wickedness. It is such feelings that make it easy to organize a nation into a governmental unit. And when that has happened, a common purpose is added, as in marriage. Foreigners would like to invade our country and lay it waste, to kill us in battle, to humble our pride. Those who coöperate with us in preventing this disaster are our friends, and their coöperation intensifies our instinctive liking. But common purposes do not constitute the whole source of our love of country: allies, even of long