It is true that American government and American society leave much to be desired; but surely the real problems of America are national, belong, that is, to the intimate region of mind and spirit which has been spoken of above. Was Virginia ever a nation? A gospel that claims to be of universal validity and application can only show results in a limited region of Europe and Western Asia. one’s country is an expression of one’s love of mankind The rise of nationalism is the decisive character of the day. These two movements or moods, nationalism and internationalism, are regarded as opposing and mutually exclusive, and the very evident ascendancy of the former is too often unquestioningly accepted as involving, if not the final defeat, at least the indefinite postponement of the latter. It is from their century-old confusion that so much mischief and bloodshed have arisen, whether in the insane German design to base the dominion of the world on the "culture," that is, the intimate expression of a single people, or in the futile and suicidal efforts, now happily discredited, of the straitest sect of "Americanizers." When the youth of fifteen has come to forty and the man of twenty-five has touched fifty, the common element in their experience becomes much more apparent. Therefore, building social resilience is also building a culture of nationalism, and it makes an international port city distinctly unique despite its internationalism characteristic. Our efforts at internationalism have failed hitherto because they have followed the line of least effort.

It was in England and Holland that nationality was first enlisted in the political field, but it was the great outburst of the French Revolution which mingled and muddied the two streams and brought about a confusion of thought and a perplexity in action from which the world, on both sides of the Atlantic and of the Pacific, has not yet recovered.When President Wilson, picking up a phrase from the great mischief-maker Lenin, flung the slogan of "self-determination" into the world's arena he was using a word capable of many interpretations.

IT IS a common theme among the pessimists that the world has relapsed since the armistice into a temper of nationalism which renders illusory the hopes and dreams of internationalism so widely entertained during the war.

As this belief is widespread and is acting as a serious hindrance to the advance of a real understanding between nations, it may be worth while to subject it to the test of a brief analysis.Let us look first at the complaint brought by the disillusioned idealists and anti-nationalists against the post-war world. That does not mean that membership in a nation, participation in its common life and consciousness, necessarily involves residence within a fixed area, or contact with it by visits or economic ties. The necessary result of such a doctrine, as Lenin foresaw and desired, was disintegration--the break-up of that bourgeois nationalist society which he so detested.A survey of the workings of political nationalism and of the theory of self-determination is instructive. There are probably more Irishmen outside Ireland, more Norwegians outside Norway, more Jews outside Palestine, perhaps also more Scotsmen, Slovaks and Letts outside Scotland, Slovakia and Latvia than in the compact area of territory with which their national sentiments are related.Again, a nation is not a race.

How indeed could these three states and their Polish neighbor, all of them inhabited by a variety of peoples, have succeeded in preserving their identity at all? The sentiment of nationality cannot gather simply round an idea or a memory or a programme or about some function or status, such as a priesthood or an aristocracy or a Legion of Janissaries.

Both sentiments are intimate; both can legitimately be compared, in the sphere of personal relations, to the sense of nationality in the wider sphere of corporate relations.

The territorial lords of Europe, kings and electors and grand-dukes and bishops and petty barons, fought and plotted and intrigued, extended their frontiers hither and thither by conquest, marriage and barter and turned the balance of power this way and that, without enlisting in their causes (which would hardly bear too close a scrutiny), the deep lying passions and sentiments which were growing up in the hearts of the populations from whom they drew tribute.

In other words, national sentiment, whilst proving an invaluable ally for a movement of resistance against the abuses of misgovernment, as in Austria-Hungary, or against the pin-pricks of misunderstanding, as in Ireland, is unable by its own unaided efforts to make the political map conform more nearly to its pattern design.Turn now to America. How could bilingual Belgium and trilingual Switzerland have survived? Internationalism is on the defensive. As one eliminates individual and national defects and prejudices, cultivates nobler virtues born out of an appreciation of the ideal of human perfection through a truer realization of the nature of the true Self, as Self of All, and a conviction of universal brotherhood, one raises oneself morally and spiritually, in however small a measure it may be, and by reaction raises the consciousness of his nation, with a beneficial effect on mankind as a whole.

Of some parts of Europe this may be true, but of Western and Central Europe, to which this judgment is usually applied, it is certainly untrue.

The fact is that we are only at the beginning of the study of the interrelations between language and personality, whether individual or national. The malady of Europe has not arisen, as is so often said, from its nationalisms.