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by Robert L. Dabney

Editor's Note: This article is an excerpt from Dabney's book, The Practical Philosophy, (1897), pp. 94-98, where he discusses various kinds of love--patriotism and friendship, conjugal and parental love. Thus for Dabney, patriotism is grounded in our duty to love our neighbor.

The Nature of Patriotism

Patriotism is usually a very complex feeling. If it is not a total perversion of the virtuous affection, it must be grounded in a feeling of disinterested philanthropy for our fellow-citizens. But if that were all, our patriotism would have to be cosmopolitan--i.e., not patriotism--in order to be disinterested. Other active principles come in to limit and intensify the affection: similarity of language, race, and modes of thought and feeling; common interests; the ties of a thousand proud associations of country and ancestors; the local associations of the familiar and beloved scenery, the plains, the mountains, the streams, the homes, the cemeteries, to which our hearts are knit by a thousand tender bonds of suggestion.

Doubtless the more impure elements of pride and ambition join with the others, in all but the purest souls. Our national pride makes us take pleasure in those who exhibit the same elation with ours, and thus gratify our sympathies. Their echo of the same national opinions with which our intellectual pride has connected itself, pleases us. These fellow-citizens are the persons from whom we hope for the boon of power and fame.

Is patriotism then moral? There have been philosophers who professed so sublimated a creed as to answer, No. They argue that if the men who by accident of birth occupy the same soil with us receive any warmer share of our philanthropy than the rest of mankind, that warmer affection is robbery of those whom we love less because they are farther off. Thus we can only be patriots by being inequitable.

This argument receives its whole plausibility from the criminal exaggeration of the virtue of patriotism so common among mankind, which hated other races, simply because they were not their own, and because they were separated from them by a language, a river, or an artificial boundary line. Such is too often the ferocious abuse which sinful men make of a legitimate affection, as the Greek counted all men barbarians who did not speak their tongue; and as both they and the other ancients generally judged that the national relation between them and any other nation with whom no formal treaty or truce existed was one of warfare and plunder.

Our philanthropy ought to be cosmopolitan to the extent of rebuking and abhorring that perversion of patriotism; we ought to extend it sufficiently to adopt that code of sentiments and international relations which Moses was the first writer of the "law of nature and nations" ever to enounce (Deut. 1:16; 10:18-19); and that a thousand years before pagan philosophy ever conceived it. But the other extreme is unnatural, and therefore not reasonable. Man is a finite creature, and his affections must in some meas­ure limit themselves. If he were as infinite as God, he might literally have cosmopolitan affections. To require us to love the men across the ocean as warmly as the fellow-citizens of our own commonwealth is a milder form of the absurdity, which should require us to love the children of all other men as tenderly as our own.

Small States Most Patriotic: Why? Therefore, Federation Is Best

The examination we have made of the nature of patriotism shows that it must be much more intense in smaller states than in large ones, and between homogeneous races than be­tween heterogeneous. Nowhere did the flame of patriot­-ism burn so hotly as in the little kingdoms and republics of Greece. Every element of patriotism is intensified by the compactness of the commonwealth, the feeling of nearness to one's fellow-citizens, the knitting of the associations with the natural scenery, the sympathy of common beliefs and inter­-ests. The Spartan could not remain patriotic out of sight of the mountains of Laconia and Arcadia, the Switzer when he has forgotten his Alps.

Now warm and generous patriotism is the prime element of a state's strength, progress, and glory. A people without an impassioned patriotism is but a gigantic horde, gregarious like the beasts, rather than social, welded together by tyranny or the mercenary greed for gain and ma­-terial good, regarding their country as a good field for the practice of legislative plunder or of rapid money-getting, rather than a center of proud affections and loyalty.

Here we have an argument in the very facts of philosophy for preferring a confederated over a consolidated body of states. It has been the small states, Israel, Tyre, Greece, Old Rome, Switzerland, Holland, England, Scotland, Virginia, which have made their impress upon the world's history for good, and for free civilization. When Rome after the Punic wars became a large, consolidated democracy, she became the curse and incubus of mankind; and under her brute weight, the civilization of the old world fell crushed. Small states are the homes of efficient patriotism. But, on the other hand, the world has grown too large to make it desirable to have its system of nations formed of a multitude of little, separate, rival commonwealths, each pursuing its own interests without any umpire between them. The result would be too constant strifes.

Here then is a vast dilemma. The solution is found in the principle of Confederation. By this the commonwealth retains its sovereignty, its self-government, and its vigorous patriotism; while its federal relations form a permanent bond of cooperation with its neighbors, and combines their common strength against foreign aggression. In such a happy federation the particular patriotism of the citizen for his own commonwealth must be first and warmest, even as the love of the most philanthropic parent for his own children and kinsmen must be nearer and warmer than the kindness which he feels for the children of others. But for this very reason he will be the more staunch and self-sacrificing in joining for the defense of the whole neighborhood. Both wisdom and justice make him know that when a neighborhood is assailed by an invader, the brave defense of all the families at once is the defense of each--and of his own.

Thus in the earlier history of our federation, the citizens of the states evinced their loyalty to the whole Union by baptizing with their blood every battle-field which the common enemy invaded. But our fathers did not profess to detach their warmest affections from their own commonwealths, and to expand them equally to all the others, as designing men not seldom demanded of them while seeking the narrowest and most selfish local advantages, under the pretense of universal and impartial patriotism. Compliance with such demands is impossible; it is forbidden by the philosophy of man's nature.

Such an expansion of patriotism would practically mean the dissolution of its bonds. Were obedience to this insolent demand possible, the ulterior result would be to replace the impulses of the true, just, and generous patriotism by the bonds of brute force and sorid self-interest, which feebly connect parts of some huge, heterogeneous "colluvies gentium," which is one only in name and in power of oppression. Such imperial masses have represented in history rather the gregariousness of some vast horde of animals than the beneficent, enlightened, and progressive socity of civilized men.

Robert L. Dabney (1820-1898) was professor of church history and theology at Union Seminary in Virginia, served as a chaplin and officer in the Confederate army, and was elected moderator of the Southern Presbyterian General Assembly in 1870. He was widely recognized as the leading Southern Presbyterian theologian of his day.

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