Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 August 1876 — International Prejudices. [ARTICLE]

International Prejudices.

Undoubtedly it is difficult to keep our affections from prejudicing our reason; to judge tilings by their intrinsic value, and yet to value them in practice by their importance to ourselves; and, in short, to refrain from declaring our own favorite geese to be swans. But that is just one of the lessons we all have to learn in our private relations, on peril t>f bitter disappointment to ourselves and serious injury to those we love. A man who is capable of learning by experience finds out that the face of one whom he loves need not be the most beautiful in the world in order to be most delightful to his eyes: and that he may admit that the maternal instinct which proportions affection to the weakness of its object instead of to its abstract merit is so far from being irrational that it represents the great condition of domestic happiness. The paradox of patriotism is precisely the same. A man may hold

that Frenchmen or Americans are every whit as good as Englishmen in all ‘essentials ; that virtue and wisdom are unfortunately not confined by the four seas or the horizon visible from his parish steeple; and he may be. as ready as his neighbors to die for his country, to do his best to carry the English flag to the North Pole or Tinibuctoo, or to give his whole strength to remedy the many evils which threaten our social welfare. In this sense, indeed, tlie worse his country may be the greater its demands upon him, and the more convinced he is that it is behind his neighbors, the greater should be his efforts to bring it up to their level. The whole difficulty, in fact, lies in this persistent assumption that because I love a country or a person I must logically hold it to be the best of all countries or persons.: That is the temptation, not the legitimate inference. My country is, or ought to be, dear to me, because I am tied down to it by a thousand bonds of birth, connection and tradition; because it is that part of the world in which I can labor to most purpose; because my affections are governed by all kinds of associations which have no connection whatever with my intellectual estimate of its value. But this is just what people in general refuse to see. They insist upon drawing an illogical inference. If I am forced to admit by evidence that another race is in any respect better than myowfi, they declare that I am unpatriotic. They do not condescend to inquire whether my recognition of that fault leads me to love my country less. That is taken for granted; and therefore the test of patriotism is taken to be my pursuasiou of the truth of certain conclusions about matters of which, in ninetynine cases out of. one hundred, I am an utterly incompetent judge. It is sought to make patriotism rational by insisting that m f emotions shall have a logical basis wnich may or may not exist. The only result is that I make a fictitious basis by inventing the propositions which gratify my vicarious vanity, and then assuming that it is the cause instead of the effecrof the vanity. I must, for nay part; decline to stake my patriotism upon any such test whatever. Something may prove to-morrow morning that another nation is better than mine, and then I must either believe aHe or cease to be patriotic. \t claim the right, bn thecontrary, of expressing such opinions as I can form, with absolute freedom, and without admitting any inference as to my sentiment. I believe that Englishmen are in many and important respects at the rear, instead of

being in the van, of civilized races. As a mere mutter of taste, I generally prefer tlie society of intelligent Americans because they arc not hide-bound by British prejudice. I never go to Paris, or travel in Italy without being impressed by the great superiority of foreigners in many respects, intellectually, artistically and sofc daily. But for all that, I may be jpst as patriotic as tbe Briton who makes his first trip to the Continent, when he is already soaked to tlie core With nutive prejudices and swears that all foreigners are filthy barbarians because lie does not find soap by his basin in the first hotel. Why not? A man may love his children better than all the world, and yet know that they are short, ugly, stupid and far from being models of all tlie Christian virtues.— CornhiU, Magazine.