ON THE NATURE AND USES OF PATRIOTISM Patriotism may be defined as a sense of partisan solidarity in respect of prestige.

What the expert psychologists, and perhaps the experts in Political Science, might find it necessary to say in the course of an exhaustive analysis and definition of this human faculty would presumably be something more precise and more extensive.

There is no inclination here to forestall definition, but only to identify and describe the concept that loosely underlies the colloquial use of this term, so far as seems necessary to an inquiry into the part played by the patriotic animus in the life of modern peoples, particularly as it bears on questions of war and peace.
On any attempt to divest this concept of all extraneous or adventitious elements it will be found that such a sense of an undivided joint interest in a collective body of prestige will always remain as an irreducible minimum.

This is the substantial core about which many and divers subsidiary interests cluster, but without which these other clustering interests and aspirations will not, jointly or severally, make up a working palladium of the patriotic spirit.
It is true, seen in some other light or rated in some other bearing or connection, one and another of these other interests, ideals, aspirations, beatitudes, may well be adjudged nobler, wiser, possibly more urgent than the national prestige; but in the forum of patriotism all these other necessaries of human life--the glory of God and the good of man--rise by comparison only to the rank of subsidiaries, auxiliaries, amenities.

He is an indifferent patriot who will let "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" cloud the issue and get in the way of the main business in hand.
There once were, we are told, many hardy and enterprising spirits banded together along the Spanish Main for such like ends, just as there are in our day an even greater number of no less single-minded spirits bent on their own "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness," according to their light, in the money-markets of the modern world; but for all their admirable qualities and splendid achievements, their passionate quest of these amenities has not entitled these Gentlemen Adventurers to claim rank as patriots.