«H. XVIII.] THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY. 205 



more and more dependent on one another over a wider and 

 wider area, and to create a whole class of interests to which 

 warfare and destnictiveness are more and more inimical. 

 And in the latter case, where the community assumes a civic 

 character, the rise of a genuine political life begins to make 

 men operate on each other by indirect compulsion, or by 

 persuasion, rather than by direct and brutal compulsion; and 

 ^he )iighest attainable ethical feeling is no longer clannishness. 

 but patriotism, in the exalted sense in which that word was 

 understood by the Greeks and Eomans. Note also that under 

 the influence of this high ethical feeling, even military life 

 loses its primitive purely egoistic character, and becomes a 

 school of self-discipline and self-sacrifice, nourishing in no 

 slight degree the altruistic feelings. If we compare the cam- 

 paigns of Marathon and Thermopylai with the expedition of 

 a band of Highlanders in execution of a blood-feud, or 

 with the excursion of a party of Eed Indians on the war- 

 path, we shall find no difficulty in realizing the force of these 

 considerations. 



But, like other phenomena in nature, our ethical feelings 

 are not sharply marked off from each other. There is a 

 selfish as well as a sympathetic side to patriotism (under- 

 standing the word always as the Greeks and Eomans under- 

 stood it.) At the one extreme, patriotism is akin to 

 clannishness ; at the other extreme, it becomes so wide as 

 to resemble cosmopolitanism. As long as the purely civic 

 structure of society lasted, the clannish element was dis- 

 tinctly present in patriotism. Greek history, after the 

 expulsion of the Persians, is the history of the struggle 

 between the higher and the lower patriotism, — between the 

 two feelings known to the Greeks as Pan-IIellenism and 

 Autonomism, represented respectively by Athens and by 

 the Doric communities. The mournful history of Thuky- 

 dides tells us how autonomism won the day, entailing th« 

 moral and political failure of Greek civilization. 



