THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 



the campaigns of Marathon and Thermopylai 

 with the expedition of a band of Highlanders 

 in execution of a blood-feud, or with the excur- 

 sion of a party of Red Indians on the warpath, 

 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 sym- 

 pathetic side to patriotism (understanding the 

 word always as the Greeks and Romans under- 

 stood it.) At the one extreme, patriotism is 

 akin to clannishness ; at the other extreme, it be- 

 comes so wide as to resemble cosmopoHtanism. 

 As long as the purely civic structure of society 

 lasted, the clannish element was distinctly pre- 

 sent in patriotism. Greek history, after the ex- 

 pulsion of the Persians, is the history of the 

 struggle between the higher and the lower pa- 

 triotism, — between the two feelings known 

 to the Greeks as Pan-Hellenism and Autono- 

 mism, represented respectively by Athens and by 

 the Doric communities. The mournful history 

 of Thukydides tells us how autonomism won 

 the day, entailing the moral and political failure 

 of Greek civilization. 



But when Rome had extended her beneficent 

 sway over all the precincts of the Mediterra- 

 nean, uniting communities hitherto autonomous 

 and hostile by common interests of culture and 

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