CH. XVIII.] THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY. 205 



more and more dependent on one anotlier over a wider and 

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

 warfare and destructiveness 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 

 the ]iighest attainable ethical feeling is no longer clannishness.. 

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

 understood by the Greeks and Romans. Note also that under 

 the influence of this hiqh 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 Therraopylai with the expedition of 

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

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

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

 considerations. 



But, like other phenomena in nature, our ethical feelings 

 are nob 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 Romans 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-Hellenism 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 the 

 moral and political failure of Greek civilization. 



