Patriotism is a vary complex feeling, built up out of primitive instincts and highly intellectual convictions. There is love of home, family and friends, making us peculiarly anxious to preserve our own country form invasion. There is the mild instinctive liking for compatriots as against foreigners. There is pride, which is bound up with the success of the community to which we feel that we belong. There is a belief, suggested by pride but reinforced by history, that one's own nation represents a great tradition and stands for ideals that are more open to attack, an element of worship, of willing sacrifice, of joyful merging of the individual life with the life to the nation. This religious element in patriotism is essential to the strength of the State since it enlists the best that is in most man on the side of national sacrifice.
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