Commonplace Book

'Patriotism - love of country. How excellent an emotion - not, I think, a virtue, except in so far as any strong feeling has more strength, more virtue in it than tepidity. When we speak of it as a proper and decor[o]us sentiment towards the State, we wrong it, as a man wrongs a woman whom he loves merely because she is his wife. The love of country is a feeling for the countryside - its hills and villages and race of men. It is a thing wholly individual and un-moral, as the love for another person is individual. To confuse this love of country and race for an adulation of the State lies at the bottom of much pain and confusion - of sentimentality and positive danger, too, I think. To raise it into a civic virtue, to clothe it with pomp of armies and banners, to stain it with blood and to slay before it as before an unholy altar sacrifices of gold and of men and of men's liberty - this is not patriotism any more than the lust of a senator who lays before his mistress the spoils of a state and of his rivals in love.'

from a letter to 'Rosalind', April 10th 1925 in Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby