The Defendant by G.K. Chesterton

The decay of patriotism in England during the last year or two is a / serious and distressing matter. Only in consequence of such a decay / could the current lust of territory be confounded with the ancient love / of country. We may imagine that if there were no such thing as a pair of / lovers left in the world, all the vocabulary of love might without / rebuke be transferred to the lowest and most automatic desire. If no / type of chivalrous and purifying passion remained, there would be no one / left to say that lust bore none of the marks of love, that lust was / rapacious and love pitiful, that lust was blind and love vigilant, that / lust sated itself and love was insatiable. So it is with the 'love of / the city,' that high and ancient intellectual passion which has been / written in red blood on the same table with the primal passions of our / being. On all sides we hear to-day of the love of our country, and yet / anyone who has literally such a love must be bewildered at the talk, / like a man hearing all men say that the moon shines by day and the sun / by night. The conviction must come to him at last that these men do not / realize what the word 'love' means, that they mean by the love of / country, not what a mystic might mean by the love of God, but something / of what a child might mean by the love of jam. To one who loves his / fatherland, for instance, our boasted indifference to the ethics of a / national war is mere mysterious gibberism. It is like telling a man that / a boy has committed murder, but that he need not mind because it is only / his son.

Here clearly the word 'love' is used unmeaningly. It is the / essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone / who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. This / sensitiveness, rising sometimes to an almost morbid sensitiveness, was / the mark of all great lovers like Dante and all great patriots like / Chatham. 'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would / think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My / mother, drunk or sober. ' No doubt if a decent man's mother took to drink / he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be / in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or / not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.