Your patriotism is a patriotism for war only, and a country
with only that kind is never long without war.
You see the difference? Patriotism for war generalizes. A patriotism for
peace particularizes, localizes. Ah, you do love, despite all their
faults, your nation, your government, your town and townspeople, else
you would not so often scold them! Otherwise, why do you let us call
them yours? Because they belong to you? No, because you belong to them.
Beyond cavil you are your own, but beyond cavil, too, you are theirs;
their purchased possession, paid for long, long in advance and
sight-unseen.
You cannot use a sidewalk, a street-lamp, or a post-box, or slip away
into the woods and find them cleared of savages and deadly serpents,
without seeing part of the price paid for you before your
great-grandfather was born. So, then, loving your town enough to scold
it, you will also serve it!
Now this we say not so much to be preaching as to bring in a last word
descriptive of our Northampton movement. We do not make that work a mere
aggregation of private kindnesses, but a public business for the
promotion of the town in sanitary upkeep, beauty and civic fellowship.
And so our aim is not chiefly to reward the highest art in gardening,
but to procure its widest and most general dissemination. The individual
is definitely subordinated to the community's undivided interest.
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