Our great philosopher William James gave expression in one of his last
utterances to a hope that every man, rich or poor, may come to serve the
State (as now every man in France does his military service) in some
direct duty that asks the same obedience, the same sacrifice, the same
forgetting of self that is asked of the soldier--that every man by the
payment of the blood tax may be able to get and keep the spirit of
neighborliness, to know how to sympathize more deeply with his fellow men,
and to learn the joy of disinterested doing for the nation. [Footnote:
"Memories and Studies: The Moral Equivalent of War," pp. 267-296.]
But in this demand and appeal of the new theory of our common
responsibility, of a dynamic conservationism, is the germ of a larger
patriotism than any that history has as yet defined--a patriotism that
asks the lifetime service of an individualism with an all-time horizon.
CHAPTER XIX
THE HEART OF AMERICA
In the little town of St. Die in the east of France there was printed in
the year 1507 a "Cosmographias Introductio"--an introduction to a
forthcoming edition of Ptolemy--in which was included an account of the
journeys of one Amerigo Vespucci, who is credited with the discovery of a
new part of the world--a fourth continent.
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