And yet our Herminia was a woman after all. Some three years later, when Harvey Kynaston came to visit her one day, and told her he was really going to be married,—what sudden thrill was this that passed through and through her. Her heart stood still. She was aware that she regretted the comparative loss of a very near and dear acquaintance.

She knew she was quite wrong. It was the leaven of slavery. But these monopolist instincts, which have wrought more harm in the world we live in than fire or sword or pestilence or tempest, hardly die at all as yet in a few good men, and die, fighting hard for life, even in the noblest women.

She reasoned with herself against so hateful a feeling. Though she knew the truth, she found it hard to follow. No man indeed is truly civilized till he can say in all sincerity to every woman of all the women he loves, to every woman of all the women who love him, "Give me what you can of your love and of yourself; but never strive for my sake to deny any love, to strangle any impulse that pants for breath within you. Give me what you can, while you can, without grudging, but the moment you feel you love me no more, don\'t pollute your own body by yielding it up to a man you have ceased to desire; don\'t do injustice to your own prospective children by giving them a father whom you no longer respect, or admire, or yearn for. Guard your chastity well. Be mine as much as you will, as long as you will, to such extent as you will, but before all things be your own; embrace and follow every instinct of pure love that nature, our mother, has imparted within you." No woman, in turn, is truly civilized till she can say to every man of all the men she loves, of all the men who love her, "Give me what you can of your love, and of yourself; but don\'t think I am so vile, and so selfish, and so poor as to desire to monopolize you. Respect me enough never to give me your body without giving me your heart; never to make me the mother of children whom you desire not and love not." When men and women can say that alike, the world will be civilized. Until they can say it truly, the world will be as now a jarring battlefield for the monopolist instincts.

Those jealous and odious instincts have been the bane of humanity. They have given us the stiletto, the Morgue, the bowie-knife. Our race must inevitably in the end outlive them. The test of man\'s plane in the scale of being is how far he has outlived them. They are surviving relics of the ape and tiger. But we must let the ape and tiger die. We must cease to be Calibans. We must begin to be human.

Patriotism is the one of these lowest vices which most often masquerades in false garb as a virtue. But what after all IS patriotism? "My country, right or wrong, and just because it is my country!" This is clearly nothing more than collective selfishness. Often enough, indeed, it is not even collective. It means merely, "MY business-interests against the business-interests of other people, and let the taxes of my fellow-citizens pay to support them." At other times it means pure pride of race, and pure lust of conquest; "MY country against other countries; MY army and navy against other fighters; MY right to annex unoccupied territory against the equal right of all other peoples; MY power to oppress all weaker nationalities, all inferior races." It NEVER means or can mean anything good or true. For if a cause be just, like Ireland\'s, or once Italy\'s, then \'tis a good man\'s duty to espouse it with warmth, be it his own or another\'s. And if a cause be bad, then \'tis a good man\'s duty to oppose it, tooth and nail, irrespective of your patriotism. True, a good man will feel more sensitively anxious that strict justice should be done by the particular community of which chance has made him a component member than by any others; but then, people who feel acutely this joint responsibility of all the citizens to uphold the moral right are not praised as patriots but reviled as unpatriotic. To urge that our own country should strive with all its might to be better, higher, purer, nobler, more generous than other countries,—the only kind of patriotism worth a moment\'s thought in a righteous man\'s eyes, is accounted by most men both wicked and foolish.

Then comes the monopolist instinct of property. That, on the face of it, is a baser and more sordid one. For patriotism at least can lay claim to some sort of delusive expansiveness beyond mere individual interest; whereas property stops short at the narrowest limits of personality. It is no longer "Us against the world!" but "Me against my fellow-citizens!" It is the last word of the intercivic war in its most hideous avatar. Look how it scars the fair face of our common country with its antisocial notice-boards, "Trespassers will be prosecuted." It says in effect, "This is my land. As I believe, God made it; but I have acquired it, and tabooed it to myself, for my ow............