_Ambition for country_ is a normal result of the acceptance of the idea of country as personal, and ambition for country appears to be the very essence of any patriotic sentiment that is sincere. Still ambition for country has been, in some of its forms, a cause of wars. What other conclusion can we come to, then, than that ambition for country must be subjected to radical educational influences? This is the reverse side of political progress. Ambition must be given new content and new direction. All the power and the sentiment of the old imperialistic motive must remain, but all peoples must now be educated to see that the maintenance of its position in the world on the part of any nation is now a far more difficult and far more complex task than ever before. The building of empire must be shown to have been far easier and far less heroic, and much less a test of the superiority of a nation than we have supposed. We can show that military virtues are much more nearly universal than has often been assumed, and that nations that are inherently superior must abandon voluntarily their ambitions of aggression, if they wish to remain superior and to have a place of honor in the world.
This implies no teaching of pure internationalism. We still recognize as fundamental the whole spirit of nationalism. Country must remain first after all. All must indeed learn to take in some way the statesman's point of view in regard to country--with its sense of the future, of wide relations and long periods of time, and its practical vision. It is futile to think of this future as one wholly without struggle and competition. We must teach history also far more with the forward view. History has dealt too exclusively even in America with the past. National ambition that has as its aim to realize, with independence and power, all the good that an enlightened nation contains, but at the same time to act with justice and with the thought of the nation as a part of a coördinated world must take this point of view.
It is a median course between merely naïve and day by day living, such as Lehmann (15) complains about as the natural tendency of uneducated patriotism, and the kind of program making that takes into account only the purposes of a single nation that we must follow in teaching this forward view of national history. There is a danger in either extreme. We may remain a nature people, without a true historic sense, and be conscious only of a dramatic past which appeals to sentiment and a still more ambiguously glorious future; or, on the other hand we may become too definitely ambitious and too conscious of some special mission in the world. A nation with a program, a nation that does not recognize the experimental nature of history, is a dangerous element in the society of nations, even though its ambitions be not purely selfish. Excessive rationalism in national consciousness is itself a menace. We must live by our historic sense, by some ideal of a future for our nation; the people must have _some_ vision of a glorious future, and not be expected to see only an unending vista of problems and labors, but this history must be understood and taught intimately and appreciatively and not merely objectively and logically. We must take an interest in the careers of all nations, and understand history psychologically and be willing to judge it ethically. So far we have had the opposite view in most of our teaching and writing of history. We must take a fair and tolerant view of the power motive that exists in all nations, and try to understand what it means to be of another nationality and to have ambitions like our own. Without such an attitude, we should argue, no one can be truly patriotic, if patriotism means having at heart the true interests of one's own country.