PATRIOTISM NOT ENOUGH

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23702, 9 January 1939, Page 9

PATRIOTISM NOT ENOUGH

, .The duty which rises higher and higher, so far as politics go, is mv duty to Europe, as a part, and a great and immediate part of my duty to humanity, writes Dr Ernest Barker, the political philosopher, In an article on “My Political Duty.” Tom Paine writes somewhere in the “Rights of Man “I am a citizen of the world and my religion is to do good.” That is like Paine’s amusing, and yet engaging, flamboyance And yet it remains a duty to be a citizen of something more than England. It is a duty which first comes home to the mind in the course of foreign travel. Never, perhaps, was it more of a duty than it is to-day to take ourselves abroad: to cultivate friends and friendships in Italy and in Germany as well as in France and the other, countries that are our nearer neighbours; to understand the cities and the mind of other peoples. Merely to know—and knowing, it may be, to love—the physical aspect and countenance of another country is a gain. One becomes a better citizen of Europe through cherishing in the mind and the memory the surge of the Rhine among vine-clad hills, or the winding of the Danube through fruit-blossom before it reaches Vienna, or the Rhone in its brimming flow past Avignon and Tarascon, or the Arno running under its bridges in Florence.