IN other families there may be as much worth as in our own. In other circles of friends there may be as much wisdom, and in other countries as much of all that deserves esteem; but, notwithstanding this, our obligation to love our own families, friends, and country, and to seek, in the first place, their good, will remain the same.*
It is proper I should desire you particularly to distinguish between the love of our country and that spirit of rivalship and ambition which has been common among nations. What has the love of their country hitherto been among mankind? What has it been but a love of domination; a desire of conquest, and a thirst for grandeur and glory, by extending territory, and enslaving surrounding countries? What has it been but a blind and narrow principle, producing in every country a contempt of other countries, and forming men into combinations and factions against their common rights and liberties? This is the principle that has been too often cried up as a virtue of the first rank.*
* Price was not anti-patriotic, and spent several paragraphs of his sermon finding patriotic sentiment in the Bible. He simply defined patriotism as a concern for the virtues and vices and liberties of our own country, rather than those of our neighbours. “The observations I have made include our whole duty to our country; for by endeavouring to liberalise and enlighten it, to discourage vice and to promote virtue in it, and to assert and support its liberties, we shall endeavour to do all that is necessary to make it great and happy.”
* Price, who died in 1791, did not live to see what the French Revolution would become. In November 1789, when the Non-conformist minister preached his sermon, Louis XVI was King of a Christian monarchy, albeit with a new National Constituent Assembly. In 1792, the officially atheist French First Republic was declared. That same year, the revolutionaries annexed the Austrian Netherlands and Savoy. In 1793, Louis XVI was publicly executed, and the newly-formed National Convention declared war on Great Britain to relieve John Bull of the oppressive King George III. By 1794, well over 16,000 execution orders had been carried out by guillotine and noyade (drowning), and some 10,000 more citizens had died in gaol or had been executed without judicial process. It is to be hoped that none of this would have changed what Price had to say about love of country; but it might have changed to whom he said it.