Patriotism was the duty of man, not to any one nation but to the whole of humanity, conceived of as the only nation.
In 1832 there was little left of that influence in England among the educated classes, and Tennyson's insular patriotism represented their feeling for many years, and partly represents it now.

But the ideas of the Revolution were at the same time taking a wiser and more practical form among the English democracy than they even had at their first outburst in France, and this emerged, on one side of it, in the idea of internationalism.

It grew among the propertied classes from the greater facilities of travel, from the wide extension of commercial, and especially of literary, intercommunication.

Literature, even more than commerce, diminishes the oppositions and increases the amalgamation of nations.

On her lofty plane nations breathe an air in which their quarrels die.