Here you all are

The anatomy of loyalty is largely unexplored. Yet it is a branch of social science which suggests exciting discoveries for the long future. If the range of our planes continues to increase, the range of our thoughts will have to increase or there will be none of us left to do the thinking, and the focus of our allegiance will have to shift or we will find ourselves at last with nothing left to be loyal to. A world government, were we ever to get one, would impose on the individual the curious burden of taking the entire globe to his bosom—although not in any sense depriving him of the love of his front yard. The special feeling of an Englishman for a stream in Devonshire or a lane in Kent would have to run parallel to his pride in Athens and his insane love of Jersey City. The special feeling of a Netherlander for a dyke in Holland would have to extend onward until it found the Norris Dam and the terraces of Egypt. A Chinese farmer in a rice paddy would have to feel, between his toes, not only the immediate wetness of his own field, but the vast wetness of the fertile world.
E. B. White, The wild flag (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), pp. xi–x.