CHAPTER ITHE RECKONINGOur Duty to the Soldier—Our Lasting Quarrel With the Foe—The Story of the Census—No More Traitors—Shutting the Gates Against the Huns—The New Patriotism for All Americans.Vox populi, vox deiis a fine phrase. But fine phrases often half-state or mis-state facts for sake of the half-idea’s sound. Many popular conceptions are wide of the truth.The world had come to call the French people light, fickle, inconstant, volatile, incapable of grave and deep emotions. That was the popular American idea of France up to 1914. The man who would voice that idea now would be treated with anger or silent contempt by all the world. Now we know the silent, modest, simple, enduring faith, the unfaltering courage, the undying flame of heart which made the real France.We thought Great Britain cold, phlegmatic, emotionless. Who would say that to-day of a brave and strong people trying their best to ask us not to mention their battles against odds, their steadfast courage in holding the line, but to feel and understand the real admiration and love Britain really feels for us in these days.We Americans thought ourselves above fickleness and lightness always, boasted always of our common sense and steady practical point of view. We called France hysterical. Was it so? No. Once again popular counsel is wrong. It is we Americans who are the most hysterical people in the world. We make a purpose and forget it. We erect a hero and forget him. We believe, boast, acclaim, hurrah—and forget. We are easily excited—it is we who most easily grow “high headed,” as the French say. It is we, of all nations, who most quickly forget.In that fact regarding the American character lies thegreat hope of Germany to-day. It is the great fear of our gallant friends in arms, who held the line from which we so long were absent. It is the great danger of America. Lest we forget! Lest we forget! The danger is that we shall forget. And if we do, the great victory of this war is lost.Our Army is turned back toward home again. We greet our soldiers with much blare of trumpets. We mention large plans of industry for to-morrow. We slap each man in uniform on the back and say: “Fine! Noble! You are a hero! You have saved the world!”But to-morrow—To-morrow! And once more, what of to-morrow!The soldier comes back to his old world shyly glad that he still lives, hoping for the renewed touch of hands he knew, seeking the place in life that once was his. But, in spite of our protestations, that place is no longer his. It is as though he really were dead. The waters have closed over his place and he is no more. To-morrow he is forgotten—and he may listen to stay-at-home stories of how the war was fought and won—the “history” of this war, which, like all other history, will not be the truth but what we all accept as the truth because that is the easiest thing to do.But if the soldiers of this country are to come back only to the old America, the hurrying, scrambling, hectic, hysterical America—and those are our deserved adjectives more than any other people’s—then we have not won this war but have lost it.Our quarrel with yonder foe is not done. We shall have been faithless to our own blood and kin if now we forget. The war begins now; not ends. It must yet be fought out here at home in America. It will require all our courage to win it; if indeed it can still be won.There have been some great editorials struck off in the white heat of American conviction in these tremendous days following the Armistice and before the conclusion of the Peace Conference. Here is one from a Chicago journal which ought to be read and remembered by every statesman and every citizen in America.Those sentimental souls who think Lloyd George and Clemenceau are “too severe” in insisting that Germany must pay tothe limit of her capacity for the damage she has wrought, should consider the speech in which Herr Ebert, temporary dictator in Berlin, welcomed the returning Prussian troops, especially the following paragraph of that speech:You protected the homeland from invasion, sheltered your wives, children and parents from flames and slaughter and preserved the nation’s workshops and fields from devastation.This to the soldiers whose bestiality has made the very name of Prussia a stench in the nostrils of a decent world.There is not in Ebert’s speech a hint of repentance for the atrocious crimes which Germany has committed. There is no recognition that Germany has committed crimes. Instead, there is a boasting glorification of the returning armies, and a reminder to the nation that German lands have been kept inviolate. It is one in sentiment with the kaiser’s speech six months or so ago, in which he commanded his subjects who complained of their sacrifices to look at the devastated fields and cities of France, and see what war on their own ground would mean.The victorious allies are civilized. Therefore, they can not repay German crimes in kind. They can not reduce Frankfort to the present condition of Lens, or desolate the Rheingau as von Hindenburg desolated Picardy. But in some way, they must bring home to the German people both the villainy and the failure of the German spring at the throat of Europe, and there seem to be but two methods of doing this. One is to inflict personal punishment on the men responsible for the grosser outrages, and the other is to make the German people pay, and pay, and pay for the ruin which they wrought.Germany is not dead or defeated in America. She will raise her head again. Again we shall hear the stirring in the leaves, and see arise once more the fanged front which has so long menaced the world. The time to scotch that snake is now, to-day; and this is no time, when our maimed men are coming home, when our young boys are growing up, to be faithless to those men who—their eyes still on us as they fling to us the torch of civilization—lie not yet content nor quiet in Flanders Fields.The great debt of the world is by no means yet paid. Whether or not Germany pays to the material limit, is not so much. Whether or not we get back a tenth of our war money, is not so much—that is not the way the great debt of the world is going to be paid. We cannot pay it byoratory or by fine phrases, or by resolutions and conferences and leagues of nations. We cannot pay it with eulogies of the dead nor monuments to the living heroes. We cannot pay it by advancing our breasts again against shot and shell.The debt of the world must be paid by America. We can pay it only by making a new and better democracy in America. We can pay it only by renewed individual sacrifices and a renewed individual courage.We must remake America. We must purify the source of America’s population and keep it pure. We must rebuild our whole theory of citizenship in America. We must care more for the safety of America’s homes and the safety of the American ideal. We must insist that there shall be an American loyalty, brooking no amendment or qualification.That is to say, we must unify the American populace—or we must fail; and the great debt of the world must remain unpaid; and the war must have been fought in vain.The old polyglot, hubbub, hurdy-gurdy days of America are gone. We are no longer a mining camp, but a country, or should be that. Happy-go-lucky times are done for us. We must become a nation, mature, of one purpose, resolved at heart. Now we shall see how brave we really are, how much men we are.What is America to-day? What undiscovered soul was there lying under the paint and the high heels and the tambourine and the bubbling glass in the fool’s paradise of our excited lives? What was there of sober and resolved citizenship under the American Protective League—a force so soon developed, so silently disbanded? Very much was there. All that a nation needs was there—if that nation shall not forget.It is one thing if a quarter million men go back to business and forget their two years of sacrifice; if three million soldiers also forget their sacrifices and simply drop back into the old business world which they left. But it is quite another thing if three and a quarter million American citizens, sobered and not forgetful, do take up the flung torch and say that the dead of Flanders shall rest content—not merely for a day or so remembered—not merely for a year or two revenged, but for all the centuries verified and made of worth and justified in their sacrifices.A part, only a small part, of the work of the American Protective League is done. We who silently pass back yet further beyond recognition, are not disbanded at all. The flung torch is especially in our own hands. We have been only pretenders in this League, we have been only mummers and imposters in this League, if we do not individually carry on the work for the future. That work, as we take it, is to make America safe for Americans, and to leave each man safe in his own home, in a country of his own making, at a table of his own choosing.When work on this book was first begun, it seemed to all concerned that the great matter was to accumulate instances of shrewdness in catching criminals; stories of plots foiled and villains thwarted. We all of us wanted to see stalk by with folded arms a tall, dark, mysterious stranger in a long cloak, with high boots, and a wide hat pulled low over his brow. We wanted him, in the final act, to pull off his hat with the sweeping gesture of one hand, his false moustache with the other, and stand revealed before us, smooth-faced and fair of hair, exclaiming “It is I—Clarence Hawkshaw, the young detective!” We shared the American thirst for something exciting.It became obvious, as the great masses of sober, conscientious revelations from the very heart of America came rolling in and piling up in cumulative testimony, that what had at first seemed the most desirable material was the least desirable. If this record is to have any ultimate value—and it should have great historical value—that must be, not because of a few flashy deeds, but because of a great, sober, underlying purpose. Our final figure of the A. P. L. man is not to be a Hawkshaw, but—an American.When the time came to call a halt and to disband, there was not a member of the League who did not lay down his work sober and grave of heart. The sum of the reaction of all these reports, large and small, from the hundreds of centers where the League was active, leaves any man acquainted with the facts convinced that America has done her part splendidly, here at home, in the war. It is splendid—what America has done. Far more splendid, what America is. Still more splendid, what America is to be.The best reading for any American in these days is thecensus map of the United States. Next year we shall have a new one, for by then, ten years more of our history will have been completed. The census map comes out once every decade, printed in different colors, showing the location of the foreign-born in the United States. The American-born regions have appeared in steadily lessening areas as the decades have passed.It is only with a grave heart that any real American can face the census map to-day. The conviction is inevitable that we have been too long careless of our racial problems. If we are to have an America now, we must change. Our golden age of money-making is not a double decade in extent. We cannot go that road another twenty years. If your son is meant to be an American, have him study the census map and the story of the A. P. L. Then he will learn something about his own country. He has not known. His father has not known.The English came early in our history and the Scotch-Irish, the finest of frontier stock. The Pennsylvania Dutch came and built homes. Then came the Irish, facile and quick to blend. Our immigration before the Civil War was north-European—sturdy stock, fit for the forests and prairies and the vast new farm lands of the West. Now we began to mine and manufacture more, and our immigrants changed the colors of the census map. We began to import work cattle, not citizens, for our so-called industrial captains. Steamship companies combed southern and southeastern Europe. Our miners could not speak English. The Irishman worked no more on the railroads, the sewers, the streets—he shrank from the squat foreigner as the lean Yankee shrank from him—as the Italian, in turn, will shrink from the Russian bolshevist, if we allow him to swarm in.The map shows you all these things inexorably. It shows the shrinking of the American-born regions to-day to only a small spot on the tops of the Cumberlands in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and a corner of Alabama and Georgia. Now check up this rough census outline with the reports printed in these pages from all over America. We soberly must conclude that America is not America. We find that the great states of each coast are practicallyforeign—New York most of all; that the Bolsheviki abound in the mines of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Montana, where coal and copper and iron are found; that Southern Europe has not yet moved its center of population west of the Mississippi; that the Scandinavian and German element occupies Wisconsin, Minnesota and parts of upper Iowa. And the American—where is he?Would to God that the chameleon record, that fatally accurate census map, could show us the American hue spreading decade after decade, and not these other colors of the map of America, showing the extension of the foreign-born! It is time now, old as we are, that we should seek a far more normal balance of the increase of our foreign-born.Something is wrong. The census map shows that it is time to put up the bars at Ellis Island. They ought to go up for ten years at least. Twenty—thirty—lo! Then this would be America, and all inside our gates would be Americans. The gates ought never to go down as they have in the past. We ought to pick and select our foreign-born population. If we have not the courage to do that, we are lost.Give us a generation of selected immigration; deport the un-Americans who divide their loyalty; revoke the naturalization of every man interned in this war and of every other disloyal man,—every adherent to the law of violence and destruction,—and then, and then only, the result may be an American population and a real America.The best possible news for America would be that of the deportation of more than 300,000 false and foresworn citizens who have acted as German spies in America during this war. Send that many away from America, and those remaining soon would learn that the hyphen must go for all time. If not, let them also go. We do not need Germans now. The world is done with Germans. We want Americans now.It is by no means impossible that some such action will be taken very soon. In his last annual report, the Attorney General of the United States recommends that all aliens who were interned during the war should be deported and that Congress shall pass a law to that effect. This would deprive us at once of a select society, estimated to numberfrom 3,000 to 6,000, who have been taking their ease in their inn at our expense. Banded or disbanded, when the American Protective League says that law must be passed, it will be passed. And then we shall begin to have an America and not a mining camp with open doors. Hunt out Americans for your leaders. Vote for them. Where have we ever found better leaders?The Department of Justice officials are on record to the effect that these interned aliens should not be left in this country to make future trouble and to serve actively as German agents. They were often trained propagandists; men involved in bomb plots; men who plotted against our shipping, against the transportation of our troops. We have no law by which we can punish those men further. Are they good citizens to retain? Our Department of Justice thinks not.Among these interned prisoners are bank presidents, exporters and importers, college professors, merchants, musicians, actors, former officers of the German army and navy and merchant marine. Many of the names which have appeared in the testimony of the Senate Overman Committee appear also on the internment rolls. There are consuls, officials and noblemen, so-called, who also have been in our internment camps. Do we want them in our homes? The Department of Justice thinks otherwise.Not less disloyal than these greater figures are thousands and hundreds of thousands of minor figures, paid or unpaid propagandists of Germany in this country during the war, pro-Germans, hyphenates, silent or outspoken, who are not Americans at all. Do we want them in our citizenship? If we cannot get rid of them, ought we to import any more of them?Already Americans stir uneasily under the revelations of treachery within our gates. They ask of themselves,—Since these things were true but now, what guarantee have we for the future? How can America protect herself against the future treachery of so large an element of her population?The answer to that question is very easy for bold men. Let us clean house. If the existing broom is not sufficient for that, let us make another broom. The revocation of citizenship for acts of disloyalty to this country is a remedialagency which will be applied more frequently in the future. A law should be, and probably will be, placed upon our statute books which will hold over the head of every foreign-born citizen attaining citizenship in this country a warning that he must come into this court with clean hands and must keep his hands clean forever thereafter. That is to say, there shall be no more an absolute patent of citizenship, nothing irrevocable any more in the citizenship of the foreign-born. We will hold a first mortgage—we will give him no deed. Four years ago, doctrine like this would have been scouted. Four years hence it will be accepted, perhaps, as the truth; indeed, the tendency has already begun. In eight years it will be a law. In twenty years, America will be a nation, and the strongest on the globe.In New Jersey, Frederick Würsterbarth, who had a certificate of American citizenship, perjured himself and remained true to his foreign birth. He declared he would do nothing to help defeat Germany, and had no desire to see America win. He would not contribute to the Red Cross or to the Y. M. C. A. He added the old hyphenated plea that to support the war against Germany would be like kicking his mother in the face. The Federal courts canceled the certificate of citizenship of Würsterbarth. In the New Jersey case, the judge said of Würsterbarth: “Before he could be admitted to citizenship, he must declare under oath that he would support the Constitution of the United States and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign sovereignty. Public policy requires that no one shall be naturalized except he exercise the utmost good faith in all the essentials required of him; and where the government is shown that good faith in any of the essentials is questionable, the burden must be on the respondent to dispel that doubt.”In addition to the statute which shall make false citizenship papers revocable, little doubt exists that we also shall have a law requiring the immediate deportation of any foreigner who has failed to take out his second naturalization papers within the prescribed time. The A. P. L. investigations during this war uncovered countless cases of these pseudo-citizens. Of what use can any Monroe doctrine be to America if it is our constant practice to nullify thatdoctrine and stultify ourselves by allowing practical colonization? And if you do not believe that we have foreign colonies, study your census map and the history of the American Protective League.Is it bitter, such a belief? You think we still need the German language in the United States? One hundred and forty-two Illinois schools eliminated the study of German from their curriculums during the last year, while twenty schools reduced the courses offered in that subject. Ninety-six schools introduced the study of French for the first time and twenty-one schools added it to their curriculum in that one state.You still think this is rabid? Read from the report of the Secretary of the Interior of the United States.There is even a larger problem than this that challenges our attention, and that is the teaching of the English tongue to millions of our population. Dr. John H. Finley, president of the University of the State of New York, in a recent speech presented this picture which he found in one of the cantonments:“How practical is the need of a language in this country common to all tongues is illustrated by what I saw in one of the great cantonments a few nights ago. In the mess hall, where I had sat an hour before with a company of the men of the National Army, a few small groups were gathered along the tables learning English under the tuition of some of their comrades, one of whom had been a district supervisor in a neighboring State and another a theological student. In one of those groups, one of the exercises for the evening consisted in practicing the challenge when on sentry duty. Each pupil of the group (there were four of Italian and two of Slavic birth) shouldered in turn the long-handled stove shovel and aimed it at the teacher, who ran along the side of the room, as if to evade the guard. The pupil called out in broken speech, ‘Halt! who goes there?’ The answer came from the teacher, ‘Friend,’ And then,in as yet unintelligible English(the voices of innumerable ancestors struggling in their throats to pronounce it), the words ‘Advance and give the countersign.’ So are those of confused tongues learning to speak the language of the land they have been summoned to defend. What a commentary upon our educational shortcomings that in the days of peace we had not taught these men, who have been here long enough to be citizens (and tens ofthousands of their brothers with them), to know the language in which our history and laws are written and in which the commands of defense must now be given! May the end of this decade, though so near, find every citizen of our State prepared to challenge, in one tongue and heart, the purposes of all who come, with the cry, ‘Who goes there?’”Who are you, new man at Ellis Island? Are you a demobilized German soldier looking for easy money in America? Let us see your hands.Qui vive!Advance, and give the countersign! And don’t let it be in German.What all the world is fearing to-day is the growth of Bolshevism. It has ruined Russia—and we must pay for that; it is blocking the peace parliaments in Germany—and we must pay for that. It is beginning in America and may grow swiftly in the turbulent days after the war—and we shall have to pay for that. Nobody knows what the Bolshevist is nor what are the tenets of Bolshevism—least of all the Bolshevists themselves. They have recruited their ranks from the most ignorant and most reckless—from the dregs and scum of the world. Their theory is that of force; of government they have nothing. They use the force of law without any surrender of privileges to the law. Their theory of life is self-contradictory. None the less, since they cannot be reasoned with, they constitute a menace to any country. The mischief makers of all classes make recruits for Bolsheviki—socialists, radical I. W. W.’s, anarchists, the red flag rabble of every country united in the general ignorant greed of the wolf pack.Bolshevism may come to America through the Socialists, through the I. W. W. or through the Non-Partisan League—which in the State of North Dakota to-day hold a two-thirds majority of both House and Senate. It will grow out of the ignorant and discontented foreigners unassimilated in this country. We must expect it naturally to come from these and from the pro-Germans in this country, because those people never have been satisfied with what we did in the war. In general, Bolshevism lives only on its own excitement, its own lack of plans, its own eccentricities. It finds its opportunity in any time of unrest and of slackened government.We have troublesome days of reconstruction ahead in America. Food prices and wages cannot go up forever, but it will be difficult to reduce wages and food prices. We shall have unemployment in this country. We shall have soldiers in this country dissatisfied because they find themselves and their deeds so soon forgotten. These things all are among the menaces of America, and they must be faced. It will require a united America to face them successfully.Shall we import more such problems, or shall we dispense with certain of those which we now have? Besides all this irresponsible and sporadic Bolshevik propaganda, we may count upon the old, steady, undying, well-conceived and well-spread propaganda of Germany after the war as much as before and during the war. We shall meet—indeed, this very day are meeting—propaganda against the Allies intended to split us from France and Great Britain. Germany is going out after her lost markets all over the world as best she can. She will need all of her propaganda to help her crawl back even into a place in the shadows of the world and not in the sun of the world’s respect. While the war was going on, some firm in America bought a shipload of German toys. Who wants such blood-reddened toys in his home? Soon we shall see German goods in our markets. Who wants such goods? Soon we shall hear the subtle commercial scoff, “It’s all bosh to refuse German goods, for they are better and cheaper.” Is it so? Is it our duty to be unsentimental in business? Germany was quite unsentimental when she tore up the Belgian scrap of paper. It now would seem to be time that we had some sentiment of the old sort. Sentiment rarely is fundamentally wrong. So-called common sense quite often is no more than common selfishness.As these pages go forward, the Allies’ declaration is that the Hun shall not be allowed in the peace conference nor in any League of Nations whatever that may be drawn up. One thing is sure. No League of Nations ever will be stronger than the individual thought of the countries combining. Our League of Nations will be no stronger than our feelings against pro-Germanism. If we forget that, and take up the game at the old place, our League of Nations is dead at its birth.The Department of Justice, having removed restrictions on enemy aliens, and having wiped out the barred zones and the necessity of passes or permits, has released a great many pro-Germans who will slip back into their old places in America. In Great Britain the German waiter—so frequently the German spy—is not going to be allowed to take his old place. It may cause some inconvenience, but Great Britain is going to get on without him. That is what we must learn in America—to get on without some of the stolid or the obsequious labor that we have had. With the barring of alien labor, we should suffer many inconveniences in our personal lives. If we cannot endure those inconveniences, then we can have no League of Nations. With the refusal to buy any article made in Germany, we should be letting ourselves in for a considerable individual loss. Unless we are willing to accept that loss, we can have neither a League of Nations nor an America worthy of the name.Germany is crippled, but not beaten and not repentant. The Germans regret the sinking of the Lusitania only because it was the thing which brought America into the war. For the war itself they are not sorry. If defeat did not make them repentant, heavy indemnities may help teach them something of their real place in the world. That lesson will be all the stronger if we in America shall make more stringent importation and deportation laws—if we shall deport more Germans and import less German goods. There is many and many an American home where German goods never again will enter the doors.Prince Carl, of the House of Hohenzollern, when speaking of the war, said he thought that Germany ought not to have started her submarine warfare “without being absolutely sure it would succeed.” He said he regretted the German propaganda in the United States—because it had been carried out so clumsily; he said that Germany ought to have started her propaganda here on a larger scale, and ought to have spent millions of marks instead of thousands! There you see the German idea and part of the German policy in America. They have learned some lessons, but not the great lesson of the humble and the contrite heart.Maximilian Harden has been a voice crying in the Hun wilderness for most of the time of the war. He says thatnow there is no real revulsion of feeling against the men who have caused Germany’s name to be a stench in the nostrils of the world. The soldiers returning from the front are cheered as heroes, though their hands are caked with the blood of innocent women and children. Not one of the groups scheming for advantage at Berlin has expressly repudiated the war. Not one has expressed horror at the violation of treaties.Are these pages indeed bitter? They cannot be made bitter enough! We cannot sufficiently amplify and intensify the innate American horror at the revealed duplicity of this nation which we have fought and helped to beat. We find their spirit to have been one of fiendish ingenuity, their intellect of that curiously perverted quality to which attention has been called. Germany never has exulted more in the success of her armies in open warfare than in her success at stealth and treachery. Are these the men we wish to see marking our coming census maps?We have nothing to fear from Germany. We have beaten the Germans at every game they have produced, and we can continue to do so. We are the victors and they are the vanquished. They made the vast mistake of being beaten in this war. There is no reason why we should fear them in the future, on either side of the Atlantic. Major H. C. Emory, a former professor at Yale, in a late address, rather colloquially voiced something of this feeling of confidence in his own country:Let us get sane! Get over this German bug of thinking that somehow or other the Germans are superior. Morally they are greatly inferior, but people have thought that somehow, intellectually or in organization, they are better than the rest of the world. We have shown them that we can smash the German military organization, which we have smashed. There is an idea that the Germans can do us in business; that somehow this is a race that we cannot compete with on normally fair terms. Put that out of your head! They are a patient, hard-working race; they will work fourteen hours a day where a Russian won’t work four. They will plod faithfully. But, gentlemen, they are dumb; they are stupid. They do not understand things. They do not get the psychology of anybody else; and a large part of theirscience and their supposed superior way of doing things is bluff and fake. They have done some good work, but no better work, and they are not doing better work, in the field of economics than the English, the French, and the Americans. In the field of business they have nothing on you. For the love of Mike, don’t be afraid of them! You can put it over them every time.We need not fear either the arms, the arts or the artifices of Germany. What we need to fear, really, is our easy-going, unsuspicious American character, our tendency to forget everything else in the great game of affairs. It is time now that from the great mass of the American people there shall appear silently, standing shoulder to shoulder and side to side as they have in their old organization, a new American Protective League. Our old League determined that our homes and our property should be saved. Let the new League determine that our country and our principles shall be saved. All the eyes of the world turn to America to-day. The remainder of the world is distracted. In Berlin, radicals coming up from the dregs are doing their best to get control of a ruined country. “Bismarck’s structure was wonderful while it lasted,” says an editorial in an able American paper, “but it was a nation without a soul. It was made of blood and iron, and it could not live because the spirit was left out.” Neither can our civilization or our citizenship live if they are made of silver and gold, and if the spirit be left out.It is time to look at the census map of America. We must revise those colors in the next ten years, or we have lost the war. This distrust of Germany in America, in South America and in Europe, is something which should excite no sympathy and no pity whatever. Wars are not cleared up, for example, on any basis of sympathy. There is no use figuring what we can do to show Germany how sorry we are. The thing to do is to leave Germany sorry. She has coal, iron, timber, copper, potash, phosphate, abundant other natural resources. If she cannot handle them, others can handle them for her. Marshal Foch has threatened repeatedly that if Germany continues cynically to disregard the terms of the armistice, he will march again on Germany.That is hard doctrine? Yes. But it was Germany that lost the war.It is altogether likely that not the best writing in the world, not the most partisan history in the world, will ever be able to give a clean bill of health to America’s conduct of this war, or to restore the old American confidence that we were the one great people of the world. The scales have fallen from the eyes at least of our soldiers. They know, and presently all the world will know, our shortcomings. Three million men will have something to say about the politics of this country. Perhaps they will say that our next war shall not find us so unprepared. Perhaps they will say that our next war shall not find us with an army of 2,000,000 spies, propagandists and pro-enemies who claim American citizenship. The Army man is the worst foe of the censorship which has held back the truth from America for so long. Perhaps the Army man will be able to settle accounts with that politician whose stock in trade is the holding back from the American people of the knowledge of themselves. It is time to raise the real banner of America. It will take courage to march under those colors. But if we cannot march side by side and shoulder to shoulder, then we have lost this war, we have lost the Monroe Doctrine, we have lost the League of Nations.Why should we try to avoid the truth? Nothing is gained by that. The truth is that the reckoning of this war is not yet paid. Eventually it must be paid through the resolution and individual courage of those citizens who are not ashamed to be called American. Ostracism of the hyphen, where it is known still to exist; fearlessness in the boycott of blood-soaked German goods; rejection of the blood-soaked German hand; the wiping out of the foreign languages in the pulpit and press of America; the revocation of citizenship based on a lie; the deportation of known traitors—those are some of the things which must go into the oath of the next A. P. L. Until we can swear that oath and maintain it, we have lost the war.It is a far cry enough. We have not shot one German spy out of those thousands whom we have found working here in America. We have not deported one man. We have revoked the citizenship of only two men—the above mentionedFred Würsterbarth, who had been a citizen of America for thirty years, and Carl August Darmer, of Tacoma, Washington, who had been a citizen in America for thirty-six years. Do you think these two men were any worse than a one hundred thousand others who worked as spies of Germany? Hardly. The war remains still to be fought against these men who still are under arms. Apply this test to your friends and associates—to your lawyer, your doctor, to your grocer, above all, to your alderman, your councilman, your mayor and your representatives in Congress. Why not? It is only the same test which the United States District Court in New Jersey applied to Würsterbarth.Eight years ago an American minister of the gospel who had lived much abroad, especially in Germany, came back to this country and wrote a book which perhaps never was very popular. He held up the mirror of America to herself. His views to-day would not be so much that of one crying in the wilderness. Let us follow along, in a running synopsis of the pages of his book, a hint now and then from page to page, and see what one man thought in that long ago before war was dreamed of; before the German army of spies, military and industrial, had been unearthed; before the plans of Germany for world conquest had been divulged. That writer says:In fifty years New York will be what the Italians make it.... In New York there is only one native American to twenty foreigners. Waterbury, Connecticut, has a population of 30,000, 20,000 being aliens.... New Haven and Hartford, cities of long-established colleges, have an un-American population which in ten years will outnumber the natives.... Parts of New Jersey are more hopelessly de-Americanized than New England. Perth Amboy has at least three to one non-Americans. Cincinnati and Milwaukee have been German cities for a quarter of a century; Chicago hardly less so.... Wherever I take a meal I am served solely by foreigners.... It seems odd that I should seldom ever see or meet Americans except in a social or professional way, and the professions are being rapidly filled by men of foreign names.... The Yankee no longer counts in the industrial and commercial life of New England. In his place is to be found the Italians, Hungarians. French, Polocks, Scandinavians and Jews.... Thoroughness, therefore, must nowbe the watchword of the native American if he hopes to survive in the terrific commercial battle now waging all over the world.... This sort of thing must be stopped at once or we are lost.... Take the half-past-seven Sunday morning train from the New York Grand Central station, and you will see at every way-station a swarm of dark, sturdy foreigners entering or quitting the train at the little towns along the way—for this is a local train and makes all the stops—and these people are thus enabled to visit their friends and acquaintances. And there appears to be no town, however small, where these foreigners have not gained some footing as laborers, farmers and small tradesmen. I should say that more than half of the Sunday railroad traffic in New York, New Jersey and New England is foreign. I took a train from New York some thirty miles into New Jersey one Sunday morning in October and the conductor told me that he did not think the native Americans constituted ten per cent of his passengers. I asked him whether that was the usual thing on Sundays, and he said, “No, not quite so bad as to-day, but we always have more foreigners than natives on Sunday.” ...Six millions of aliens are necessary, we are told, to the development of the resources of our country. Now, it is perfectly plain that these foreign hordes are necessary to the development of the multi-millionaires, the trusts and the monopolies; but it is not so plain that they are necessary to the peace, happiness and prosperity of this country.... The normal increase of the native American population in the last forty years would have been amply sufficient for the proper and healthy development of this country. Had not the foreigner been called in in such hordes, we should have been forced to do our own work ourselves and would have been all the happier and richer for it.... There must be a check put upon immigration. Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and the time has come when we must resort to it.... We need time to train our children to compete with these people and during that time the foreigner must be held at bay. Immigration must be checked. The resources of this land are being too rapidly developed by means of these aliens.... Some radical change for the worse has taken place in the last quarter of a century in the fibre of our life, our manhood and our national character.... Indiscriminate and immoderate immigration is, I believe, the main cause of this deterioration. We have ceased long since to assimilate the vast hordes of heterogeneous peoples who have beendumped down upon our shores and who swarm all over this land in the eager pursuit of the mere physical necessities of life. This is the object, the sole ambition of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand. Such an invasion is actually as disastrous to a country as the invasion of Germany by the Huns who were impelled solely by hunger (the very same motive that brings the vast majority of immigrants to this country) and whose ravages devastated the whole of Germany and scattered its inhabitants beyond the Alps to the Rhine and to the borders of the Mediterranean.... Such masses of crude humanity as pour in upon us cannot possibly be taken up into healthy circulation, but must lie undigested in the stomach of the nation, seriously affecting its health and happiness.... The curse these immigrants bring upon themselves is plainly to be seen, for it is immediate. They form a body incompatible with the healthy growth of this country. The greater curse of this country is that they do the work that should not be done by them at all, the work that should be done by natives. They take the work and the bread out of the hands and mouths of native Americans, and the question of their means of living must soon become one of the most pressing economic and social problems of the day.Such extended quotations are made from one writer (Mr. Monroe Royce; “The Passing of the American”) only because these truths of ten years ago are equally true to-day and more true. In the past ten years our census map has changed yet more. And now into this crude population of ours we have inducted all the seeds of discord of this war. We have learned a sudden distrust of a large number of our citizenry. Our returning soldiers will bring us yet more problems. The spirit of unrest in this hour of anarchy will add to all these problems.It is time for another oath, sworn indeed for the protection of America.AT THE PEACE TABLEWho shall sit at the table, then, when the terms of peace are made—The wisest men of the troubled lands in their silver and gold brocade?Yes, they shall gather in solemn state to speak for each living race,But who shall speak for the unseen dead that shall come to the council place?Though you see them not and you hear them not, they shall sit at the table, too;They shall throng the room where the peace is made and know what it is you do;The innocent dead from the sea shall rise to stand at the wise man’s side,And over his shoulder a boy shall look—a boy that was crucified.You may guard the doors of that council hall with barriers strong and stout,But the dead unbidden shall enter there, and never you’ll shut them out.And the man that died in the open boat, and the babes that suffered worse,Shall sit at the table when peace is made by the side of a martyred nurse.You may see them not, but they’ll all be there; when they speak you may fail to hear;You may think that you’re making your pacts alone, but their spirits will hover near;And whatever the terms of the peace you make with the tyrant whose hands are red,You must please not only the living here, but must satisfy your dead.—Edgar A. Guest.
Our Duty to the Soldier—Our Lasting Quarrel With the Foe—The Story of the Census—No More Traitors—Shutting the Gates Against the Huns—The New Patriotism for All Americans.
Our Duty to the Soldier—Our Lasting Quarrel With the Foe—The Story of the Census—No More Traitors—Shutting the Gates Against the Huns—The New Patriotism for All Americans.
Vox populi, vox deiis a fine phrase. But fine phrases often half-state or mis-state facts for sake of the half-idea’s sound. Many popular conceptions are wide of the truth.
The world had come to call the French people light, fickle, inconstant, volatile, incapable of grave and deep emotions. That was the popular American idea of France up to 1914. The man who would voice that idea now would be treated with anger or silent contempt by all the world. Now we know the silent, modest, simple, enduring faith, the unfaltering courage, the undying flame of heart which made the real France.
We thought Great Britain cold, phlegmatic, emotionless. Who would say that to-day of a brave and strong people trying their best to ask us not to mention their battles against odds, their steadfast courage in holding the line, but to feel and understand the real admiration and love Britain really feels for us in these days.
We Americans thought ourselves above fickleness and lightness always, boasted always of our common sense and steady practical point of view. We called France hysterical. Was it so? No. Once again popular counsel is wrong. It is we Americans who are the most hysterical people in the world. We make a purpose and forget it. We erect a hero and forget him. We believe, boast, acclaim, hurrah—and forget. We are easily excited—it is we who most easily grow “high headed,” as the French say. It is we, of all nations, who most quickly forget.
In that fact regarding the American character lies thegreat hope of Germany to-day. It is the great fear of our gallant friends in arms, who held the line from which we so long were absent. It is the great danger of America. Lest we forget! Lest we forget! The danger is that we shall forget. And if we do, the great victory of this war is lost.
Our Army is turned back toward home again. We greet our soldiers with much blare of trumpets. We mention large plans of industry for to-morrow. We slap each man in uniform on the back and say: “Fine! Noble! You are a hero! You have saved the world!”
But to-morrow—To-morrow! And once more, what of to-morrow!
The soldier comes back to his old world shyly glad that he still lives, hoping for the renewed touch of hands he knew, seeking the place in life that once was his. But, in spite of our protestations, that place is no longer his. It is as though he really were dead. The waters have closed over his place and he is no more. To-morrow he is forgotten—and he may listen to stay-at-home stories of how the war was fought and won—the “history” of this war, which, like all other history, will not be the truth but what we all accept as the truth because that is the easiest thing to do.
But if the soldiers of this country are to come back only to the old America, the hurrying, scrambling, hectic, hysterical America—and those are our deserved adjectives more than any other people’s—then we have not won this war but have lost it.
Our quarrel with yonder foe is not done. We shall have been faithless to our own blood and kin if now we forget. The war begins now; not ends. It must yet be fought out here at home in America. It will require all our courage to win it; if indeed it can still be won.
There have been some great editorials struck off in the white heat of American conviction in these tremendous days following the Armistice and before the conclusion of the Peace Conference. Here is one from a Chicago journal which ought to be read and remembered by every statesman and every citizen in America.
Those sentimental souls who think Lloyd George and Clemenceau are “too severe” in insisting that Germany must pay tothe limit of her capacity for the damage she has wrought, should consider the speech in which Herr Ebert, temporary dictator in Berlin, welcomed the returning Prussian troops, especially the following paragraph of that speech:You protected the homeland from invasion, sheltered your wives, children and parents from flames and slaughter and preserved the nation’s workshops and fields from devastation.This to the soldiers whose bestiality has made the very name of Prussia a stench in the nostrils of a decent world.There is not in Ebert’s speech a hint of repentance for the atrocious crimes which Germany has committed. There is no recognition that Germany has committed crimes. Instead, there is a boasting glorification of the returning armies, and a reminder to the nation that German lands have been kept inviolate. It is one in sentiment with the kaiser’s speech six months or so ago, in which he commanded his subjects who complained of their sacrifices to look at the devastated fields and cities of France, and see what war on their own ground would mean.The victorious allies are civilized. Therefore, they can not repay German crimes in kind. They can not reduce Frankfort to the present condition of Lens, or desolate the Rheingau as von Hindenburg desolated Picardy. But in some way, they must bring home to the German people both the villainy and the failure of the German spring at the throat of Europe, and there seem to be but two methods of doing this. One is to inflict personal punishment on the men responsible for the grosser outrages, and the other is to make the German people pay, and pay, and pay for the ruin which they wrought.
Those sentimental souls who think Lloyd George and Clemenceau are “too severe” in insisting that Germany must pay tothe limit of her capacity for the damage she has wrought, should consider the speech in which Herr Ebert, temporary dictator in Berlin, welcomed the returning Prussian troops, especially the following paragraph of that speech:
You protected the homeland from invasion, sheltered your wives, children and parents from flames and slaughter and preserved the nation’s workshops and fields from devastation.
This to the soldiers whose bestiality has made the very name of Prussia a stench in the nostrils of a decent world.
There is not in Ebert’s speech a hint of repentance for the atrocious crimes which Germany has committed. There is no recognition that Germany has committed crimes. Instead, there is a boasting glorification of the returning armies, and a reminder to the nation that German lands have been kept inviolate. It is one in sentiment with the kaiser’s speech six months or so ago, in which he commanded his subjects who complained of their sacrifices to look at the devastated fields and cities of France, and see what war on their own ground would mean.
The victorious allies are civilized. Therefore, they can not repay German crimes in kind. They can not reduce Frankfort to the present condition of Lens, or desolate the Rheingau as von Hindenburg desolated Picardy. But in some way, they must bring home to the German people both the villainy and the failure of the German spring at the throat of Europe, and there seem to be but two methods of doing this. One is to inflict personal punishment on the men responsible for the grosser outrages, and the other is to make the German people pay, and pay, and pay for the ruin which they wrought.
Germany is not dead or defeated in America. She will raise her head again. Again we shall hear the stirring in the leaves, and see arise once more the fanged front which has so long menaced the world. The time to scotch that snake is now, to-day; and this is no time, when our maimed men are coming home, when our young boys are growing up, to be faithless to those men who—their eyes still on us as they fling to us the torch of civilization—lie not yet content nor quiet in Flanders Fields.
The great debt of the world is by no means yet paid. Whether or not Germany pays to the material limit, is not so much. Whether or not we get back a tenth of our war money, is not so much—that is not the way the great debt of the world is going to be paid. We cannot pay it byoratory or by fine phrases, or by resolutions and conferences and leagues of nations. We cannot pay it with eulogies of the dead nor monuments to the living heroes. We cannot pay it by advancing our breasts again against shot and shell.
The debt of the world must be paid by America. We can pay it only by making a new and better democracy in America. We can pay it only by renewed individual sacrifices and a renewed individual courage.
We must remake America. We must purify the source of America’s population and keep it pure. We must rebuild our whole theory of citizenship in America. We must care more for the safety of America’s homes and the safety of the American ideal. We must insist that there shall be an American loyalty, brooking no amendment or qualification.
That is to say, we must unify the American populace—or we must fail; and the great debt of the world must remain unpaid; and the war must have been fought in vain.
The old polyglot, hubbub, hurdy-gurdy days of America are gone. We are no longer a mining camp, but a country, or should be that. Happy-go-lucky times are done for us. We must become a nation, mature, of one purpose, resolved at heart. Now we shall see how brave we really are, how much men we are.
What is America to-day? What undiscovered soul was there lying under the paint and the high heels and the tambourine and the bubbling glass in the fool’s paradise of our excited lives? What was there of sober and resolved citizenship under the American Protective League—a force so soon developed, so silently disbanded? Very much was there. All that a nation needs was there—if that nation shall not forget.
It is one thing if a quarter million men go back to business and forget their two years of sacrifice; if three million soldiers also forget their sacrifices and simply drop back into the old business world which they left. But it is quite another thing if three and a quarter million American citizens, sobered and not forgetful, do take up the flung torch and say that the dead of Flanders shall rest content—not merely for a day or so remembered—not merely for a year or two revenged, but for all the centuries verified and made of worth and justified in their sacrifices.
A part, only a small part, of the work of the American Protective League is done. We who silently pass back yet further beyond recognition, are not disbanded at all. The flung torch is especially in our own hands. We have been only pretenders in this League, we have been only mummers and imposters in this League, if we do not individually carry on the work for the future. That work, as we take it, is to make America safe for Americans, and to leave each man safe in his own home, in a country of his own making, at a table of his own choosing.
When work on this book was first begun, it seemed to all concerned that the great matter was to accumulate instances of shrewdness in catching criminals; stories of plots foiled and villains thwarted. We all of us wanted to see stalk by with folded arms a tall, dark, mysterious stranger in a long cloak, with high boots, and a wide hat pulled low over his brow. We wanted him, in the final act, to pull off his hat with the sweeping gesture of one hand, his false moustache with the other, and stand revealed before us, smooth-faced and fair of hair, exclaiming “It is I—Clarence Hawkshaw, the young detective!” We shared the American thirst for something exciting.
It became obvious, as the great masses of sober, conscientious revelations from the very heart of America came rolling in and piling up in cumulative testimony, that what had at first seemed the most desirable material was the least desirable. If this record is to have any ultimate value—and it should have great historical value—that must be, not because of a few flashy deeds, but because of a great, sober, underlying purpose. Our final figure of the A. P. L. man is not to be a Hawkshaw, but—an American.
When the time came to call a halt and to disband, there was not a member of the League who did not lay down his work sober and grave of heart. The sum of the reaction of all these reports, large and small, from the hundreds of centers where the League was active, leaves any man acquainted with the facts convinced that America has done her part splendidly, here at home, in the war. It is splendid—what America has done. Far more splendid, what America is. Still more splendid, what America is to be.
The best reading for any American in these days is thecensus map of the United States. Next year we shall have a new one, for by then, ten years more of our history will have been completed. The census map comes out once every decade, printed in different colors, showing the location of the foreign-born in the United States. The American-born regions have appeared in steadily lessening areas as the decades have passed.
It is only with a grave heart that any real American can face the census map to-day. The conviction is inevitable that we have been too long careless of our racial problems. If we are to have an America now, we must change. Our golden age of money-making is not a double decade in extent. We cannot go that road another twenty years. If your son is meant to be an American, have him study the census map and the story of the A. P. L. Then he will learn something about his own country. He has not known. His father has not known.
The English came early in our history and the Scotch-Irish, the finest of frontier stock. The Pennsylvania Dutch came and built homes. Then came the Irish, facile and quick to blend. Our immigration before the Civil War was north-European—sturdy stock, fit for the forests and prairies and the vast new farm lands of the West. Now we began to mine and manufacture more, and our immigrants changed the colors of the census map. We began to import work cattle, not citizens, for our so-called industrial captains. Steamship companies combed southern and southeastern Europe. Our miners could not speak English. The Irishman worked no more on the railroads, the sewers, the streets—he shrank from the squat foreigner as the lean Yankee shrank from him—as the Italian, in turn, will shrink from the Russian bolshevist, if we allow him to swarm in.
The map shows you all these things inexorably. It shows the shrinking of the American-born regions to-day to only a small spot on the tops of the Cumberlands in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and a corner of Alabama and Georgia. Now check up this rough census outline with the reports printed in these pages from all over America. We soberly must conclude that America is not America. We find that the great states of each coast are practicallyforeign—New York most of all; that the Bolsheviki abound in the mines of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Montana, where coal and copper and iron are found; that Southern Europe has not yet moved its center of population west of the Mississippi; that the Scandinavian and German element occupies Wisconsin, Minnesota and parts of upper Iowa. And the American—where is he?
Would to God that the chameleon record, that fatally accurate census map, could show us the American hue spreading decade after decade, and not these other colors of the map of America, showing the extension of the foreign-born! It is time now, old as we are, that we should seek a far more normal balance of the increase of our foreign-born.
Something is wrong. The census map shows that it is time to put up the bars at Ellis Island. They ought to go up for ten years at least. Twenty—thirty—lo! Then this would be America, and all inside our gates would be Americans. The gates ought never to go down as they have in the past. We ought to pick and select our foreign-born population. If we have not the courage to do that, we are lost.
Give us a generation of selected immigration; deport the un-Americans who divide their loyalty; revoke the naturalization of every man interned in this war and of every other disloyal man,—every adherent to the law of violence and destruction,—and then, and then only, the result may be an American population and a real America.
The best possible news for America would be that of the deportation of more than 300,000 false and foresworn citizens who have acted as German spies in America during this war. Send that many away from America, and those remaining soon would learn that the hyphen must go for all time. If not, let them also go. We do not need Germans now. The world is done with Germans. We want Americans now.
It is by no means impossible that some such action will be taken very soon. In his last annual report, the Attorney General of the United States recommends that all aliens who were interned during the war should be deported and that Congress shall pass a law to that effect. This would deprive us at once of a select society, estimated to numberfrom 3,000 to 6,000, who have been taking their ease in their inn at our expense. Banded or disbanded, when the American Protective League says that law must be passed, it will be passed. And then we shall begin to have an America and not a mining camp with open doors. Hunt out Americans for your leaders. Vote for them. Where have we ever found better leaders?
The Department of Justice officials are on record to the effect that these interned aliens should not be left in this country to make future trouble and to serve actively as German agents. They were often trained propagandists; men involved in bomb plots; men who plotted against our shipping, against the transportation of our troops. We have no law by which we can punish those men further. Are they good citizens to retain? Our Department of Justice thinks not.
Among these interned prisoners are bank presidents, exporters and importers, college professors, merchants, musicians, actors, former officers of the German army and navy and merchant marine. Many of the names which have appeared in the testimony of the Senate Overman Committee appear also on the internment rolls. There are consuls, officials and noblemen, so-called, who also have been in our internment camps. Do we want them in our homes? The Department of Justice thinks otherwise.
Not less disloyal than these greater figures are thousands and hundreds of thousands of minor figures, paid or unpaid propagandists of Germany in this country during the war, pro-Germans, hyphenates, silent or outspoken, who are not Americans at all. Do we want them in our citizenship? If we cannot get rid of them, ought we to import any more of them?
Already Americans stir uneasily under the revelations of treachery within our gates. They ask of themselves,—Since these things were true but now, what guarantee have we for the future? How can America protect herself against the future treachery of so large an element of her population?
The answer to that question is very easy for bold men. Let us clean house. If the existing broom is not sufficient for that, let us make another broom. The revocation of citizenship for acts of disloyalty to this country is a remedialagency which will be applied more frequently in the future. A law should be, and probably will be, placed upon our statute books which will hold over the head of every foreign-born citizen attaining citizenship in this country a warning that he must come into this court with clean hands and must keep his hands clean forever thereafter. That is to say, there shall be no more an absolute patent of citizenship, nothing irrevocable any more in the citizenship of the foreign-born. We will hold a first mortgage—we will give him no deed. Four years ago, doctrine like this would have been scouted. Four years hence it will be accepted, perhaps, as the truth; indeed, the tendency has already begun. In eight years it will be a law. In twenty years, America will be a nation, and the strongest on the globe.
In New Jersey, Frederick Würsterbarth, who had a certificate of American citizenship, perjured himself and remained true to his foreign birth. He declared he would do nothing to help defeat Germany, and had no desire to see America win. He would not contribute to the Red Cross or to the Y. M. C. A. He added the old hyphenated plea that to support the war against Germany would be like kicking his mother in the face. The Federal courts canceled the certificate of citizenship of Würsterbarth. In the New Jersey case, the judge said of Würsterbarth: “Before he could be admitted to citizenship, he must declare under oath that he would support the Constitution of the United States and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign sovereignty. Public policy requires that no one shall be naturalized except he exercise the utmost good faith in all the essentials required of him; and where the government is shown that good faith in any of the essentials is questionable, the burden must be on the respondent to dispel that doubt.”
In addition to the statute which shall make false citizenship papers revocable, little doubt exists that we also shall have a law requiring the immediate deportation of any foreigner who has failed to take out his second naturalization papers within the prescribed time. The A. P. L. investigations during this war uncovered countless cases of these pseudo-citizens. Of what use can any Monroe doctrine be to America if it is our constant practice to nullify thatdoctrine and stultify ourselves by allowing practical colonization? And if you do not believe that we have foreign colonies, study your census map and the history of the American Protective League.
Is it bitter, such a belief? You think we still need the German language in the United States? One hundred and forty-two Illinois schools eliminated the study of German from their curriculums during the last year, while twenty schools reduced the courses offered in that subject. Ninety-six schools introduced the study of French for the first time and twenty-one schools added it to their curriculum in that one state.
You still think this is rabid? Read from the report of the Secretary of the Interior of the United States.
There is even a larger problem than this that challenges our attention, and that is the teaching of the English tongue to millions of our population. Dr. John H. Finley, president of the University of the State of New York, in a recent speech presented this picture which he found in one of the cantonments:“How practical is the need of a language in this country common to all tongues is illustrated by what I saw in one of the great cantonments a few nights ago. In the mess hall, where I had sat an hour before with a company of the men of the National Army, a few small groups were gathered along the tables learning English under the tuition of some of their comrades, one of whom had been a district supervisor in a neighboring State and another a theological student. In one of those groups, one of the exercises for the evening consisted in practicing the challenge when on sentry duty. Each pupil of the group (there were four of Italian and two of Slavic birth) shouldered in turn the long-handled stove shovel and aimed it at the teacher, who ran along the side of the room, as if to evade the guard. The pupil called out in broken speech, ‘Halt! who goes there?’ The answer came from the teacher, ‘Friend,’ And then,in as yet unintelligible English(the voices of innumerable ancestors struggling in their throats to pronounce it), the words ‘Advance and give the countersign.’ So are those of confused tongues learning to speak the language of the land they have been summoned to defend. What a commentary upon our educational shortcomings that in the days of peace we had not taught these men, who have been here long enough to be citizens (and tens ofthousands of their brothers with them), to know the language in which our history and laws are written and in which the commands of defense must now be given! May the end of this decade, though so near, find every citizen of our State prepared to challenge, in one tongue and heart, the purposes of all who come, with the cry, ‘Who goes there?’”
There is even a larger problem than this that challenges our attention, and that is the teaching of the English tongue to millions of our population. Dr. John H. Finley, president of the University of the State of New York, in a recent speech presented this picture which he found in one of the cantonments:
“How practical is the need of a language in this country common to all tongues is illustrated by what I saw in one of the great cantonments a few nights ago. In the mess hall, where I had sat an hour before with a company of the men of the National Army, a few small groups were gathered along the tables learning English under the tuition of some of their comrades, one of whom had been a district supervisor in a neighboring State and another a theological student. In one of those groups, one of the exercises for the evening consisted in practicing the challenge when on sentry duty. Each pupil of the group (there were four of Italian and two of Slavic birth) shouldered in turn the long-handled stove shovel and aimed it at the teacher, who ran along the side of the room, as if to evade the guard. The pupil called out in broken speech, ‘Halt! who goes there?’ The answer came from the teacher, ‘Friend,’ And then,in as yet unintelligible English(the voices of innumerable ancestors struggling in their throats to pronounce it), the words ‘Advance and give the countersign.’ So are those of confused tongues learning to speak the language of the land they have been summoned to defend. What a commentary upon our educational shortcomings that in the days of peace we had not taught these men, who have been here long enough to be citizens (and tens ofthousands of their brothers with them), to know the language in which our history and laws are written and in which the commands of defense must now be given! May the end of this decade, though so near, find every citizen of our State prepared to challenge, in one tongue and heart, the purposes of all who come, with the cry, ‘Who goes there?’”
Who are you, new man at Ellis Island? Are you a demobilized German soldier looking for easy money in America? Let us see your hands.Qui vive!Advance, and give the countersign! And don’t let it be in German.
What all the world is fearing to-day is the growth of Bolshevism. It has ruined Russia—and we must pay for that; it is blocking the peace parliaments in Germany—and we must pay for that. It is beginning in America and may grow swiftly in the turbulent days after the war—and we shall have to pay for that. Nobody knows what the Bolshevist is nor what are the tenets of Bolshevism—least of all the Bolshevists themselves. They have recruited their ranks from the most ignorant and most reckless—from the dregs and scum of the world. Their theory is that of force; of government they have nothing. They use the force of law without any surrender of privileges to the law. Their theory of life is self-contradictory. None the less, since they cannot be reasoned with, they constitute a menace to any country. The mischief makers of all classes make recruits for Bolsheviki—socialists, radical I. W. W.’s, anarchists, the red flag rabble of every country united in the general ignorant greed of the wolf pack.
Bolshevism may come to America through the Socialists, through the I. W. W. or through the Non-Partisan League—which in the State of North Dakota to-day hold a two-thirds majority of both House and Senate. It will grow out of the ignorant and discontented foreigners unassimilated in this country. We must expect it naturally to come from these and from the pro-Germans in this country, because those people never have been satisfied with what we did in the war. In general, Bolshevism lives only on its own excitement, its own lack of plans, its own eccentricities. It finds its opportunity in any time of unrest and of slackened government.
We have troublesome days of reconstruction ahead in America. Food prices and wages cannot go up forever, but it will be difficult to reduce wages and food prices. We shall have unemployment in this country. We shall have soldiers in this country dissatisfied because they find themselves and their deeds so soon forgotten. These things all are among the menaces of America, and they must be faced. It will require a united America to face them successfully.
Shall we import more such problems, or shall we dispense with certain of those which we now have? Besides all this irresponsible and sporadic Bolshevik propaganda, we may count upon the old, steady, undying, well-conceived and well-spread propaganda of Germany after the war as much as before and during the war. We shall meet—indeed, this very day are meeting—propaganda against the Allies intended to split us from France and Great Britain. Germany is going out after her lost markets all over the world as best she can. She will need all of her propaganda to help her crawl back even into a place in the shadows of the world and not in the sun of the world’s respect. While the war was going on, some firm in America bought a shipload of German toys. Who wants such blood-reddened toys in his home? Soon we shall see German goods in our markets. Who wants such goods? Soon we shall hear the subtle commercial scoff, “It’s all bosh to refuse German goods, for they are better and cheaper.” Is it so? Is it our duty to be unsentimental in business? Germany was quite unsentimental when she tore up the Belgian scrap of paper. It now would seem to be time that we had some sentiment of the old sort. Sentiment rarely is fundamentally wrong. So-called common sense quite often is no more than common selfishness.
As these pages go forward, the Allies’ declaration is that the Hun shall not be allowed in the peace conference nor in any League of Nations whatever that may be drawn up. One thing is sure. No League of Nations ever will be stronger than the individual thought of the countries combining. Our League of Nations will be no stronger than our feelings against pro-Germanism. If we forget that, and take up the game at the old place, our League of Nations is dead at its birth.
The Department of Justice, having removed restrictions on enemy aliens, and having wiped out the barred zones and the necessity of passes or permits, has released a great many pro-Germans who will slip back into their old places in America. In Great Britain the German waiter—so frequently the German spy—is not going to be allowed to take his old place. It may cause some inconvenience, but Great Britain is going to get on without him. That is what we must learn in America—to get on without some of the stolid or the obsequious labor that we have had. With the barring of alien labor, we should suffer many inconveniences in our personal lives. If we cannot endure those inconveniences, then we can have no League of Nations. With the refusal to buy any article made in Germany, we should be letting ourselves in for a considerable individual loss. Unless we are willing to accept that loss, we can have neither a League of Nations nor an America worthy of the name.
Germany is crippled, but not beaten and not repentant. The Germans regret the sinking of the Lusitania only because it was the thing which brought America into the war. For the war itself they are not sorry. If defeat did not make them repentant, heavy indemnities may help teach them something of their real place in the world. That lesson will be all the stronger if we in America shall make more stringent importation and deportation laws—if we shall deport more Germans and import less German goods. There is many and many an American home where German goods never again will enter the doors.
Prince Carl, of the House of Hohenzollern, when speaking of the war, said he thought that Germany ought not to have started her submarine warfare “without being absolutely sure it would succeed.” He said he regretted the German propaganda in the United States—because it had been carried out so clumsily; he said that Germany ought to have started her propaganda here on a larger scale, and ought to have spent millions of marks instead of thousands! There you see the German idea and part of the German policy in America. They have learned some lessons, but not the great lesson of the humble and the contrite heart.
Maximilian Harden has been a voice crying in the Hun wilderness for most of the time of the war. He says thatnow there is no real revulsion of feeling against the men who have caused Germany’s name to be a stench in the nostrils of the world. The soldiers returning from the front are cheered as heroes, though their hands are caked with the blood of innocent women and children. Not one of the groups scheming for advantage at Berlin has expressly repudiated the war. Not one has expressed horror at the violation of treaties.
Are these pages indeed bitter? They cannot be made bitter enough! We cannot sufficiently amplify and intensify the innate American horror at the revealed duplicity of this nation which we have fought and helped to beat. We find their spirit to have been one of fiendish ingenuity, their intellect of that curiously perverted quality to which attention has been called. Germany never has exulted more in the success of her armies in open warfare than in her success at stealth and treachery. Are these the men we wish to see marking our coming census maps?
We have nothing to fear from Germany. We have beaten the Germans at every game they have produced, and we can continue to do so. We are the victors and they are the vanquished. They made the vast mistake of being beaten in this war. There is no reason why we should fear them in the future, on either side of the Atlantic. Major H. C. Emory, a former professor at Yale, in a late address, rather colloquially voiced something of this feeling of confidence in his own country:
Let us get sane! Get over this German bug of thinking that somehow or other the Germans are superior. Morally they are greatly inferior, but people have thought that somehow, intellectually or in organization, they are better than the rest of the world. We have shown them that we can smash the German military organization, which we have smashed. There is an idea that the Germans can do us in business; that somehow this is a race that we cannot compete with on normally fair terms. Put that out of your head! They are a patient, hard-working race; they will work fourteen hours a day where a Russian won’t work four. They will plod faithfully. But, gentlemen, they are dumb; they are stupid. They do not understand things. They do not get the psychology of anybody else; and a large part of theirscience and their supposed superior way of doing things is bluff and fake. They have done some good work, but no better work, and they are not doing better work, in the field of economics than the English, the French, and the Americans. In the field of business they have nothing on you. For the love of Mike, don’t be afraid of them! You can put it over them every time.
Let us get sane! Get over this German bug of thinking that somehow or other the Germans are superior. Morally they are greatly inferior, but people have thought that somehow, intellectually or in organization, they are better than the rest of the world. We have shown them that we can smash the German military organization, which we have smashed. There is an idea that the Germans can do us in business; that somehow this is a race that we cannot compete with on normally fair terms. Put that out of your head! They are a patient, hard-working race; they will work fourteen hours a day where a Russian won’t work four. They will plod faithfully. But, gentlemen, they are dumb; they are stupid. They do not understand things. They do not get the psychology of anybody else; and a large part of theirscience and their supposed superior way of doing things is bluff and fake. They have done some good work, but no better work, and they are not doing better work, in the field of economics than the English, the French, and the Americans. In the field of business they have nothing on you. For the love of Mike, don’t be afraid of them! You can put it over them every time.
We need not fear either the arms, the arts or the artifices of Germany. What we need to fear, really, is our easy-going, unsuspicious American character, our tendency to forget everything else in the great game of affairs. It is time now that from the great mass of the American people there shall appear silently, standing shoulder to shoulder and side to side as they have in their old organization, a new American Protective League. Our old League determined that our homes and our property should be saved. Let the new League determine that our country and our principles shall be saved. All the eyes of the world turn to America to-day. The remainder of the world is distracted. In Berlin, radicals coming up from the dregs are doing their best to get control of a ruined country. “Bismarck’s structure was wonderful while it lasted,” says an editorial in an able American paper, “but it was a nation without a soul. It was made of blood and iron, and it could not live because the spirit was left out.” Neither can our civilization or our citizenship live if they are made of silver and gold, and if the spirit be left out.
It is time to look at the census map of America. We must revise those colors in the next ten years, or we have lost the war. This distrust of Germany in America, in South America and in Europe, is something which should excite no sympathy and no pity whatever. Wars are not cleared up, for example, on any basis of sympathy. There is no use figuring what we can do to show Germany how sorry we are. The thing to do is to leave Germany sorry. She has coal, iron, timber, copper, potash, phosphate, abundant other natural resources. If she cannot handle them, others can handle them for her. Marshal Foch has threatened repeatedly that if Germany continues cynically to disregard the terms of the armistice, he will march again on Germany.That is hard doctrine? Yes. But it was Germany that lost the war.
It is altogether likely that not the best writing in the world, not the most partisan history in the world, will ever be able to give a clean bill of health to America’s conduct of this war, or to restore the old American confidence that we were the one great people of the world. The scales have fallen from the eyes at least of our soldiers. They know, and presently all the world will know, our shortcomings. Three million men will have something to say about the politics of this country. Perhaps they will say that our next war shall not find us so unprepared. Perhaps they will say that our next war shall not find us with an army of 2,000,000 spies, propagandists and pro-enemies who claim American citizenship. The Army man is the worst foe of the censorship which has held back the truth from America for so long. Perhaps the Army man will be able to settle accounts with that politician whose stock in trade is the holding back from the American people of the knowledge of themselves. It is time to raise the real banner of America. It will take courage to march under those colors. But if we cannot march side by side and shoulder to shoulder, then we have lost this war, we have lost the Monroe Doctrine, we have lost the League of Nations.
Why should we try to avoid the truth? Nothing is gained by that. The truth is that the reckoning of this war is not yet paid. Eventually it must be paid through the resolution and individual courage of those citizens who are not ashamed to be called American. Ostracism of the hyphen, where it is known still to exist; fearlessness in the boycott of blood-soaked German goods; rejection of the blood-soaked German hand; the wiping out of the foreign languages in the pulpit and press of America; the revocation of citizenship based on a lie; the deportation of known traitors—those are some of the things which must go into the oath of the next A. P. L. Until we can swear that oath and maintain it, we have lost the war.
It is a far cry enough. We have not shot one German spy out of those thousands whom we have found working here in America. We have not deported one man. We have revoked the citizenship of only two men—the above mentionedFred Würsterbarth, who had been a citizen of America for thirty years, and Carl August Darmer, of Tacoma, Washington, who had been a citizen in America for thirty-six years. Do you think these two men were any worse than a one hundred thousand others who worked as spies of Germany? Hardly. The war remains still to be fought against these men who still are under arms. Apply this test to your friends and associates—to your lawyer, your doctor, to your grocer, above all, to your alderman, your councilman, your mayor and your representatives in Congress. Why not? It is only the same test which the United States District Court in New Jersey applied to Würsterbarth.
Eight years ago an American minister of the gospel who had lived much abroad, especially in Germany, came back to this country and wrote a book which perhaps never was very popular. He held up the mirror of America to herself. His views to-day would not be so much that of one crying in the wilderness. Let us follow along, in a running synopsis of the pages of his book, a hint now and then from page to page, and see what one man thought in that long ago before war was dreamed of; before the German army of spies, military and industrial, had been unearthed; before the plans of Germany for world conquest had been divulged. That writer says:
In fifty years New York will be what the Italians make it.... In New York there is only one native American to twenty foreigners. Waterbury, Connecticut, has a population of 30,000, 20,000 being aliens.... New Haven and Hartford, cities of long-established colleges, have an un-American population which in ten years will outnumber the natives.... Parts of New Jersey are more hopelessly de-Americanized than New England. Perth Amboy has at least three to one non-Americans. Cincinnati and Milwaukee have been German cities for a quarter of a century; Chicago hardly less so.... Wherever I take a meal I am served solely by foreigners.... It seems odd that I should seldom ever see or meet Americans except in a social or professional way, and the professions are being rapidly filled by men of foreign names.... The Yankee no longer counts in the industrial and commercial life of New England. In his place is to be found the Italians, Hungarians. French, Polocks, Scandinavians and Jews.... Thoroughness, therefore, must nowbe the watchword of the native American if he hopes to survive in the terrific commercial battle now waging all over the world.... This sort of thing must be stopped at once or we are lost.... Take the half-past-seven Sunday morning train from the New York Grand Central station, and you will see at every way-station a swarm of dark, sturdy foreigners entering or quitting the train at the little towns along the way—for this is a local train and makes all the stops—and these people are thus enabled to visit their friends and acquaintances. And there appears to be no town, however small, where these foreigners have not gained some footing as laborers, farmers and small tradesmen. I should say that more than half of the Sunday railroad traffic in New York, New Jersey and New England is foreign. I took a train from New York some thirty miles into New Jersey one Sunday morning in October and the conductor told me that he did not think the native Americans constituted ten per cent of his passengers. I asked him whether that was the usual thing on Sundays, and he said, “No, not quite so bad as to-day, but we always have more foreigners than natives on Sunday.” ...Six millions of aliens are necessary, we are told, to the development of the resources of our country. Now, it is perfectly plain that these foreign hordes are necessary to the development of the multi-millionaires, the trusts and the monopolies; but it is not so plain that they are necessary to the peace, happiness and prosperity of this country.... The normal increase of the native American population in the last forty years would have been amply sufficient for the proper and healthy development of this country. Had not the foreigner been called in in such hordes, we should have been forced to do our own work ourselves and would have been all the happier and richer for it.... There must be a check put upon immigration. Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and the time has come when we must resort to it.... We need time to train our children to compete with these people and during that time the foreigner must be held at bay. Immigration must be checked. The resources of this land are being too rapidly developed by means of these aliens.... Some radical change for the worse has taken place in the last quarter of a century in the fibre of our life, our manhood and our national character.... Indiscriminate and immoderate immigration is, I believe, the main cause of this deterioration. We have ceased long since to assimilate the vast hordes of heterogeneous peoples who have beendumped down upon our shores and who swarm all over this land in the eager pursuit of the mere physical necessities of life. This is the object, the sole ambition of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand. Such an invasion is actually as disastrous to a country as the invasion of Germany by the Huns who were impelled solely by hunger (the very same motive that brings the vast majority of immigrants to this country) and whose ravages devastated the whole of Germany and scattered its inhabitants beyond the Alps to the Rhine and to the borders of the Mediterranean.... Such masses of crude humanity as pour in upon us cannot possibly be taken up into healthy circulation, but must lie undigested in the stomach of the nation, seriously affecting its health and happiness.... The curse these immigrants bring upon themselves is plainly to be seen, for it is immediate. They form a body incompatible with the healthy growth of this country. The greater curse of this country is that they do the work that should not be done by them at all, the work that should be done by natives. They take the work and the bread out of the hands and mouths of native Americans, and the question of their means of living must soon become one of the most pressing economic and social problems of the day.
In fifty years New York will be what the Italians make it.... In New York there is only one native American to twenty foreigners. Waterbury, Connecticut, has a population of 30,000, 20,000 being aliens.... New Haven and Hartford, cities of long-established colleges, have an un-American population which in ten years will outnumber the natives.... Parts of New Jersey are more hopelessly de-Americanized than New England. Perth Amboy has at least three to one non-Americans. Cincinnati and Milwaukee have been German cities for a quarter of a century; Chicago hardly less so.... Wherever I take a meal I am served solely by foreigners.... It seems odd that I should seldom ever see or meet Americans except in a social or professional way, and the professions are being rapidly filled by men of foreign names.... The Yankee no longer counts in the industrial and commercial life of New England. In his place is to be found the Italians, Hungarians. French, Polocks, Scandinavians and Jews.... Thoroughness, therefore, must nowbe the watchword of the native American if he hopes to survive in the terrific commercial battle now waging all over the world.... This sort of thing must be stopped at once or we are lost.... Take the half-past-seven Sunday morning train from the New York Grand Central station, and you will see at every way-station a swarm of dark, sturdy foreigners entering or quitting the train at the little towns along the way—for this is a local train and makes all the stops—and these people are thus enabled to visit their friends and acquaintances. And there appears to be no town, however small, where these foreigners have not gained some footing as laborers, farmers and small tradesmen. I should say that more than half of the Sunday railroad traffic in New York, New Jersey and New England is foreign. I took a train from New York some thirty miles into New Jersey one Sunday morning in October and the conductor told me that he did not think the native Americans constituted ten per cent of his passengers. I asked him whether that was the usual thing on Sundays, and he said, “No, not quite so bad as to-day, but we always have more foreigners than natives on Sunday.” ...
Six millions of aliens are necessary, we are told, to the development of the resources of our country. Now, it is perfectly plain that these foreign hordes are necessary to the development of the multi-millionaires, the trusts and the monopolies; but it is not so plain that they are necessary to the peace, happiness and prosperity of this country.... The normal increase of the native American population in the last forty years would have been amply sufficient for the proper and healthy development of this country. Had not the foreigner been called in in such hordes, we should have been forced to do our own work ourselves and would have been all the happier and richer for it.... There must be a check put upon immigration. Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and the time has come when we must resort to it.... We need time to train our children to compete with these people and during that time the foreigner must be held at bay. Immigration must be checked. The resources of this land are being too rapidly developed by means of these aliens.... Some radical change for the worse has taken place in the last quarter of a century in the fibre of our life, our manhood and our national character.... Indiscriminate and immoderate immigration is, I believe, the main cause of this deterioration. We have ceased long since to assimilate the vast hordes of heterogeneous peoples who have beendumped down upon our shores and who swarm all over this land in the eager pursuit of the mere physical necessities of life. This is the object, the sole ambition of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand. Such an invasion is actually as disastrous to a country as the invasion of Germany by the Huns who were impelled solely by hunger (the very same motive that brings the vast majority of immigrants to this country) and whose ravages devastated the whole of Germany and scattered its inhabitants beyond the Alps to the Rhine and to the borders of the Mediterranean.... Such masses of crude humanity as pour in upon us cannot possibly be taken up into healthy circulation, but must lie undigested in the stomach of the nation, seriously affecting its health and happiness.... The curse these immigrants bring upon themselves is plainly to be seen, for it is immediate. They form a body incompatible with the healthy growth of this country. The greater curse of this country is that they do the work that should not be done by them at all, the work that should be done by natives. They take the work and the bread out of the hands and mouths of native Americans, and the question of their means of living must soon become one of the most pressing economic and social problems of the day.
Such extended quotations are made from one writer (Mr. Monroe Royce; “The Passing of the American”) only because these truths of ten years ago are equally true to-day and more true. In the past ten years our census map has changed yet more. And now into this crude population of ours we have inducted all the seeds of discord of this war. We have learned a sudden distrust of a large number of our citizenry. Our returning soldiers will bring us yet more problems. The spirit of unrest in this hour of anarchy will add to all these problems.
It is time for another oath, sworn indeed for the protection of America.
AT THE PEACE TABLE
Who shall sit at the table, then, when the terms of peace are made—The wisest men of the troubled lands in their silver and gold brocade?Yes, they shall gather in solemn state to speak for each living race,But who shall speak for the unseen dead that shall come to the council place?Though you see them not and you hear them not, they shall sit at the table, too;They shall throng the room where the peace is made and know what it is you do;The innocent dead from the sea shall rise to stand at the wise man’s side,And over his shoulder a boy shall look—a boy that was crucified.You may guard the doors of that council hall with barriers strong and stout,But the dead unbidden shall enter there, and never you’ll shut them out.And the man that died in the open boat, and the babes that suffered worse,Shall sit at the table when peace is made by the side of a martyred nurse.You may see them not, but they’ll all be there; when they speak you may fail to hear;You may think that you’re making your pacts alone, but their spirits will hover near;And whatever the terms of the peace you make with the tyrant whose hands are red,You must please not only the living here, but must satisfy your dead.—Edgar A. Guest.
Who shall sit at the table, then, when the terms of peace are made—The wisest men of the troubled lands in their silver and gold brocade?Yes, they shall gather in solemn state to speak for each living race,But who shall speak for the unseen dead that shall come to the council place?Though you see them not and you hear them not, they shall sit at the table, too;They shall throng the room where the peace is made and know what it is you do;The innocent dead from the sea shall rise to stand at the wise man’s side,And over his shoulder a boy shall look—a boy that was crucified.You may guard the doors of that council hall with barriers strong and stout,But the dead unbidden shall enter there, and never you’ll shut them out.And the man that died in the open boat, and the babes that suffered worse,Shall sit at the table when peace is made by the side of a martyred nurse.You may see them not, but they’ll all be there; when they speak you may fail to hear;You may think that you’re making your pacts alone, but their spirits will hover near;And whatever the terms of the peace you make with the tyrant whose hands are red,You must please not only the living here, but must satisfy your dead.—Edgar A. Guest.
Who shall sit at the table, then, when the terms of peace are made—The wisest men of the troubled lands in their silver and gold brocade?Yes, they shall gather in solemn state to speak for each living race,But who shall speak for the unseen dead that shall come to the council place?
Who shall sit at the table, then, when the terms of peace are made—
The wisest men of the troubled lands in their silver and gold brocade?
Yes, they shall gather in solemn state to speak for each living race,
But who shall speak for the unseen dead that shall come to the council place?
Though you see them not and you hear them not, they shall sit at the table, too;They shall throng the room where the peace is made and know what it is you do;The innocent dead from the sea shall rise to stand at the wise man’s side,And over his shoulder a boy shall look—a boy that was crucified.
Though you see them not and you hear them not, they shall sit at the table, too;
They shall throng the room where the peace is made and know what it is you do;
The innocent dead from the sea shall rise to stand at the wise man’s side,
And over his shoulder a boy shall look—a boy that was crucified.
You may guard the doors of that council hall with barriers strong and stout,But the dead unbidden shall enter there, and never you’ll shut them out.And the man that died in the open boat, and the babes that suffered worse,Shall sit at the table when peace is made by the side of a martyred nurse.
You may guard the doors of that council hall with barriers strong and stout,
But the dead unbidden shall enter there, and never you’ll shut them out.
And the man that died in the open boat, and the babes that suffered worse,
Shall sit at the table when peace is made by the side of a martyred nurse.
You may see them not, but they’ll all be there; when they speak you may fail to hear;You may think that you’re making your pacts alone, but their spirits will hover near;And whatever the terms of the peace you make with the tyrant whose hands are red,You must please not only the living here, but must satisfy your dead.
You may see them not, but they’ll all be there; when they speak you may fail to hear;
You may think that you’re making your pacts alone, but their spirits will hover near;
And whatever the terms of the peace you make with the tyrant whose hands are red,
You must please not only the living here, but must satisfy your dead.
—Edgar A. Guest.
—Edgar A. Guest.