Our Part in the Great War

SECTION II

WHY SOME AMERICANS ARE NEUTRAL

I

NEUTRALITY: AN INTERPRETATION OF THE MIDDLE WEST

"The great interior region bounded east by the Alleghanies, north by the British Dominions, west by the Rocky Mountains, and south by the line along which the culture of corn and cotton meets ... will have fifty millions of people within fifty years, if not prevented by any political folly or mistake. It contains more than one-third of the country owned by the United States—certainly more than one million of square miles. A glance at the map shows that, territorially speaking, it is the great body of the republic. The other parts are but marginal borders to it."

(Lincoln's Message to Congress, Dec. 1, 1862.)

The war and the election together have revealed a growing separation between the ideas of the East and those of the West. This separation is largely the fault of the East, which prefers to do its thinking in terms of its own industrial welfare. The life of the West is a healthier life. There is better balance between industry and agriculture, more recognition of the value of social equality, more open-mindedness to new ideas, greater readiness to put them into practice. The East has been slow to recognize this moral leadership of the newer country. It has greeted the men and their ideas with caustic humor and sometimes with an almost malignant bitterness. This has not weakened the men nor crushed their ideas, but it has lessened good will. It has led the West to distrust a policy which has the endorsement of the East.

The German Kaiser said to a distinguished Frenchman whom I know:

"America once divided between North and South. It would not be impossible now to separate America, the East from the West."

It is time for the East to waken itself from its selfish sleep, and bend its mind to an understanding of the American community. In the matter of foreign policy, it is wiser than the Middle West, but in order to make its ideas prevail it will have to work by sympathetic coÖperation. It will have to prove that its notion of foreign policy is not based on self-interest, but is a wise program for the American nation.

I have shown that a section of America of the Civil War traditions is intensely Pro-Ally, and has proved it in speech and action. The new America, spreading out over the immense areas of the Middle West, is neutral. It is neutral because it does not know the facts. I am sometimes told in Europe that it is the chink of our money that has made my country deaf. But our neutral people are our earnest Middle Westerners, hard-working and humanitarian. The Middle West has not given money, and it is warm-hearted. It has not taken sides, and it is honest. This neutrality is in part the result of the Allied methods of conducting the war. In England and France, there has been an unconscious disregard of neutral opinion, an indifference in the treatment of its representatives, an unwillingness to use the methods of a democracy in appealing to a democracy. A Government report, issued by a belligerent power, has little effect on a community three thousand miles away. But the first-hand accounts, sent by its own writers, who are known to be accurate and impartial, have wide effect. It is unfortunate that through the first two years of the war, more news was given to American journalists by Germany than by England and France.

There is need that some one should speak the truth about the foreign policy of the Allies. For that foreign policy has been a failure in its effect on neutrals. The successful prosecution of a war involves three relationships:

(1) The enemy.

(2) The Allies.

(3) The Neutrals.

The first two relationships have long been realized. The third—that of relationship toward neutrals—has never been realized. It is not fully realized to-day. The failure to realize it led America and England into the fight of 1812. It led to the Mason and Slidell case between England and America in the Civil War. The importance of winning neutral good will and public opinion is not, even to-day, included in the forefront of the national effort. It is still spoken of as a minor matter of giving "penny-a-liner" journalists "interviews." England has steered her way through diplomatic difficulties with neutral governments. But that is only one-half the actual problem of a foreign policy. The other half is to win the public opinion of the neutral people, because there is no such thing finally as neutrality.[2] Public opinion turns either Pro or Anti, in the end. At present about thirty per cent of American public opinion is Pro-Ally. Ten per cent is anti-British, ten per cent anti-Russian, ten per cent Pro-German, and forty per cent neutral. The final weight will rest in whichever cause wins the forty per cent neutral element. That element is contained in the Middle West. The failure in dealing with America has been the failure to see that we needed facts, if we were to come to a decision. Our only way of getting facts is through the representatives whom we send over.

A clear proof that the cause of the Allies has not touched America except on the Atlantic Seaboard lies in the exact number of men from the Eastern Universities who have come across to help France, as compared with the number from the Middle Western institutions of learning. For instance, in the American Field Ambulance Service Harvard has 98 men, Princeton, 28, Yale 27, Columbia 9, Dartmouth 8. These are Eastern institutions. From the Middle West, with the exception of the University of Michigan, which has sent several, there is occasionally one man from a college. The official report up to the beginning of 1916 shows not a man from what many consider the leading University of America, the State University of Wisconsin, and less than six from the entire Middle West. There is no need of elaborating the point. The Middle West has not been allowed to know the facts.

Because my wife told her friends in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the facts of the war, three men have come four thousand miles to help France. One is Robert Toms, General Manager of the Marion Water Works, one is Dr. Cogswell, a successful physician, one is Verne Marshall, Editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Each man of the three is a successful worker, and gave up his job. These three men are as significant as the 98 college boys from Harvard.

What took place in that little Iowa group will take place throughout the whole vast Middle Western territory, when the Allies are willing to use the only methods that avail in a modern democracy—namely, the use of public opinion, publicity, and the periodicals,—by granting facilities for information to the representatives of a democracy when they come desiring to know the truth. Constantly, one is met in London and Paris when seeking information on German atrocities, German frightfulness, German methods:

"But surely your people know all that."

How can they know it? Our newspaper men have rarely been permitted access to the facts by the Allies. But to every phase of the war they have been personally conducted by the German General Staff. It has been as much as our liberty was worth, and once or twice almost as much as our life was worth, to endeavor to build up the Pro-Ally case, so constant have been the obstacles placed in our way. Much of the interesting war news, most of the arresting interviews, have come from the German side. The German General Staff has shown an understanding of American psychology, a flexibility in handling public opinion. The best "stories" have often come out of Germany, given to American correspondents. Their public men and their officers, including Generals, have unbent, and stated their case. An American writer, going to Germany, has received every aid in gathering his material. A writer, with the Allies, is constantly harassed. This is a novel experience to any American journalist whose status at home is equal to that of the public and professional men, whose work he makes known and aids. My own belief for the first twenty-two months of work in obtaining information and passing it on to my countrymen was that such effort in their behalf was not desired by France and England, that their officials and public men would be better pleased if we ceased to annoy them. I was thoroughly discouraged by the experience, so slight was the official interest over here in having America know the truth.

This foreign policy, which dickers with the State Department, but neglects the people, is a survival of the Tory tradition. One of the ablest interpreters of that tradition calls such a foreign policy—"the preference for negotiating with governments rather than with peoples." But the foreign policy of the United States is created by public opinion. Negotiation with the State Department leaves the people, who are the creators of policy, cold and neutral, or heated and hostile, because uninformed. If the Allied Governments had released facts to the representatives of American public opinion, our foreign policy of the last two years might have been more firm and enlightened, instead of hesitant and cloudy. As a people we have made no moral contribution to the present struggle, because in part we did not have the fact-basis and the intellectual material on which to work.

If a democracy, like England, is too proud to present its case to a sister democracy, then at that point it is not a democracy. If it gives as excuse (and this is the excuse which officials give) that the military will not tolerate propaganda, then the Allies are more dominated by their military than Germany. Of course the real reason is neither of these. The real reason is that England and France are unaware of the situation in our Middle West.

The Middle West is a hard-working, idealistic, "uncommercialized" body of citizens, who create our national policy. It has some of the best universities in America—places of democratic education, reaching every group of citizen in the State, and profoundly influential on State policy. Such Universities as the State Universities of Wisconsin and Michigan are closely related to the life of their community, whereas Yale University could not carry a local election in New Haven. What the late Professor Sumner (of Yale) thought, was of little weight at the Capitol House at Hartford, Conn. What John R. Commons (Professor at the State University of Wisconsin) thinks, has become State law. The Middle West has put into execution commission government in over 200 of its cities, the first great move in the overthrow of municipal graft. It practices city-planning. Many of its towns are models. Our sane radical movements in the direction of equality are Middle-Western movements. To curse this section as money-grubbing, uninspired, and to praise the Harvard-Boston Brahmins, the Princeton-Philadelphia Tories, and the Yale-New York financial barons, as the hope of our country, is to twist values. Both elements are excellent and necessary. Out of their chemical compounding will come the America of the future. The leaders of the Middle West are Brand Whitlock, Bryan, La Follette, Herbert Quick, Henry Ford, Booth Tarkington, Edward Ross, John R. Commons, William Allen White, The Mayos, Orville Wright. Not all of them are of first-rate mentality. But they are honest, and their mistakes are the mistakes of an idealism unrelated to life as it is. The best of them have a vision for our country that is not faintly perceived by the East. Their political ideal is Abraham Lincoln. Walt Whitman expressed what they are trying to make of our people. The stories of O. Henry describe this type of new American.

A clear analysis of our Middle West is contained in the second of Monsieur Emile Hovelaque's articles in recent issues of the Revue de Paris. In that he shows how distance and isolation have operated to give our country, particularly the land-bound heart of it, a feeling of security, a sense of being unrelated to human events elsewhere on the planet. He shows how the break of the immigrant with his Old World has left his inner life emptied of the old retrospects, cut off from the ancestral roots. That vacancy the new man in the new world filled with formula, with vague pieces of idealism about brotherhood. He believed his experiment had cleared human nature of its hates. He believed that ideals no longer had to be fought for. Phrases became a substitute for the ancient warfare against the enemies of the race. And all the time he was busy with his new continent. Results, action, machinery, became his entire outer life. The Puritan strain in him, a religion of dealing very directly with life immediately at hand, drove him yet the harder to tackle his own patch of soil, and then on to a fresh field in another town in another State: work, but work unrelated to a national life—least of all was it related to an international ideal.

And he let Europe go its own gait, till finally it has become a dim dream, and just now a very evil dream. But of concern in its bickerings he feels none. So to-day he refuses to see a right and a wrong in the European War. He confuses the criminal and the victim. He regards the Uhlan and the GerbÉviller peasant as brothers. Why don't they cease their quarrel, and live as we live?

That, in brief, is a digest of Hovelaque's searching analysis of our national soul at this crisis. We have not understood the war. We are not going to see it unless we are aided. If we do not see it, the future of the democratic experiment on this earth is imperiled. The friends of France and England lie out yonder on the prairies. The Allies have much to teach them, and much to learn from them. But to effect the exchange, England and France must be willing to speak to them through the voices they know—not alone through "Voix Americaines" of James Beck, and Elihu Root and Whitney Warren and President Lowell and Mr. Choate. England must speak to them through Collier's Weekly and the Saturday Evening Post and the newspaper syndicates. There is only one way of reaching American public opinion—the newspapers and periodicals. No other agency avails. England must recognize the function of the correspondent in the modern democracy. Through him come the facts and impressions on which the people make up its mind. He supplies public opinion with the material out of which to build policy. For our failure to understand the war, France and England must share the blame with America. We should have been ready enough to alter our indifference and ignorance into understanding, if only our writers had been aided to gain information.

But the Western Allies have little knowledge of American public opinion, and small desire to win it. They have sent some of our best men over in disgust to the enemy lines. Any one, coming on such a quest as I have been on, that of proving German methods from first-hand witness, is regarded by the Allies as partly a nuisance and partly misguided. If any public criticism is ever made of my country's attitude by the French or English, we, that have sought to serve the Allies, will be obliged to come forward and tell our experience:—namely, that it has been most difficult to obtain facts for America, as the Allies have seen fit to disregard her public opinion, and scorn the methods and channels of reaching that public opinion.

II

SOCIAL WORKERS AND THE WAR

I found in Belgium the evidences of a German spy system, carried out systematically through a period of years. I saw widespread atrocities committed on peasant non-combatants by order of German officers. I saw German troops burn peasants' houses. I saw dying men, women and a child, who had been bayonetted by German soldiers as they were being used as a screen for advancing troops. What I had seen was reported to Lord Bryce by the young man with me, and the testimony appears in the Bryce report. I saw a ravaged city, 1,100 houses burned house by house, and sprinkled among the gutted houses a hundred houses undamaged, with German script on their door, saying, "Nicht verbrennen. Gute leute wohnen hier."

With witnesses and with photographs I had reinforced my observation, so that I should not overstate or alter in making my report at home. Opposed to this machine of treachery and cruelty, I had seen an uprising of the people of three nations, men hating war and therefore enlisted in this righteous war to preserve values more precious than the individual life. With a bitter and a costly experience, I had won my conviction that there were two wars on the western front.

When I returned from a year in the war zone, five months of which was spent at the front, I looked forward to finding a constructive program, hammered out by the social work group, which would interpret the struggle and give our nation a call to action. I looked to social workers because I have long believed and continue to believe that social workers are the finest group of persons in our American community. They seem to me in our vanguard because of a sane intelligence, touched with ethical purpose.

It was a disappointment to find them scattered and negative, many of them anti-war, some of them members of the Woman's Peace Party, some even opposing the sending of ammunition to the Allies.

Few elements in the war were more perplexing than the failure of our idealists to make their thinking worthy of the sudden and immense crisis which challenged them. Absence of moral leadership in America was as conspicuous as the presence of inexhaustible stores of moral heroism in Europe.

The very experts who have prepared accurate reports on social conditions are failing to inform themselves of the facts of this war. I have found social workers who have not studied the Bryce report, and who are unaware of the German diaries and German letters, specifying atrocities, citing "military necessity," and revealing a mental condition that makes "continuous mediation" as grim a piece of futility as it would be if applied to a maniac in the nursery about to brain a child.

I heard the head of a famous institution, a member of the Woman's Peace Party, tell what promise of the future it gave when a German woman crossed the platform at The Hague and shook hands with a Belgian woman. There is something unworthy in citing that incident as answering the situation in Belgium, where at this hour that German woman's countrymen are holding the little nation in subjection, and impoverishing it by severe taxation, after betraying it for many years, and then burning its homes and killing its peasants. An active unrepentant murderer is not the same as a naughty child, whom you cajole into a conference of good-will. A pleasant passage of social amenity does not obliterate the destruction of a nation. Such haphazard treatment of a vast tragedy reveals that our people are not living at the same deep level as the young men I have known in Flanders, who are dying to defend the helpless and to preserve justice.

I was asked by a secretary of the Woman's Peace Party to speak at Carnegie Hall to a mass meeting of pacifists. When I told her I should speak of the wrong done to Belgium which I had witnessed, and should state that the war must go on to a righteous finish, she withdrew her invitation, saying she was sorry the women couldn't listen to my stories. She said that her experience as a lawyer had shown her that punishment never accomplished anything, and the driving out of the Germans by military measures was punishment.

I have known social workers to aid girl strikers in making their demands effective. Have the social workers as a unit denounced the continuing injustice to Belgium? Protests, made by the Belgian government to Washington, of cruelties, of undue taxation, of systematic steam-roller crushing, were allowed to be filed in silence, so that these protests that cover more than twelve months of outrage are to-day unknown to the general public, and have not availed to mitigate one item of the evil. One was astonished by the sudden hush that had fallen on the altruistic group, so sensitive to corporate wrong-doing, so alert in defense of exploited children and women. Why the overnight change from sharp intolerance of successful injustice?

I find that our philanthropists are held by a theory. The theory is in two parts. One is that war is the worst of all evils. The other is that war can be willed out of existence. They believe that another way out can be found, by some sort of mutual understanding, continuous mediation, and overlooking of definite and hideous wrongs committed by a combatant, wrongs that date back many years, so that out of long-continued treachery the atrocity sprang, like flame out of dung.

They refuse to see a right and a wrong in this war. It is not to them as other struggles in life, as the struggle between the forces of decency and the vice trust with its army of owners, pimps, cadets and disorderly hotel keepers. They have let their minds slip into a confusion between right and wrong, a blurring of distinctions as sharp and fundamental as the distinction between chastity and licentiousness, between military necessity and human rights, between a living wage and sweatshop labor. In their socialized pity, they have lost the consciousness of sin.

I found a ready answer to the charges of hideous practice by the army of invasion—the answer, that war is always like that. But it is too easy to dismiss all these outrages as "war." That is akin to the easy generalizations of prohibition fanatics, of pseudo-Marxian Socialists, of Anarchists, of vegetarians, of Christian Scientists, and of many other sincere persons who overstate, who like to focus what is complex into a one-word statement. "Do away with drink at one stroke, and you have abolished unhappy marriages." "All modern business is bad." "Government is the worst of all evils." "Meat-eating leads to murder."

Just as men-of-the-world theories on the inevitability of prostitution, with its "lost" girls, had to give way to the presence of facts on the commercialized traffic, so the pacifist position on the present war is untenable when confronted with the honeycombing of Belgium with spies through long years and with the state of mind and the resultant acts of infamy recorded by Germans in their letters and diaries. There is an incurable romanticism in the literature of the pacifists that is offensive to men in a tragic struggle. Let me quote two sentences from a peace pamphlet issued by friends of mine who are among the best-known social workers in the United States:

"It (war) has found a world of friends and neighbors, and substituted a world of outlanders and aliens and enemies."

This is a quaint picture of the ante-bellum situation in Belgium, when the country was undermined with German clerks, superintendents, commercial travelers, summer residents, who were extracting information and forwarding it to Berlin, buying up peasants for spies and building villas with concrete foundations for big guns. "Friends and neighbors" is a rhetorical flourish that hurts when applied to German officers riding into towns as conquerors where for years they had been entertained as social guests.

"In rape and cruelty and rage, ancient brutishness trails at the heels of all armies."

That description is just when applied to the German army of invasion which practiced widespread murder on non-combatants. It is inaccurate, and therefore unjust, when applied to the Belgian, French and British armies. I have lived and worked as a member of the allied army for five months. It does not trail brutishness. It is fighting from high motive with honorable methods. It is unfortunate to overlay the profound reality of the war with a mental concept.

To summarize:

1. The social workers have failed to apply their high moral earnestness to this war. They have not accepted the war as a revelation of the human spirit in one of its supreme struggles between right and wrong. As the result their words have offended, as light words will always hurt men who are sacrificing property and ease and life itself for the sake of an ideal.

2. They have neglected to inform themselves of the facts of the war. As the result, they have made no positive program and taken no constructive action.

Let them deal with such facts as the German villa in the Belgian town where we lived—a villa that was a fortification with a deep concrete foundation for a heavy gun. I want them to face, as I had to face, the eighty-year-old peasant woman with a bayonet thrust through her thigh, and the twelve-year-old girl with her back cut open to the backbone by bayonets. Is it too much to ask that our social workers shall hold their peace in the presence of universal suffering and not mock noble sacrifice with tales of drugged soldiers? It was not the vinegar on hyssop that explains the deed on the cross. Is it too much to ask them to abstain from their peace parties and their anti-munitions campaigns?

We should listen to these leaders more readily if we had seen them risking their lives like the boys of the American Ambulance. To weigh sacrifice in detached phrases calls for an equal measure of service and a shared peril. If a few of our social workers had been wounded under fire, we should feel that their companions in the hazard were speaking from some such depth of experience as the peasants of Lorraine. But our idealists have not spoken from this initiation. Miss Addams is still puzzled and grieved by the response her words about drugged soldiers called out. Mr. Wilson is annoyed that his phrase of "too proud to fight" gave little pleasure to the mothers of dead boys.

With fuller knowledge our leaders will turn to and build us a program we can follow, a program of action that preserves the immutable distinction between right and wrong, that lends strength to those dying for the right. With such frank taking of sides, let me give two instances where definite results could be achieved. They are both highly supposititious cases. But they will serve.

Let us suppose, that at this moment the Russian government, under cover of the war, is harrying and suppressing the Russian revolutionary centers in Paris and London—the French and British governments remaining complacent to the act because of the present war alliance. If we had a staunch public opinion, resulting in a strong government policy at Washington which had decided there was a right and a wrong on the western front, and which had thrown the immense weight of its moral support to the defenders of Belgium, such a government would be in a position to make a friendly suggestion to France and England that "live and let live" for Russian liberalism would be appreciated.

Let us take another imaginative case. Suppose that, under cover of the war, Japan was tightening her hold on China, and gradually turning China into a subject state. If our government were on relations of powerful friendship with the Allies, it would be conceivable that England could be asked to hint gently that unseemly pressure from Tokyo was undesirable. The English fleet is a fact in the world of reality.

What is needed precisely is a foreign policy that will strengthen the tendencies toward world peace, based on justice. By our indecision and failure to take a stand, we have lessened our moral value to the world. It is weak thinking that advocates a policy and is too timid to use the instruments that will shape it. Because we want a restored Belgium and France and a world peace, we need statesmen who are effective in attaining these things. We need men who can suggest a diplomatic gain in the cause of justice that the nations will agree on, because of a government at Washington that carries weight with the diplomats who will bring it to pass. We want to see the friendship of France and England and Canada regained. We are letting all these things slip. There will come a day when it is too late to do anything except develop regrets. Why should not social workers declare themselves in time?

At a season of national gravity, when the future for fifty years may be determined inside of four years, we want those men for our leaders who can work results in the world of time and space, instead of dream liberations in the untroubled realms of moral consciousness.

Before we have an all-embracing internationalism, we must have a series of informal alliances, where the forces of modern democracy tend to range on one side, and the autocratic nations tend to range on the other side. There will be strange mixtures, of course, on both sides, even as there are in the present war. But the grand total will lean ever more and more to righteousness. Righteousness will prevail in spite of us, but how much fairer our lot if we are ranged with the "great allies—exultations, agonies, and love," and man's unconquerable will to freedom.

III

FORGETTING THE AMERICAN TRADITION

The Chicago Evening American places on its editorial page on August 10, 1916, a letter to which it gives editorial approval. The letter says: "There are thousands of German-born citizens, in fact the writer knows of no others, whose very German origin has made them immune against such influences as ancestry, literature, sentiment and language, which count for so much in their effect upon a great percentage of our population. These very men continue to be loyal Americans. If we are disloyal, what then do you call the Choates, the Roosevelts, the Eliots, and the foreign-born Haven Putnams?"

The letter is signed M. Kirchberger. Mr. Hearst finds this statement of sufficient importance to spread out before five or six million readers of his newspapers. It is of importance, because it voices the belief of an ever-increasing element in our population. Our ancestry, literature, sentiment and language do produce such men as Joseph Choate, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles William Eliot and George Haven Putnam. Those names do go straight back in our national history to the original stock, which shaped our national policy and ideals. It was their ancestry, English and American literature, their racial sentiment, and the English language, which made the historic America. Mr. Kirchberger believes them to be disloyal to the New America. I trust he and his numerous clan will define what sort of country he wants to make of us, what ancestry he wishes to have prevail, what literature he will introduce into our schools, what sentiment and what language. I hope his group will come out into the open with their program of action. For they have one. He sees clearly that the civilization of a nation is the resultant of its racial inheritance, its literature, its language and its ideas about life. He means that our civilization shall go his way, not the way of the Choates and Eliots. He has no quarrel whatever with the vague internationalism of many of our social workers because under that fog he and his kind can operate unobserved. I do not underestimate the influence of such thought as his. It is growing stronger every day. It is sharply defined, forceful, and it will prevail unless we fight it.

When one comes among us, sharing the privileges of citizenship, to tell us that he is "immune" from the claims of our great ancestry, and the noble sentiment of our past, he is striking at the heart of our nationality. He is vastly more significant than his own alien voice. For his claims are being advocated by editors and politicians. His ideas are sweeping our communities. Our nation does not live because it is a geographical unit, nor because it accepts all the races of Europe. It lives because it fought at Yorktown side by side with Rochambeau and his Frenchmen. It lives in the songs of Whittier and in the heart of Lincoln. By its past of struggle for ideas it has given us a heritage. But we have substituted pacifism and commercialism for the old struggle, and we have substituted phrases for the old ideas which cost sacrifice to maintain. If enough citizens become "immune" from the influences that have shaped us, we shall lose our historic continuity, and become the sort of nation which these enemies would have us be. But these considerations do not bring alarm to our leaders. Our leaders supply the very intellectual defense for this treason. They supply it in the doctrine of so-called internationalism.

Let us without delay select our position and hold it. Let us stand firmly on our traditions and history. We have no wish to be "immune" from our language and literature, our sentiment and ancestry. We need a fresh inoculation of those "influences." Let us reinforce the policy of Franklin which recognized the desirability of friendship with France and England. Let us restate the policy of Lincoln, who paused in the stress of a great war to strike hands with the workers of England, because they and he were at one in the love of liberty.

No single factor of race and climate, language and culture is determinative on that central power of cohesion which gathers a multitude of persons—"infinitely repellent particles"—into an organism which lives its life in unity, and forms its tradition from a collective experience. But it does not follow that some one of these factors cannot be so strengthened as to disturb the balance. If the geographical territory is carved up the nation is destroyed. Successive waves of immigration can drown out the sharply defined character of a people. This is now taking place in the United States. The proof is our reaction to the war. It is not that we revealed differences of "opinion." It is that we were untrue to our tradition.

It is easy to throw the discussion into nonsense by asking: Is there any such thing as a pure race? Are not the greatest nations of mixed blood? Do you think race and nation are the same thing? It is true that no one thing is determinative in the making of a nation. Race and language, culture and government, border line and climate, religion and economic system, are each an influence, and, together, they shape the people in face and habit till they walk the earth with a new stride and look out on the world with different eyes from those of any people elsewhere. But the supreme thing about a nation is that it happened. A certain group of people developed affinities and aspirations, cohered and became an organism, fought its way to independence, and remembered the blood it had spilled. That tradition of common experience and sacrifice in victory and defeat is the cord that binds the generations. It is a spiritual ancestry that colors every thought and governs every action. An English historian, Professor Ramsay Muir, has stated this aptly. He writes:

"The most potent of all nation-molding factors, the one indispensable factor which must be present whatever else be lacking, is the possession of a common tradition, a memory of sufferings endured and victories won in common, expressed in song and legend, in the dear names of great personalities that seem to embody in themselves the character and ideals of the nation, in the names also of sacred places wherein the national memory is enshrined."

Gilbert K. Chesterton said to me:

"Certain people like the arrangements under which they live. They prefer to die rather than to let other people come in and change things. Even if their nation decides on a policy that is suicidal, they would rather die with her than live without her. That is nationality. When the call came, the citizens of the nations answered with what was deep in their subconsciousness. All resolutions to act as 'workers,' as members of an 'International,' fell away. If pacifists of the ruling class, like Miss Hobhouse and Bertrand Russell, would analyze what is really in their mind, they would find that what they dislike is the spectacle of democracy enthusiastically and unanimously agreeing to do something. They distrust democracy on the march. It is their artistocratic sense that disapproves. Just now, it is the Kaiser whom the democracies are marching out to find, and the people are not behaving as the pacifists would like to have them."

This idea of nationalism, instead of being an early and now obsolete idea, is a recent and a noble idea. What the common life of the home is to the father and mother and children, through poverty and childbirth and fame, that is the life of a nation to its citizens. In the blood of sacrifice it is welded together. Mixed races cannot dilute it, a doctored border cannot suppress it, a stern climate cannot quench it, an oppressive government cannot enslave it. Only one thing can destroy it and that is when it annuls its past and weakens at the heart. When it ceases to respond to the great ideas that once aroused it, then it is time for those who love it to look to the influences at work that have made it forgetful. The denial of that common experience, the refusal to inherit the great tradition, the unwillingness to continue the noble and costly policy—these mark the decline of a nation. These are the signs of peril we see in the unwieldy life of our immense democracy to-day. The call that came to us from France was the same voice that we once knew as the voice of our most precious friend. By our failure to respond we show that we have allowed something alien to enter our inmost life. In our equal failure to safeguard our own helpless non-combatants, we reveal that the old compulsions no longer move us. By the cry that went up from half our nation—not of outrage at stricken France, not of anger for slaughtered children of our own race—but that strange mystical cry, "He kept us out of war," we betray that we have lost our hardihood. We have been overwhelmed by numbers. We have suffered such a heaping up of new elements that we have no time to teach our tradition, no will to continue our race experience.

I was talking of this recently with a profound student of race psychology, Havelock Ellis. He said that the determining factor is the strength of the civilization receiving the fresh contributions. Is that civilization potent enough to shape the new contributions? The French have always had their boundaries beaten in upon by other races, but so distinctive, so salient, is their civilization that it absorbs the invasion. He said that the question to decide is whether the cells are sufficiently organized and determinate to receive alien matter.

Surely no student of our social conditions can say that our tendencies are clear, our collective will formed, our national mind unified. We keep adding chemical elements without coming to a solution. England accepted a few invasions and conquests and then had to stiffen up and work the material into a mold. France was overrun every half century, but finally she drew the sacred circle around her borders, and proceeded to the work of coalescing her parts. Our present stream of tendency, and our present grip on our own historic tradition, are not strong enough to admit of immense new European contributions. We are losing the sense of what we mean as a people.

In dealing with any pet assumption of modern thought, one must guard against misunderstanding. The opponent calls one reactionary and then one's day in court is over. Or the opponent pushes a plain statement over into an academic discussion, and the whole matter at issue is befogged. I am not attacking the desirability of a true internationalism. I am saying that our conception of it is all wrong, and that our method of attaining it is futile. The greater day of peace between nations will not come by weakening the ties of nationality. It will come through a deepening of the sense of citizenship in each nation. But much of our recent thinking has tended to weaken the claims of nationality. It is against this that we must set ourselves. We want internationalism, but the internationalism we mean is an understanding and a good will between distinct nations, not an internationalism which is the loss of a rich variety, and the blurring of distinctions. Nations will not disappear. They will heighten their individuality under the process of time. The hope of peace lies in the appreciation of those differences. We are not to reach internationalism by ceasing to become nations, as our present-day theorists advocate. There lies the service of the war. It has taught us that the Frenchman and the German will refuse to merge their ideas about life and duty in a denationalized world league. Each wants his plot of ground, his own patch of sky, his own kind of a world, with those men for neighbors who think as he thinks. The Frenchman does not wish to be speeded up by universal vocational training, and a governmental rÉgime where efficiency and organization are the aims of the corporate life. The German does not wish his world to contain waste and laziness and dilettantism. A hundred years ago the world put up a sign in front of encroaching France: "No trespassing on these premises." To-day the grass of France is red where the marauder crossed the line. I have seen the soul of France at tension for two years, and I know that her agony has deepened her sense of nationality.

It is easy to retort that it is the nationalism of Germany that has spread fire and blood across Europe. But it is easier yet to give the final answer. There are diseases of individuality—the "artistic temperament," egoism, freakishness, criminality—which require chastening. But because certain individuals have to be restrained, we do not crush individual liberty, self-expression and the free play of development. There are diseases of nationalism—the lust for power and territory, the desire to impose the will, the language and the customs, on smaller units. When a nation hands over its foreign policy and its personal morality to the state, which is only the machinery of a nation, and when the machine, operated by a little group of imperialists instead of by the collective will of the nation, turns to organized aggression, there is catastrophe. Prussian history from the vivisection of Poland, through the rape of Schleswig and the crushing of Paris, to the assassination of Belgium, offers us no guarantees of a common aim for human welfare. But it is because nationality has been betrayed, not because it has been expressed. The Uhlan officer, murdering women, is no reason for abolishing Habeas Corpus. The misbehavior of Germany is no excuse for rebuking the liberty of France.

At the touch of the bayonet, on the first shock of reality, internationalism crumbles—the internationalism, I mean, that disbelieves in national quality, and disregards essential differences. Groups of "workers," the "universal" church of co-religionists, dissolve. The nation emerges. Wars have been the terrible method by which nations have created themselves, and by which they have defended their being. Pacifism is not a disease, it is the symptom of the disease of a false internationalism. Pacifism springs from the belief that nations do not matter, that "humanity is the great idea." "Why should nations go to war, since the principle of nationality is not vital?" But, actually, this principle is vital. "An effective internationalism can only be rendered possible by a triumphant nationalism." The present war is a fight by the little nations of Belgium and Serbia, and by the great nation, France, for the preservation of their nationality. We have failed to understand "the causes and objects" of this war, because we have weakened our own sense of nationality. Our tradition has been drowned out by new voices. Ninety years ago, we responded to Greece, and, later, to Garibaldi and Kossuth. To-day, only those understand the fight of the nations who have been reared in our American tradition. Richard Neville Hall went from Dartmouth College and died on an Alsatian Hill, serving France. A friend writes of him: "He was saying things about the France of Washington and Lafayette, how he had been brought up on the tradition of that historic friendship."

I have found something inspiring in the action of these young Americans in France. Perhaps out of them will come the leadership which our country lacks. My own generation moves on to middle life, and, as is the way of elders, reveals moderation of mind and a good-natured acceptance of conditions. Nothing is to be hoped for from us. The great generation of Walt Whitman and Julia Ward Howe is dead, and the next generation of George Haven Putnam and Eliot and O. O. Howard is dying. There is nowhere to turn but to the young. They must strive where we have failed. They must fight where we were neutral. I have seen some hundreds of these youth who love France because they love America. In them our tradition is continued. Through them the American idea can be reaffirmed for all our people. May they remember their dead, their boy-comrades who fell in service at the front. They have shared in the greatness of France. May they come home to us very sure of their possession. We have nothing for them. Complacent in our neutrality, and fat with our profits, we have lost our chance. They bring us moral leadership.

Now, all this will have no appeal to the many nationalities among us. The American tradition (except for a few personalities and ideas) is meaningless to them. I have dealt with their needs in the preceding chapter. I am writing these next chapters for the inheritors of our American tradition, who have grown slack and cosmopolitan, who, though of the blood-strain and cultural consciousness that fought our wars and created our civilization, are now too tired, some of them, to do anything but exploit the other nationalities which have tumbled in on the later waves of immigration. Others of us are simply swamped by the multitude and find our refuge in cosmopolitanism. "They're all alike. They will all be Americans to-morrow." If these tame descendants of America will be true to their own tradition, they will learn to be merciful to their fellow-countrymen with quite other traditions. It is precisely because we "old-timers" have been forgetting our tradition that we have been blind to the rich inherited life of those that come to us. If we recover our own sense of spiritual values, we shall welcome the tradition and the hope which the humblest Jew has brought us.

IV

COSMOPOLITANISM

Cosmopolitanism is the attempt to deny the instinct of nationality. It works in three ways with us. It seeks to impose an English culture on our mixed races; it seeks to create an American type at one stroke; it preaches an undiscriminating indeterminate merging of national cultures into a new blend, "the human race," which will be composed of individuals pretty much alike, with the same aspirations. The differences of inheritance will be thrown away like the bundle from the pilgrim's back. Modern thought is permeated with this "new religion of humanity," which is going to accomplish what the Roman Empire and the Spanish Inquisition failed to do: unify the infinite variety of human nature.

One of its analysts says that "internally it is productive of many evil vapors which issue from the lips in the form of catchwords." He traces it to ill-assimilated education, and sees its final stage when "the victim, hating his teachers and ashamed of his parentage and nationality, is intensely miserable." He is the man without roots, who has lost his contacts with the ideas, the ethic, the customs, the affectionate attachments, out of which social life develops.

For the last fifty years certain Germans have preached a boundless cosmopolitanism, while the German people have practiced an intense ingrowing racialism. It is, of course, true that these men who preached it were themselves rebels against the German system. Karl Marx, Lasselle, Engels, helped to found an international movement in protest against the form of nationality within which they lived. But the direction and violence of their rebound were governed by the hard surface from which they recoiled. The personality of these men and the tonic value of their thought have been of inestimable benefit to our age. In their main position they were much nearer the truth than their opponents. But the precise point I am dealing with is their theory of cosmopolitanism. And here a grievous personal experience in a cramping environment misled these early radicals, and they incorporated in their program the anti-national item which did not belong. Because their analysis of conditions was in the main so searching, so just, their thought has continued to exercise a profound influence, and the animating ideas in their philosophy of history and in their analysis of industrialism were imported to England and to America. The stern and unbending leaders of socialist thought have reproduced their masters' voice with an almost unchanged accent. A few great Russians contributed to the same theory of cosmopolitanism, and have powerfully affected groups of modern thinkers. I doubt if any single idea has traveled further and more swiftly than this idea that the sense of nationality is a mistaken thing, and that a something wider and vaguer is the goal of the future. The Latin races have sometimes thought they believed it, but they quickly corrected their thinking under the impact of event.

Our present school of softened, daintily stepping radicals have whittled away some of the original doctrine of the class war. The materialistic theory of history, surplus value and the proletarian division have had to yield in part to the facts of the case. But the modern reformers cling to that creation of German and Russian thought, a cosmopolitan world, the merging of races and nations into a universal undifferentiated brotherhood with gradually disappearing boundaries. We find it in our intelligent skilled social workers. I mention them in no unfriendliness, but because I believe that they and their group are a noble influence in our country, and because their blindness and failure in this crisis are a grief to me and to thousands of other persons who have looked to them for leadership. We find this idea of cosmopolitanism in the modern essayists, who are read in America, like Lowes Dickinson, Bertrand Russell, and Bernard Shaw. This doctrine has misled our social workers, our socialists, our radicals in social reform, our feminists—almost every element in our social movement. Our American radicalism is permeated with a vague cosmopolitanism, and its child, pacifism. At no point has "modern" thought exercised a profounder effect than on our social movement.

We need the check here of the Latin mentality. The clear Latin mind refuses to be misled by idealistic phrases, whose meaning does not permit of analysis into concrete terms. The French and Italians have recognized that the contribution of nationality is vital to the future. Their conception of social change is healthier than ours. It is Mazzini and not Karl Marx who was the prophet of a sane evolution. Mazzini says:

"Every people has its special mission, which will co-operate towards the fulfillment of the general mission of Humanity. That mission constitutes its nationality. Nationality is sacred.

"In laboring, according to true principles, for our country we are laboring for humanity. Our country is the fulcrum of the lever which we have to wield for the common good. If we give up this fulcrum, we run the risk of becoming useless both to our country and to humanity.

"Do not be led away by the idea of improving your material conditions without first solving the national question. You cannot do it.

"Country is not a mere zone of territory. The true country is the idea to which it gives birth." It is "A common principle, recognized, accepted, and developed by all."

His thought is clear and consistent. How shall a man serve all humanity whom he has not seen, if he does not serve his nation whom he has seen? "The individual is too insignificant, and humanity too vast." The stuff of nationality is the sacrifice rendered by the people to realize their aspirations—"By the memory of our former greatness, by the sufferings of the millions." The limits of nationality will tend toward natural boundaries—the division of

"humanity into distinct groups or nuclei upon the face of the earth, thus creating the germ of nationalities. Evil governments have disfigured the divine design. Nevertheless you may still trace it, distinctly marked out—as least as far as Europe is concerned—by the course of the great rivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and other geographical conditions. They (the Governments) have disfigured it so far that, if we except England and France, there is not perhaps a single country whose present boundaries correspond to that design. Natural divisions, and the spontaneous, innate tendencies of the peoples, will take the place of the arbitrary divisions sanctioned by evil governments. The map of Europe will be redrawn.

"Then may each one of you, fortified by the power and the affection of many millions, all speaking the same language, gifted with the same tendencies, and educated by the same historical tradition, hope, even by your own single effort, to be able to benefit all Humanity. O my brothers, love your Country! Our Country is our Home, the house that God has given us, placing therein a numerous family that loves us, and whom we love; a family with whom we sympathize more readily, and whom we understand more quickly than we do others; and which, from its being centered round a given spot, and from the homogeneous nature of its elements, is adapted to a special branch of activity."

The method of strengthening the sense of nationality is by education. "Every citizen should receive in the national schools a moral education, a course of nationality—comprising a summary view of the progress of humanity and of the history of his own country; a popular exposition of the principles directing the legislation of that country."

That Mazzini's ideas are a living force to-day is proved by the response of the nations in this war. In the seaside town of Hove, Sussex, where I live, his book, developing these ideas, was drawn out from the public library thirty-eight times in the last four years.

There is a danger here of over-stressing nationality and inviting a return to the anarchy of war, and this is the difficulty one has in pointing out the psychologic unsoundness of Cosmopolitanism. The limitations of the Mazzini theory have been convincingly drawn by Graham Wallas.

"Nationalism, as interpreted either by Bismarck ("We must not swallow more than we can digest") or by Mazzini, played a great and invaluable part in the development of the political consciousness of Europe during the nineteenth century. But it is becoming less and less possible to accept it as a solution for the problems of the twentieth century."

Wallas shows that Mazzini enormously exaggerated the simplicity of the question. National types are not divided into homogeneous units "by the course of the great rivers and the direction of the high mountains," but are intermingled from village to village. Do the Balkan mountains represent the purposes of God in Macedonia? And for which nationality, Greek or Bulgar? The remedy, as Wallas sees it, for recurring war between nations is an international science of eugenics which might "indicate that the various races should aim, not at exterminating each other, but at encouraging the improvement by each of its own racial type." In this way the emotion of political solidarity can be slowly made possible between individuals of consciously different national types. A political emotion, if it is to do away with war, cannot be created by thwarting the instinct of nationality. It must be based, "not upon a belief in the likeness of individual human beings, but upon the recognition of their unlikeness." We in America have tried to deny the facts of psychology by calling all our newcomers Americans. We have sought to escape our problem by shutting our eyes to the infinite dissimilarity of the individuals in our population. The only direction for hope to travel is that the improvement of the whole species will come rather from "a conscious world-purpose based upon a recognition of the value of racial as well as individual variety than from mere fighting." This is the true internationalism, and it differs as widely from a cosmopolitan blur which "makes" Americans as from the bitter enforced nationality of blood and iron, or spiritual imperial arrogance.

I have found a perfectly clear statement of what lies loosely in the mind of modern Americans of mixed race and intense pre-occupation with the game of getting on. I have found it in the editorial columns of a Middle Western paper. The Cedar Rapids Gazette says:

EXTINCT AMERICANS

"The authorities who fear that the American race will 'die out' may not have noticed that all the ingredients of that race are still being born in Europe at about the usual rate. And, at the worst, if one American race dies out there will be another race as good or better in America to take its place.

"Several American races have already died to the extent that the members are no longer to be separately identified and their distinctive ideas no longer exert influence on the county. Among the vanished races are the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the Cavaliers, the Huguenots, the Acadian voyagers, the Knickerbockers, the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Dutch, the pioneer forest tribes of Kentucky, Ohio and southern Indiana, the picturesque Yankee, the southeastern Cracker, the typical Plainsman and Cowboy, each of whom in his time and place was the representative of a small and distinct nationality.

"The Americans of two generations are unlike. To use an Irish epigram, change is the only established characteristic of the American. The American in whose veins flows the blood of half a dozen European races, whose grandparents may have been born in four states, his parents in two states; whose wife may have been born in a state other than his own and whose four children may be married to men and women of four nationalities, is not worrying greatly regarding the exact composition of the 'American race.' Individually he has on hand a rather complete stock of the ingredients and is satisfied with the idea that he is doing his best to help establish a representative order of humanity.

"There is no need to worry about the passing of a race. The world and humanity are the big ideas. The race that deserves to die will pass. The race that fights for its existence, whose members have pride in their kind, will live. A race is recruited only through the cradle. A race that disregards its young is doomed. But mankind will not be less numerous and that which is of value will survive. Not only the end of the race, but the end of the world is in sight for those who leave no children to perpetuate their bodies and their minds."

The trouble with that is that it is devoid of self-respect. It gives no foundation for ethics. It gives no sanction for religion. It gives no soil and roots for literature. It treats the life of man as if it were grass to flourish and perish. It treats men as mechanical units in a political and industrial system. They go to their lathe in the factory, attend a motion-picture show in the evening, and so on for a few years to dissolution. It is pessimistic with a dark annihilating quality. And it is a habit of mind that is growing among us. It is the inevitable reflex of our bright surface optimism, which drowns thought in speed and change, and believes that activity under scientific direction can satisfy the human spirit.

Actually the stock we came of matters very much—for ourselves. Being dead, it yet lives, and we are the channel of its ongoing. Only by using the inheritance that comes to us can we lead the life of the mind in art and ethics and religion. "Huckleberry Finn," "The Virginian," "Still Jim," "The Valley of the Moon," and "Ethan Frome," possess a permanence of appeal precisely because they are rooted in the sense of nationality, and are a natural growth out of a tradition. Each story describes a vanishing race, and deals with a locality assailed by change. Each is a momentary arrest in time of an ebbing tide. Each has the unconscious pathos of a last stand. But not one of these books would have carried beyond the day of its appearance if it had dealt with a life-history removed from its long inheritance. It is only so that the nations among us will in time produce their literature. It will not be by surface types of "rapid" Americans. It will rather be by rendering the individual (whether Jew or Bohemian) in all the loneliness of crowds and modern cities, and revealing the thoughts and "notions" and desires that have come down to him from his very ancient past, and his little ripple of activity in the endless stream of descent. Montague Glass and Joseph Hergesheimer and Fannie Hurst are aware of this necessity of relating their art to the instinctive life of their character, and so under the brightest crackle of their American smartness something goes echoing back to a day that is older than the Coney Island and Broadway and Atlantic City of their setting. Joseph Stella in his drawings has shown perception of this by anchoring his type in its inherited life, and his steel workers are better than many reports of Mr. Gary on how it is with America at the Pittsburgh blast furnaces.

But not only is the sense of nationality needed for the finer activities of the mind. There is need of it in "practical" politics. It is discouraging that our American social movement has been captured by cosmopolitanism. For the immediate future lies with radical changes in the world of environment. Living conditions are going to be improved. A greater measure of equality will be achieved in our own time. But how is the social change inside the country to be related to other States? What shall be our foreign policy? This is where the cosmopolitanism of our radical group is a poor guide for action. It is the vice of liberals that they don't harness their ideas to facts. The result is that at time of crisis the power slips over in the hands of Tory reactionaries. We have seen a recent instance in England, where the liberals shirked the war during the premonitory years. As the result, the good old stand-pat crowd of Tories came in with a rush, simply because on foreign policy they had a program which at least dealt with the facts of the case.

Until liberals are willing to think through on foreign policy, studying European and world history, defining the meaning of the State and visualizing its relationship to other States, we shall have a skimmed-milk pacifism as their largest contribution to the problems of nation-States, submerged nationalities, backward races, exploitable territory and international straits, canals and ports of call. That is unfortunate. For, unless the liberal mind is brought to bear on foreign policy, we shall continue to have that policy manipulated by little groups of expert imperialists. These inner cliques present a program of action based on fact-study, which wins public opinion, because the instinct of the people trusts men who know what they want more than it trusts a bland benevolence without direction of aim.

Our social workers and other liberals would not think of advocating a policy of "Christianizing" the employer as the sole remedy for social maladjustment. But this is precisely the sort of thing they advocate in inter-State relationship. They seek to work by spiritual conversion, turning the hearts of the rulers to righteousness and softening the mood of the bellicose mass-people. And the chaos of the outer world will continue to pour into our tight little domestic compartments of nicely-adjusted social relationships.

In a word, foreign policy and domestic policy are of one piece, and the same realism must be applied to questions like the neutrality of Belgium and the internationalization of Constantinople which we apply to wage-scales. Until men of liberal tendency are willing to devote the same hard study to the map which they put on social reform and internal development, the world will continue to turn to its only experts on foreign policy, who unfortunately are largely imperialists.

V

THE HYPHENATES

A famous American president once said to a distinguished ambassador:

"We make them into Americans. They come in immigrants of all nationalities, but they rapidly turn into Americans and make one nation."

And the ambassador thought within himself and later said to me:

"But a nation is a people with a long experience, who have lived and suffered together. There is a bell in a great church, which if you lightly flick it with the fingernail, gives out one single tone which goes echoing through the Cathedral. If you stand at the far end, you can hear that tone. So it is with a nation. If it is struck, it responds as one man to its furthest border. At the stroke of crisis it answers with one tone."

No. We are not a nation. We are a bundle of nationalities, and some day we shall be a Commonwealth if we deal wisely with these nations who dwell among us.

We cannot "make" Americans. We can make "imitation Americans," as Alfred Zimmern calls them. The Jew, spiritually sensitive and intellectually acute, becomes an "amateur Gentile." The imaginative Calabrian, of rich social impulse, becomes a flashily dressed Padrone. The poetic, religious Irishman, whose instinct has been communal for many centuries, becomes a district leader. These individuals have come to us with rare and charming gifts, fruit of their nationality. Instead of frankly accepting them in their inheritance, we have applied a hasty conversion which denied their life of inherited impulses and desires. Instead of bringing out the good in them, we have Americanized them into commercial types.

Where does our future lie?

It lies in developing and making use of men like the great Jews, Abram Jacobi, Charles Proteus Steinmetz and Louis Brandeis, who are true to their own nature, and who respond to the American environment. These men are not amateur Gentiles. They are Jews and they are Americans. It lies in Italians like Dr. Stella, who love those elements in Italy which are liberal, and who further every effort in America to create free institutions. We need the help of every man of them to save our country from commercialism.

Recently I asked one of the most brilliant of living scholars, of German descent, to give me his views on the future in America. He wrote:

"What is America to do? I should answer: preach hyphenation. Make the common man realize that nationality is a spiritual force which has in essence as little to do with government as religion has. When government interferes with freedom of worship, religion comes into politics and stays there till its course is unimpeded. The same is true of nationality—in Ireland, in East Europe and elsewhere. But that is only an accident. To allow governments to exploit for political ends the huge inarticulate emotional driving force of either religion or nationality is to open the floodgates. Hence the wars of religion in the Seventeenth Century and the nationalist hatreds of the present war."

Alfred Zimmern says:

"It seems strange that there should be Americans who still hold firmly to the old-fashioned view of what I can only call instantaneous conversion, of the desirability and possibility of the immigrant shedding his whole ancestral inheritance and flinging himself into the melting-pot of transatlantic life to emerge into a clean white American soul of the brand approved by the Pilgrim Fathers. Now the only way to teach immigrants how to become good Americans, that is to say, how to be good in America, is by appealing to that in them which made them good in Croatia, or Bohemia, or Poland, or wherever they came from. And by far the best and the most useful leverage for this purpose is the appeal to nationality: because nationality is more than a creed or a doctrine or a code of conduct, it is an instinctive attachment."

The road to sound Internationalism, to an understanding between States, lies "through Nationalism, not through leveling men down to a gray, indistinctive Cosmopolitanism but by appealing to the best elements in the corporate inheritance of each nation." True democracy wishes to use the best that is in men in all their infinite diversity, not to melt away their difference into one economic man. The American passion for uniformity, for creating a "snappy," efficient, undifferentiated type, is merely the local and recent form of the rigid aristocratic desire to "Christianize" the Jew, to Anglicize Ireland, to modernize the Hindu. It is the wish to make man in our own image. It is the last bad relic of the missionary zeal which conducted the Inquisition. It is only subtler and more dangerous, because persecution called out hidden powers of resistance, but triumphant Commercialism, as engineered by our industrial oligarchy, calls out imitation.

I have a collection of photographs made at Ellis Island by Julian Dimock. They are subjects chosen almost at random from the stream of newcomers on the morning of ship-arrival. There is often something very touching in the expression of these faces: a trust in the goodness of life, in the goodness of human nature. Man and woman and youth, they seem to carry something that has been won by long generations of rooted life and passed on to them for safe-keeping. And suddenly at the landing in the new world the tradition is touched to a dream of hope. But that light never lasts for long. Watch those same newcomers as they are disgorged from our city factories. How soon the light goes out of their faces, the inhabiting spirit withdrawn to its own inaccessible home. Something brisk and natty and pert replaces that unconscious dignity. Something tired from unceasing surface stimulus takes possession of what was fresh and innocent in open peasant life and the friendly intercourse of neighbors.

These races, in their weakness and poverty, have been unable to swing back to their own deep center of consciousness. Unaided, it is doubtful if they will ever raise their buried life from its sleep. The Jewish nation is the only dispersion among us which has gathered its will and recovered its self-consciousness enough to give us any promising movement. They are slowly recognizing what is being done to their young. They begin to see that their nation is losing its one priceless jewel, the possession of spiritual insight. In the movement which is spreading through the day schools for teaching young Jews the great ethical tradition of their people, in their educational alliances, in the Menorah Association, in the Zionist Movement, in the writings of Brandeis, Kallen and Bourne, they are showing the first glimmerings of statesmanship and making the first application of intelligence to our commercialized cosmopolitan materialistic country which we have had since we passed on from "Anglo-Saxon" Protestant civilization. May their grip on their nationality never grow less. May the clear program which they have constructed against the drift and rush of our careless life seize the imagination of Italian and Serb and Bohemian. So and no otherwise, we shall at last have a spiritual basis for our civilization.

Frank acceptance of the fact of dual nationality leads to such clear statement as Randolph Bourne has given us in The Menorah Journal for December, 1916. He shows the fallacy of the "melting pot" idea, which attempts to knead the whole population into an undefined colorless mass, labeled American. In place of that undesirable and absurd consummation, he offers a coÖperation of cultures. "America has become a vast reservoir of dispersions," and CoÖperative Americanism will meet "the demands of the foreign immigrÉ who wishes freedom to preserve his heritage at the same time that he coÖperates loyally with all other nationals in the building up of America."

What is CoÖperative Americanism? Mr. Bourne answers that it is "an ideal of a freely mingling society of peoples of very different racial and cultural antecedents, with a common political allegiance and common social ends, but with free and distinctive cultural allegiances which may be placed anywhere in the world that they like. If the Jews have been the first international race, I look to America to be the first international nation."

Now, there is no unpopularity to-day in lauding a Jew or a Greek or an Irishman. May I go a step further, and say that the same freedom to express the tradition within them must be extended to the Americans of the old stock, even those who hold a grateful love for France (some of them recently have died for that), even those who love England for her long struggle for political liberty. I cannot feel that Agnes Repplier, Lyman Abbott, George Haven Putnam and the American Rights League are deserving of a certain fine intellectual scorn which Randolph Bourne and Max Eastman have applied to them. The American Rights League is entitled to the same open field and the same respect which the Menorah Society should receive. Why does Mr. Bourne applaud the one and lash the other? I trust he will welcome both. What I think Bourne, James Oppenheim, Walter Lippmann and Max Eastman have failed to see is that the old American stock (of diverse race but common tradition) had a right to respond vigorously to this war, where their inheritance of social, legal and political ideas were battling with hostile ideas. Somewhere, at some point, the new American tradition must plant itself. In some issue it must take root. We of the old stock sought to make this war the issue. We failed. All right. It is now your turn. In the open arena of discussion the ideas of all of us must collide into harmony. I can make clear the difficulty one has in reaffirming the old American idea by quoting from the letter of an American editor in response to what the chapters of this book are stating:

"It seems so curiously out of focus in its estimation of the Old, the vanishing, America. Do you really believe that Old America should be raised from the dead:—The America of convenient transcendentalism where religion allowed a whole race to devote its body and spirit to material aggrandizement? If you blame America for Christian Science optimism, you must remember that Emerson and Whitman were our teachers. If you blame America for not taking part in the European war, you must remember that Washington told us to keep out of 'entangling alliances.' It is historic America that was grossly material, out of which our vast industrialism sprang with its importation of cheap labor. But the Garden of Eden always lies behind us, and nothing is commoner than finding Paradise in the past."

What I have tried to say is that the tradition of a nation is not a dead thing, locked in the past. It is a living thing, operating on the present. A tradition is a shared experience, governing present life. The State needs to cohere and find itself and establish a cultural consciousness, blended from manifold contributions. It is destructive to have new swirling elements ceaselessly driving through the mass. So I have protested against the too ready and ruthless discarding of the cultural consciousness bequeathed us by the older American stock. While the ideas imbedded in that consciousness will never again be in sole command, I believe that they should be more potent than they are to-day. I believe that politically they have a living value for us, and that we persistently underestimate the English contribution to freedom and justice. I deny that my desire that these ideas shall prevail is an attempt to locate the Garden of Eden and Paradise in the smoky past. It is, instead, the wish to see our country appropriate a particular political contribution from the English stock, exactly as it needs to appropriate certain social values from the Italians and the Greeks, and many very definite spiritual ideas from the culture of the Jews.

What is the solution of these diverse elements? What blend can we obtain from a score of mixtures? How fashion a civilization that shall absorb and assimilate those blood-strains and traditional beliefs? I think the one clear answer lies in the creation of free institutions, which shall answer a common need, and which shall violate the instinctive life and traditions of none. Those free institutions will be the product of education, legislation, CoÖperation, Trades Unionism and Syndicalism, municipal and State ownership, and widely spread private ownership and enterprise. The organized State under democratic control will be the thing aimed at. But these free institutions must gradually extend over areas far wider than vocational training and economic well-being. They should seek to offer free expression to the fully-functioning mind in art, science, ethics and religion. In this way they will give a good life. We have the shadowy beginnings of such institutions in the public school and library. But we have nothing like the Danish or English coÖperative movement. Our institution of property affords us nothing like true peasant proprietorship of Ireland.

No apter illustration of how little we have tackled our job can be found than in American Socialism. There is no American Socialism. Orthodox socialism in America is dead doctrine, brought across by German and Russian revolutionaries, reacting on their peculiar environment, and then exhumed in a new country. Meanwhile a great vital movement toward democratic control goes on in Europe, in Trades Unionism, CoÖperation and municipal and State ownership. Our socialist locals repeat formulÆ which Shaw, the Webbs, Rowntree, Wallas, Kautsky, Vandervelde and HervÉ outgrew a generation ago. It is here I hold that the old American stock can do a service in interpreting American conditions to our recent arrivals.

But if we continue to leave the door open we shall continue to be swamped, and we shall employ our little hasty ready-made devices for turning peasants with a thousand years of inherited characteristics into citizens. We shatter them against our environment, and then are astonished that their thwarted instincts, trained to another world, revenge themselves in political corruption, abnormal vices, and murderous "gunman" activities. Psychologists like Ross warn us in vain.

These overlapping hordes of "aliens" destroy the economic basis on which alone free institutions can be reared. People, to whom we cannot afford to pay a living wage, or for whom we do not care to arrange a living wage, will not help us in creating free institutions. Instead, they are manipulated by the industrial oligarchy into a force for breaking down the standard of living of all workers. A resolute restriction of immigration is not a discrimination against any race. It is the first step toward unlocking the capacities of the races already among us. The reason for stopping immigration, then, is economic. It rests in the fact that our wage-scale and standard of living are being shot to pieces by the newcomers. As the result our existent institutions are not developing in liberal directions, and we are failing to create new free institutions. It requires a somewhat stable population, and a fairly uniform economic basis to create a CoÖperative movement, like that in Ireland, or a Trade Union movement, like that in Australia.

Slowly the new order is coming, the day of the Commonwealth of nationalities, where men from many lands, drawing their spiritual reserves from the home that nourished their line through the long generations, will yet render loyal citizenship to the new State which harbors them and gives them a good life. The task of America is to create that Commonwealth, that entity which men gladly serve, and for which at need they willingly die. Our politics have not yet held that appeal. Not yet can an American of these recent years stand off from the stream of his experience, saying, "What does it mean that I am an American?" and answer it in the high terms which a Frenchman can use. Fifty years ago the American could answer in fairly definite terms. But does our recent history mean much to Czech or Russian Jew or Calabrian who has settled among us? It does not. The stirring of their blood responds to another history than ours. Shall we take away their tradition from them? We cannot if we would. What we can do with their help is to create free institutions which will win them to a new allegiance, and this will slowly root itself in the fiber of their line.

For a few generations they will continue at time of stress to hear the call of their old home, as a bird in the autumn takes the call of the South. The Serb will return to his mountains when the battle-line is drawn, as he returned five years ago. The German will go back to his barracks when Russia begins to spread toward the West. And over those that do not go back a great restlessness will come, and they will torment themselves, like a caged bird in the month of flight. But with each generation the call will grow fainter, till finally the old tradition is subdued and the citizen is domesticated. In this way only can the new allegiance and instinctive sense of nationality be created, growing very gradually out of free institutions.

Out of free institutions in State, property, religion and marriage, ever-developing to fit a developing people; out of the unfolding process of law, escaping from legalism and applying psychology to human relationship; out of an education, sanctioned by human interest, and devoted not only to vocational training but to the sense of beauty and wonder; out of vast movements of the mass-people toward democratic control; there will some day grow the new American tradition, which in the fullness of time will take possession of the heart of these diverse races and clashing nationalities. It will not root itself and grow in the years of "naturalization," nor yet in one or two generations. But in a hundred or two hundred years it will coalesce infinitely repellant particles and gently conquer antagonisms, and in that day, which not even our children's children will see, there will at last emerge the American Commonwealth.

VI

THE REMEDY

I have made out the best case I can for our people. These chapters have listed every excuse that can reasonably be given for our failure to declare ourselves on the moral issue of this war. They have said that a careless, busy folk, like those of the Middle West, need many facts to enable them to see where the truth lies. They have pointed out how short-sighted is the foreign policy of the Allies which gives few facts to the American public. They have shown how the best of our radicals have failed to think clearly because they have been befuddled by a vague pseudo-internationalism. I have stated what I believe to be the falsity in our present-day conception of Europe, the self-complacency in our monopoly of freedom and justice; and I have tried to reveal how that assumption of merit blinded our eyes to the struggles of other peoples for the same causes. I have blamed our failure on Germany and on England. But after every explanation has been made, it is still true that our people ought to have been sensitive. At a great moment of history we failed of greatness. There remains a shame to us that we held aloof. There was no organized campaign of facts needed to convince France that we were fighting for human rights in our Revolution. Three thousand miles of water did not drown the appeal of our extremity. But to-day our leaders are so bewildered by dreams of universal brotherhood that they overlook our blood-brother on the Marne. Our common people have their eyes to their work, and do not look up, as the workers of Lancashire looked up with cheer and sympathy when we rocked in the balance of 1863.

This war has shown to us that we are not at the level of earlier days. We have lost our national unity, our sense of direction. The war has revealed in us an unpreparedness in foreign and domestic policy. It is a curse to know one's weakness unless one cures it. So this war will not leave us blessed until we take a program of action. It is a waste of time to write a book on the war except to convince and move to action.

The steps are clear.

Our first step is to set our house in order. We need to recover our self-consciousness, to restate what we mean by America. A half million newcomers each year will not help us to find ourselves. We shall be the better friends of freedom if we digest our present welter. Let us fearlessly and at once advocate a stringent restriction of immigration. Our citizenship has become somewhat cheap. Our ideals have become somewhat mixed. Let us take time to locate the direction in which we wish to go, and decide on the goal at which we aim. "Thou, Oh! my country, must forever endure," said a famous patriot; but in a few years his country had been melted down into an autocracy. We cannot rely for all time on luck and happy drift. Size, numbers, the physical economic conquest of a continent—these are not a final good. They are at best only means toward worthy living. It is easier to rush in fresh masses of cheap labor than it is to deal with the workers already here as members of a free community, aid them in winning a high standard of living, and establish with them an industrial democracy. The cheapest way of digging our ditches and working our factories, and sewing our shirts, is of course to continue holding open our flood gates and letting the deluge come. It is the clever policy of our exploiters, and the sentimental policy of the rest of us who love to be let alone, if only we can cover our unconcern with a humanitarian varnish. But the result of it is the America of to-day with its oligarchy of industrial captains and bankers, with its aristocracy of labor, made up of powerful trades unions and restricted "Brotherhoods," and with its unskilled alien masses of mine and factory labor, unorganized, exploited. Let us begin to build the better America by sacrificing the easy immediate benefits of unrestricted immigration.

Our second step is to teach our tradition to the hundred million already here. It is a large enough classroom. We can advertise for new pupils when our present group matriculates. When it has matriculated, there will be no popularity for phrases like "He kept us out of war," nor for songs of "I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier." The teaching of that tradition will reveal the interweaving of the American and the French Revolutions as products of a single impulse toward world liberation. If we had known our history, we should have answered the need of France, as Hall, Chapman, Thaw, Seeger, and many more answered it who have laid down their lives for their friend, France. The teaching of the American tradition will reveal to our awakened astonished minds that our policy has not been that of neutrality toward oppressed peoples like the Belgians. It will reveal that the British fleet has served us well from the time of Canning down to Manila Bay. It will stir in us loyalties that have long been asleep. It will show what a phrase like "Government for the people" has meant in terms of social legislation. It will point to the long road we must tread before we reach that ideal goal. We cannot leave the teaching of our tradition to the public schools alone. Courses of evening lectures for the people, the newspapers and periodicals, clergymen and economists and social workers, all must help.

Our third step is a deep understanding sympathy with the forces in the world making for righteousness. We should have been sensitive enough to see the right and the wrong of the present war. But that chance has gone by. Let us now make ready to contribute to the future. The fundamental question is this: Are the democracies of the world to stand together, or is the world-fight for freedom to be made, with our nation on the side-lines? The whole emphasis of the world's emotion has shifted from war to peace. When thought follows this emotion and rationalizes it, we can begin constructive work. The test of our desire for peace will be found in this: Do we mean business? Pacifism is valueless, because it is a vague emotion. Peace is a thing won by thought and effort. It is not alone a "state of mind." If we are willing to give guarantees by army and navy, and to back up protest by force, we can serve the cause of peace. But if we continue our "internationalism" of recent years, we shall not be admitted to any such effective league of peace as France and England will form. We must take our place by the side of the nations who mean to make freedom and justice prevail throughout the world.

Our fourth step will be that measure of preparedness which will render us effective in playing our part in world history. We cannot go on forever asking the English fleet to supply the missing members in our Monroe Doctrine. We cannot go on forever developing a rich ripeness, trusting that no hand will pluck us. In a competitive world, which builds Krupp guns, we cannot place our sole reliance in a good-nature which will be touched to friendliness because we are a special people. That preparedness will not stop with enriching munition makers, and playing into the hands of Eastern bankers. It will be a preparedness which enlists labor, by safeguarding wages and hours. It is the preparedness of an ever-encroaching equality: a democracy of free citizens, prosperous not in spots but in a wide commonalty, disciplined not only by national service of arms, but by the fundamental discipline of an active effective citizenship. It is a preparedness which will call on the women to share the burden of citizenship. It is a preparedness which mobilizes all the inner forces of a nation by clearing the ground for equality. It will be a preparedness not against an evil day, but for the furtherance of the great hopes of the race.

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