Our Part in the Great War

ident once said to a d

mmigrants of all nationalities, but they rap

ought within himself

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

lities, and some day we shall be a Commonwealth if

s 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. Ins

es our f

ond 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

living scholars, of German descent, to give me

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 exploi

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ing-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 the

ir 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.

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. Ho

at 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

knead the whole population into an undefined colorless mass, labeled American. In place of that undesirable and absurd consummation, he offers a co?peration of cultures. "America has become a vast reservoir of dispersion

ural antecedents, with a common political allegiance and common social ends, but with free and distinctive cultural allegiances which may be place

ectual 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, le

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 ou

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

institutions will be the product of education, legislation, Co?peration, 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

acting 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, Co?peration and municipal and State ownership. Our socialist local

thousand years of inherited characteristics into citizens. We shatter them against our environment, and then are astonished that their thwarted instincts, tr

king 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

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 histo

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 gen

ning 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 g