Those are the keys which unlock that magic casement. You can open it for yourself, anytime. The “Round Robin” window which I am opening in this letter, looks not into the past nor yet into the future, but into the present. It looks right into the hearts of American boys and girls of to-day.
From the East and the West and the North and the South of our United States they come. Two or three, in the story, have fathers who were foreign born, but most of them are of “American Stock,” as we say when we mean that our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers were the children of English colonists. We say it proudly, we whose ancestors fought the American Revolution, whose grandfathers saw the passing of slavery, whose brothers did their bit in the Great War. Proudly, because we believe that whatsoever of freedom, of democracy, of holiness there is in America to-day, was first planted and rooted here by our ancestors, those first English settlers.
Narrow-minded and narrow-hearted people who look with near-sighted spirits through the windows of the past and the windows of the future, bewail the fact that one hundred years from now, “American Stock” will no longer mean to American Schoolchildren, English inheritance. Because, dear Schoolmate, your children and your grandchildren will have married and intermarried with Americans of Latin and Teutonic and Slavic and other blood—with the American grandchildren of Italians, and French, and Germans, and Swedes, and Russians, and Syrians—and who knows how many other races? But these narrow-minded, narrow-hearted, unvisionary people forget that if our America is a free, a democratic, a holy place, one hundred years from now, the American Stock will still be rooted true in the old ideals. And it is by ideals that countries live and are judged.
To Americanize a person means to find out how much, or how little, he knows and cares about freedom and democracy and holiness, and then to help that much or little grow. And all this is done by making friends with the foreigners who come to us from other lands. Making friends with people, as you know very well, means understanding them, loving them, making allowance for them and remembering that they have to make allowance for us also. It means studying their ways, and especially their ways of achieving freedom, their ways of achieving democracy, their ways of achieving holiness—as well as expecting them to study and approve of our ways. Perhaps some of their ways are better than some of ours. If they are, then we shall certainly want to adopt those ways; if they are not, then we must do our American best to convince these immigrant friends that our ways are better. We mustn’t think that a way is bad just because it isn’t our way, and we mustn’t think a way is good just because it is our way.
So you see that Americanizing people means much more than teaching them English, and telling them about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and showing them how to use bathtubs and ballot boxes. It means making sure that they know what freedom means, and what democracy means (Do you know, dear Schoolmate?) and what holiness means; and that their hearts and souls are set toward making America a free, a democratic, a holy nation.
Look into the hearts of the children in this Round Robin, and you will find growing there the old ideals whose names I am repeating so often in this letter, freedom, democracy, holiness; you will find them in the hearts of the young Americans whose fathers were foreign born (I’ll wait and let Miss Abbie Farwell Brown tell you which those are), as well as in Beverly’s courteous little Southern heart, and Nancy’s staunch little New England heart, and Dick’s jolly little wholesome heart of the West. The children in the story would be astonished if they knew that I was saying these things about them. They are just “a bunch” of honest, happy boys and girls, off on a typical American holiday in a summer camp, learning to “get together.” But getting together is the A B C of freedom and democracy and holiness.
It is the A B C of holiness because holiness is “getting together” with God: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” And getting together with God means finding out God’s will and then doing it; working with Him; building up the nation with Him. And the way to get together with God is by prayer; and by looking back through the ages and following the working of His will in His world, as we see it in the Bible, and in all secular science, art, history, and literature; and then by more prayer. “Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven.” That is the prayer of the nation builder, who has “got together” with God. And every American is a nation builder.
It is the A B C of democracy because democracy is “getting together” with your fellow-men: “And thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Fellowship, brotherhood, equal opportunity, all these come from loving thy neighbor as thyself. Government of the people, by the people, for the people, must fail just so long as we fail to love our neighbor as ourself. Democracy means loving all the people all the time; not just one kind of people, the rich, or the poor, or the bankers, or the bakers, or the people who live in our street, but all the people, all the time. In a Democracy, every man is our neighbor.
It is the A B C of freedom, because freedom is “getting together” with the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you.” You can’t be free by yourself; not in America; not in the world. Even if you were a self-supporting hermit, or a Robinson Crusoe, you wouldn’t be free. Solitude isn’t freedom. You wouldn’t be free to marry, alone on a desert island. A man is free when he is at peace with himself. But no man is really at peace with himself so long as some other man is not at peace. God made us so. Even if we are self-righteous and think that we are not to blame for our neighbor’s unhappiness, we can’t be at peace while he is miserable before our eyes and in our ears; but to have to run away from misery isn’t freedom. What does this mean, dear Schoolmate? Why! it means that you and I can never be free until everyone is free. It means that freedom is a spiritual goal; but you don’t have to beat the other fellow to it; the game is to have everybody come up to time. And to have everybody come up to time, we must all play the game according to the rule; be good sports!
And now, you will tell me that these ideals are not merely American, they are the ideals for which every Christian nation ought to strive. That may be; but America has a special claim to them, for it was our English colonial ancestors who put them into political form for us, and breathed their spirit into this government of ours which we called a Republic. We think that freedom, democracy, and holiness have a better chance to grow in our Republic than in the earlier forms of government, such as monarchy. Republics, such as ours, may not be the last word in political freedom, and democracy, and holiness; there may be newer forms of government in which people may have a better chance to be holy, democratic, and free than they have in ours; all history shows how men and governments have grown and changed, down the ages; to grow is to change. But so long as we do think that our ideals have a better chance in a Republic than in anything else, we can keep our government a Republic; for it is we who choose what America shall be; it is we who cast the votes. That is what it means to be an American.