These changing conditions of our growth have blotted out from memory the old historic experience and substituted a fresher, more recent, experience. Forty years of peace and commercial prosperity have created a new American tradition, breeding its own catch words and philosophy. The change has come so quietly, and yet so completely, that Americans to-day are largely unaware that they are speaking and acting from different motives, impulses and desires than those of the men who created and established the nation. The types of our national heroes have changed. We have substituted captains of industry for pioneers, and smart men for creative men. Our popular phrases express the new current of ideas. "Making good," "neutrality," "punch," "peace and prosperity": these stir our emotional centers. We used to be shaken and moved when the spirit of a Kossuth or Garibaldi spoke to us. But to-day we receive the appeal of Cardinal Mercier, and are unmoved. We no longer know the great accent when we hear it.
So we must look to the young to save us. Henry Farnsworth was a Boston man, twenty-five years old. He died near Givenchy, fighting for France.
"I want to fight for France," he had said, "as the French once fought for us."
Our American workers are aiding France because she defends our tradition, which is also hers, a tradition of freedom and justice, practiced in equality. In her version of it, there are elements of intellectual grace, a charm, a profundity of feeling expressed with a light touch, bits of "glory," clothed in flowing purple, which are peculiar to the Latin temperament. But the ground plan is the same. Our doctors and nurses of the American Hospital, our workers in the hostels and the Clearing House, our boys in the American Field Service, are not alone saving the lives of broken men of a friendly people. They are restoring American nationality.
SECTION II
WHY SOME AMERICANS ARE NEUTRAL