What is loyalty? When is a citizen loyal to his country? Waving his country’s flag and cheering it on a Fourth of July is but an outward demonstration of loyalty. A citizen is never loyal until he becomes and is faithful to the law; when he upholds and assists others in upholding the lawful authorities unswervingly. That is loyalty. There is no other definition for the word. So the citizen who refuses to obey the law himself in the first place, and makes no efforts to assist others in its enforcement, is not loyal to his country. When he has ceased to be loyal he becomes disloyal, and disloyalty is treason.
The true American, therefore, is loyal and has the courage to prove that loyalty whenever occasion arises.
One need not put on a uniform and fight battles against a foreign enemy to prove his patriotism. The patriot—the truly loyal citizen serves his country well by exercising that loyalty at home.
Good citizenship carries with it more than the simple right to vote. That right has obligations attached to it. The chief obligation is loyalty.
The moment loyalty weakens, a wedge of social and political corruption enters; once that wedge is driven deeper government must totter and fall, and anarchy steps in its place.
During the Civil War hundreds of thousands of Americans gave up their lives “that the nation might live.” The nation is an aggregation of States, the State a union of communities, and communities are formed by families.
To preserve a nation healthy that it may live, the States must also be so. But a State cannot be so if portions of it are diseased with social and political corruption. When a sore spot appears it ought to be cauterized at once without waiting for it to develop into an eating, destroying cancer.
The spirit of loyalty must be revived and kept alive in the minds and hearts of all citizens. Only through it can the evil impulses of the criminally inclined be controlled.
The citizen who is loyal should always reflect, when he begins to lose courage, that the good citizens are in the majority, and that the vicious element is almost universally cowardly. The criminal has the fear of the law although he defies it for a time.
We have narrated at great length the stealthy preparations made by the murderers of Callahan. The cool and apparently deliberate manner with which their plans were executed would lead one to believe that they feared no law.