When the boys come home they are going to ask for an accounting. They will want to take more than just a peep at our stewardship. Where are the loafers hanging out? They’ll ask us that. And they’ll ask about the dives and dens and thief-making sports that boldly flaunted themselves in the days before the great change.
A lot of the boys won’t come home. They’ll be asleep, over there, but the big majority will return and they will be men of brawn—resolute and brave. They will begin at once to ask questions that will make some of us wince, and they are going to insist upon truthful answers. “What about the profiteers?” They’re going to insist on knowing all about these fellows. They will seek them out and compel them to disgorge their ill-gotten gains—profits taken from the families of these men who crossed the seas to rid the world of just such a piratical crew.
And what about booze—have we given that traffic the final punch? If it wasn’t good for soldiers to fight on how could it be useful in civil life? These are questions we’ve got to answer when the boys come home and it looks as though we were going to be able to give a good account of ourselves—thanks to the government.
Things are changing—many things have already changed. The big crucial tests upon our national conscience are coming to a head. Our government is far-seeing and alert. Abuses still exist, but the eyes of able men are upon them. A government that is capable of sending millions of men under prime conditions to foreign lands in behalf of our most precious rights need not be expected to fall down on the task of cleaning things up at home while they are away. The whole world is to be made safe and clean, including the U. S. A.
CHAPTER XVIII
REGENERATION
When the great war broke upon an unsuspecting brotherhood of fellow humans, we were, as a nation, from prosperity and self-indulgence, perilously near the brink of disaster. It is only in the light of events and a backward glance toward the precipice which had yawned for us that we may now indulge in a certain sort of solemn consolation. At least, we have been saved from a worse fate, one that has bells on its toes—our national intellect was on the wane; likewise our national conscience. But we were not alone—all nations were afflicted, ours no more than the rest, but we were the younger and more opulent.
Regeneration or degeneracy? That was the uppermost question in the public mind when the king of Berlin turned loose his hosts of degeneracy, thereby bringing back to its sober senses the brain power of civilized mankind. And with it came the brawn.