I AM sure the Herr Director will not object if I have the last word; for while he was with me that privilege was seldom mine and obtained only by dint of strategy.
Since his departure, the great war which he prophesied has moved over Europe and hides every bit of fair and peaceful sky like a storm-cloud; its thunder and destructive lightning fill the air, leaving scarcely a place safe and undisturbed.
Not a soul is unafraid, not a heart is without pain and sorrow, and the Herr Director himself, although past middle age, has volunteered to serve in the trenches, slippery from oozing blood and foul from the spattered brains of men. The “fiddling, twiddling diplomats, the haggling, calculating merchants of Babylon, the sleek lords with their plumes and spurs” have had their way, and the poor, blind, ignorant millions, made mad by hate, do their brutal bidding.
We, on this safer side, who as yet have not loosed the dogs of war, have calculated the loss to Europe in the fratricidal slaughter of its most virile men, in the loss of its arts and trades, in the wreck and ruin to houses and homes and in the age-long poverty which awaits. Much counting has been done as to what we shall make out of this sure bankruptcy that is to come to the nations which are our competitors for the world’s trade, and what glory shall be ours when New York, and not London shall be the new Babylon, with power to make the “Epha small and the Shekel great.”
With the incalculable loss to the European nations there has come to some of them a gain in national unity upon which under no circumstances we may count.
It has been with no small sense of pride that I have demonstrated to the Herr Director and to others the fact that, in spite of our youth as a nation, and the varied national, linguistic and religious rootage of our population even in the Colonial period, we have grown to be one people. Even the constant inflow of new and more varied human material has not weakened us but indeed the sense of national unity has grown stronger. I have watched with joy the processes by which this alien element was becoming one with us, the fading away of animosities and inherited prejudices, and the making of a new people out of the world’s conglomerate.
The war has brought about a retardation of this process, and we shall have great cause for gratitude if no permanent damage is done to our nation’s spirit, a loss for which no possible gain in any direction could compensate. The term “Hyphenated American,” which has now come into use, if it indicates anything more than the place of a man’s national or racial origin, and the very natural sympathies arising therefrom, is an insult to the man to whom it is applied, and a confession of divided allegiance, if voluntarily assumed.
It may be interesting to note that it was His Majesty, the Emperor of Germany, who repudiated the hyphen when a German-American delegation called on him on the occasion of some royal anniversary.
When the delegation was introduced in this hyphenated manner, he said: “Germans I know, Americans I know, but German-Americans I do not know.”
Although the hyphen has always existed, it has assumed new meaning in these troubled days and is applied as a term of opprobrium, largely to Americans of German birth; people who have always been loyal to the country of their adoption, and, I think, are no less loyal now.