“Fifty children of nearly all the races under Heaven sang the songs of their home-land, all the way from those they used to sing under the dark pines of Norway’s farthest crag, down to those sung by Sicilian children beneath the palms of their ever sunny land.
“Together they sang those Heaven-born prophecies of ‘Peace on earth, good will to men’; and as I heard the blended voices of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, Greeks, Italians and Syrians, I felt that the ancient prophecies are being fulfilled, at least in spots, on our then unknown continent.
“Go home. Learn to find pleasure in that classic art of making home. Learn how to find joy in giving children a chance to live and laugh, to look towards manhood and womanhood from a mountain top and not from a cage. Catch the rhythm of that new poetry which is now in the making; which speaks in its sonnets of justice, in its epics of war against all human wrong and in its lyrics of a sublimer and a larger love.”
“There comes my Captain!” said my victim, with a sigh of relief; “and I must go.”
Yes, there he stood; all braid and buttons, or just braid and buttons, a waxed moustache, a waxen smile and clicking spurs.
Gracefully he bowed as he offered his arm, in such a charming manner as could not be easily reproduced by any mere American. Thus they left me to my solemn musings, while the living tide swept by me, each drop in the great current antagonistic to the other. Unbidden there arose before me the ship, laden by human freight, leaving America, carrying representatives of these same races and nationalities alien and hostile to each other: Slavs and Magyars, arch foes of centuries’ standing; Northern and Southern Italians, looking with scorn at one another; Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and Bulgarians, Albanians and Montenegrins.
All of them had come out of the chaos wrought by ages of hate and centuries of warfare. But in America, many of them had learned to live together without scorn on the lip or hand on the sword-hilt.
The walls which separated them were weakened, if not broken down, and like blind men they felt for one another in the dark; sometimes missing the larger brotherhood, but often finding it.
The Pentecost of which prophets and seers have dreamt, which is to repair the ruin wrought in the human family by the building of its towers of Babel, cannot be so far away. The cosmos may yet come out of the chaos, and there is no spot of earth on which this creative act can be performed as well as in our America.
The land is vast enough and rich enough; no barrier of language divides the East from the West; the North and the South are almost one, after an internecine war; and in spite of our melting of metals and slaughter of cattle and growing of corn—in spite of souls made hard and unresponsive to anything but money—like the