The old polyglot, hubbub, hurdy-gurdy days of America are gone. We are no longer a mining camp, but a country, or should be that. Happy-go-lucky times are done for us. We must become a nation, mature, of one purpose, resolved at heart. Now we shall see how brave we really are, how much men we are.
What is America to-day? What undiscovered soul was there lying under the paint and the high heels and the tambourine and the bubbling glass in the fool’s paradise of our excited lives? What was there of sober and resolved citizenship under the American Protective League—a force so soon developed, so silently disbanded? Very much was there. All that a nation needs was there—if that nation shall not forget.
It is one thing if a quarter million men go back to business and forget their two years of sacrifice; if three million soldiers also forget their sacrifices and simply drop back into the old business world which they left. But it is quite another thing if three and a quarter million American citizens, sobered and not forgetful, do take up the flung torch and say that the dead of Flanders shall rest content—not merely for a day or so remembered—not merely for a year or two revenged, but for all the centuries verified and made of worth and justified in their sacrifices.
A part, only a small part, of the work of the American Protective League is done. We who silently pass back yet further beyond recognition, are not disbanded at all. The flung torch is especially in our own hands. We have been only pretenders in this League, we have been only mummers and imposters in this League, if we do not individually carry on the work for the future. That work, as we take it, is to make America safe for Americans, and to leave each man safe in his own home, in a country of his own making, at a table of his own choosing.
When work on this book was first begun, it seemed to all concerned that the great matter was to accumulate instances of shrewdness in catching criminals; stories of plots foiled and villains thwarted. We all of us wanted to see stalk by with folded arms a tall, dark, mysterious stranger in a long cloak, with high boots, and a wide hat pulled low over his brow. We wanted him, in the final act, to pull off his hat with the sweeping gesture of one hand, his false moustache with the other, and stand revealed before us, smooth-faced and fair of hair, exclaiming “It is I—Clarence Hawkshaw, the young detective!” We shared the American thirst for something exciting.
It became obvious, as the great masses of sober, conscientious revelations from the very heart of America came rolling in and piling up in cumulative testimony, that what had at first seemed the most desirable material was the least desirable. If this record is to have any ultimate value—and it should have great historical value—that must be, not because of a few flashy deeds, but because of a great, sober, underlying purpose. Our final figure of the A. P. L. man is not to be a Hawkshaw, but—an American.
When the time came to call a halt and to disband, there was not a member of the League who did not lay down his work sober and grave of heart. The sum of the reaction of all these reports, large and small, from the hundreds of centers where the League was active, leaves any man acquainted with the facts convinced that America has done her part splendidly, here at home, in the war. It is splendid—what America has done. Far more splendid, what America is. Still more splendid, what America is to be.
The best reading for any American in these days is the census map of the United States. Next year we shall have a new one, for by then, ten years more of our history will have been completed. The census map comes out once every decade, printed in different colors, showing the location of the foreign-born in the United States. The American-born regions have appeared in steadily lessening areas as the decades have passed.
It is only with a grave heart that any real American can face the census map to-day. The conviction is inevitable that we have been too long careless of our racial problems. If we are to have an America now, we must change. Our golden age of money-making is not a double decade in extent. We cannot go that road another twenty years. If your son is meant to be an American, have him study the census map and the story of the A. P. L. Then he will learn something about his own country. He has not known. His father has not known.
The English came early in our history and the Scotch-Irish, the finest of frontier stock. The Pennsylvania Dutch came and built homes. Then came the Irish, facile and quick to blend. Our immigration before the Civil War was north-European—sturdy stock, fit for the forests and prairies and the vast new farm lands of the West. Now we began to mine and manufacture more, and our immigrants changed the colors of the census map. We began to import work cattle, not citizens, for our so-called industrial captains. Steamship companies combed southern and southeastern Europe. Our miners could not speak English. The Irishman worked no more on the railroads, the sewers, the streets—he shrank from the squat foreigner as the lean Yankee shrank from him—as the Italian, in turn, will shrink from the Russian bolshevist, if we allow him to swarm in.