The answer to that question is very easy for bold men. Let us clean house. If the existing broom is not sufficient for that, let us make another broom. The revocation of citizenship for acts of disloyalty to this country is a remedial agency which will be applied more frequently in the future. A law should be, and probably will be, placed upon our statute books which will hold over the head of every foreign-born citizen attaining citizenship in this country a warning that he must come into this court with clean hands and must keep his hands clean forever thereafter. That is to say, there shall be no more an absolute patent of citizenship, nothing irrevocable any more in the citizenship of the foreign-born. We will hold a first mortgage—we will give him no deed. Four years ago, doctrine like this would have been scouted. Four years hence it will be accepted, perhaps, as the truth; indeed, the tendency has already begun. In eight years it will be a law. In twenty years, America will be a nation, and the strongest on the globe.
In New Jersey, Frederick Würsterbarth, who had a certificate of American citizenship, perjured himself and remained true to his foreign birth. He declared he would do nothing to help defeat Germany, and had no desire to see America win. He would not contribute to the Red Cross or to the Y. M. C. A. He added the old hyphenated plea that to support the war against Germany would be like kicking his mother in the face. The Federal courts canceled the certificate of citizenship of Würsterbarth. In the New Jersey case, the judge said of Würsterbarth: “Before he could be admitted to citizenship, he must declare under oath that he would support the Constitution of the United States and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign sovereignty. Public policy requires that no one shall be naturalized except he exercise the utmost good faith in all the essentials required of him; and where the government is shown that good faith in any of the essentials is questionable, the burden must be on the respondent to dispel that doubt.”
In addition to the statute which shall make false citizenship papers revocable, little doubt exists that we also shall have a law requiring the immediate deportation of any foreigner who has failed to take out his second naturalization papers within the prescribed time. The A. P. L. investigations during this war uncovered countless cases of these pseudo-citizens. Of what use can any Monroe doctrine be to America if it is our constant practice to nullify that doctrine and stultify ourselves by allowing practical colonization? And if you do not believe that we have foreign colonies, study your census map and the history of the American Protective League.
Is it bitter, such a belief? You think we still need the German language in the United States? One hundred and forty-two Illinois schools eliminated the study of German from their curriculums during the last year, while twenty schools reduced the courses offered in that subject. Ninety-six schools introduced the study of French for the first time and twenty-one schools added it to their curriculum in that one state.
You still think this is rabid? Read from the report of the Secretary of the Interior of the United States.
There is even a larger problem than this that challenges our attention, and that is the teaching of the English tongue to millions of our population. Dr. John H. Finley, president of the University of the State of New York, in a recent speech presented this picture which he found in one of the cantonments:
“How practical is the need of a language in this country common to all tongues is illustrated by what I saw in one of the great cantonments a few nights ago. In the mess hall, where I had sat an hour before with a company of the men of the National Army, a few small groups were gathered along the tables learning English under the tuition of some of their comrades, one of whom had been a district supervisor in a neighboring State and another a theological student. In one of those groups, one of the exercises for the evening consisted in practicing the challenge when on sentry duty. Each pupil of the group (there were four of Italian and two of Slavic birth) shouldered in turn the long-handled stove shovel and aimed it at the teacher, who ran along the side of the room, as if to evade the guard. The pupil called out in broken speech, ‘Halt! who goes there?’ The answer came from the teacher, ‘Friend,’ And then, in as yet unintelligible English (the voices of innumerable ancestors struggling in their throats to pronounce it), the words ‘Advance and give the countersign.’ So are those of confused tongues learning to speak the language of the land they have been summoned to defend. What a commentary upon our educational shortcomings that in the days of peace we had not taught these men, who have been here long enough to be citizens (and tens of thousands of their brothers with them), to know the language in which our history and laws are written and in which the commands of defense must now be given! May the end of this decade, though so near, find every citizen of our State prepared to challenge, in one tongue and heart, the purposes of all who come, with the cry, ‘Who goes there?’”
Who are you, new man at Ellis Island? Are you a demobilized German soldier looking for easy money in America? Let us see your hands. Qui vive! Advance, and give the countersign! And don’t let it be in German.
What all the world is fearing to-day is the growth of Bolshevism. It has ruined Russia—and we must pay for that; it is blocking the peace parliaments in Germany—and we must pay for that. It is beginning in America and may grow swiftly in the turbulent days after the war—and we shall have to pay for that. Nobody knows what the Bolshevist is nor what are the tenets of Bolshevism—least of all the Bolshevists themselves. They have recruited their ranks from the most ignorant and most reckless—from the dregs and scum of the world. Their theory is that of force; of government they have nothing. They use the force of law without any surrender of privileges to the law. Their theory of life is self-contradictory. None the less, since they cannot be reasoned with, they constitute a menace to any country. The mischief makers of all classes make recruits for Bolsheviki—socialists, radical I. W. W.’s, anarchists, the red flag rabble of every country united in the general ignorant greed of the wolf pack.
Bolshevism may come to America through the Socialists, through the I. W. W. or through the Non-Partisan League—which in the State of North Dakota to-day hold a two-thirds majority of both House and Senate. It will grow out of the ignorant and discontented foreigners unassimilated in this country. We must expect it naturally to come from these and from the pro-Germans in this country, because those people never have been satisfied with what we did in the war. In general, Bolshevism lives only on its own excitement, its own lack of plans, its own eccentricities. It finds its opportunity in any time of unrest and of slackened government.