We need not fear either the arms, the arts or the artifices of Germany. What we need to fear, really, is our easy-going, unsuspicious American character, our tendency to forget everything else in the great game of affairs. It is time now that from the great mass of the American people there shall appear silently, standing shoulder to shoulder and side to side as they have in their old organization, a new American Protective League. Our old League determined that our homes and our property should be saved. Let the new League determine that our country and our principles shall be saved. All the eyes of the world turn to America to-day. The remainder of the world is distracted. In Berlin, radicals coming up from the dregs are doing their best to get control of a ruined country. “Bismarck’s structure was wonderful while it lasted,” says an editorial in an able American paper, “but it was a nation without a soul. It was made of blood and iron, and it could not live because the spirit was left out.” Neither can our civilization or our citizenship live if they are made of silver and gold, and if the spirit be left out.
It is time to look at the census map of America. We must revise those colors in the next ten years, or we have lost the war. This distrust of Germany in America, in South America and in Europe, is something which should excite no sympathy and no pity whatever. Wars are not cleared up, for example, on any basis of sympathy. There is no use figuring what we can do to show Germany how sorry we are. The thing to do is to leave Germany sorry. She has coal, iron, timber, copper, potash, phosphate, abundant other natural resources. If she cannot handle them, others can handle them for her. Marshal Foch has threatened repeatedly that if Germany continues cynically to disregard the terms of the armistice, he will march again on Germany. That is hard doctrine? Yes. But it was Germany that lost the war.
It is altogether likely that not the best writing in the world, not the most partisan history in the world, will ever be able to give a clean bill of health to America’s conduct of this war, or to restore the old American confidence that we were the one great people of the world. The scales have fallen from the eyes at least of our soldiers. They know, and presently all the world will know, our shortcomings. Three million men will have something to say about the politics of this country. Perhaps they will say that our next war shall not find us so unprepared. Perhaps they will say that our next war shall not find us with an army of 2,000,000 spies, propagandists and pro-enemies who claim American citizenship. The Army man is the worst foe of the censorship which has held back the truth from America for so long. Perhaps the Army man will be able to settle accounts with that politician whose stock in trade is the holding back from the American people of the knowledge of themselves. It is time to raise the real banner of America. It will take courage to march under those colors. But if we cannot march side by side and shoulder to shoulder, then we have lost this war, we have lost the Monroe Doctrine, we have lost the League of Nations.
Why should we try to avoid the truth? Nothing is gained by that. The truth is that the reckoning of this war is not yet paid. Eventually it must be paid through the resolution and individual courage of those citizens who are not ashamed to be called American. Ostracism of the hyphen, where it is known still to exist; fearlessness in the boycott of blood-soaked German goods; rejection of the blood-soaked German hand; the wiping out of the foreign languages in the pulpit and press of America; the revocation of citizenship based on a lie; the deportation of known traitors—those are some of the things which must go into the oath of the next A. P. L. Until we can swear that oath and maintain it, we have lost the war.
It is a far cry enough. We have not shot one German spy out of those thousands whom we have found working here in America. We have not deported one man. We have revoked the citizenship of only two men—the above mentioned Fred Würsterbarth, who had been a citizen of America for thirty years, and Carl August Darmer, of Tacoma, Washington, who had been a citizen in America for thirty-six years. Do you think these two men were any worse than a one hundred thousand others who worked as spies of Germany? Hardly. The war remains still to be fought against these men who still are under arms. Apply this test to your friends and associates—to your lawyer, your doctor, to your grocer, above all, to your alderman, your councilman, your mayor and your representatives in Congress. Why not? It is only the same test which the United States District Court in New Jersey applied to Würsterbarth.
Eight years ago an American minister of the gospel who had lived much abroad, especially in Germany, came back to this country and wrote a book which perhaps never was very popular. He held up the mirror of America to herself. His views to-day would not be so much that of one crying in the wilderness. Let us follow along, in a running synopsis of the pages of his book, a hint now and then from page to page, and see what one man thought in that long ago before war was dreamed of; before the German army of spies, military and industrial, had been unearthed; before the plans of Germany for world conquest had been divulged. That writer says:
In fifty years New York will be what the Italians make it.... In New York there is only one native American to twenty foreigners. Waterbury, Connecticut, has a population of 30,000, 20,000 being aliens.... New Haven and Hartford, cities of long-established colleges, have an un-American population which in ten years will outnumber the natives.... Parts of New Jersey are more hopelessly de-Americanized than New England. Perth Amboy has at least three to one non-Americans. Cincinnati and Milwaukee have been German cities for a quarter of a century; Chicago hardly less so.... Wherever I take a meal I am served solely by foreigners.... It seems odd that I should seldom ever see or meet Americans except in a social or professional way, and the professions are being rapidly filled by men of foreign names.... The Yankee no longer counts in the industrial and commercial life of New England. In his place is to be found the Italians, Hungarians. French, Polocks, Scandinavians and Jews.... Thoroughness, therefore, must now be the watchword of the native American if he hopes to survive in the terrific commercial battle now waging all over the world.... This sort of thing must be stopped at once or we are lost.... Take the half-past-seven Sunday morning train from the New York Grand Central station, and you will see at every way-station a swarm of dark, sturdy foreigners entering or quitting the train at the little towns along the way—for this is a local train and makes all the stops—and these people are thus enabled to visit their friends and acquaintances. And there appears to be no town, however small, where these foreigners have not gained some footing as laborers, farmers and small tradesmen. I should say that more than half of the Sunday railroad traffic in New York, New Jersey and New England is foreign. I took a train from New York some thirty miles into New Jersey one Sunday morning in October and the conductor told me that he did not think the native Americans constituted ten per cent of his passengers. I asked him whether that was the usual thing on Sundays, and he said, “No, not quite so bad as to-day, but we always have more foreigners than natives on Sunday.” ...
Six millions of aliens are necessary, we are told, to the development of the resources of our country. Now, it is perfectly plain that these foreign hordes are necessary to the development of the multi-millionaires, the trusts and the monopolies; but it is not so plain that they are necessary to the peace, happiness and prosperity of this country.... The normal increase of the native American population in the last forty years would have been amply sufficient for the proper and healthy development of this country. Had not the foreigner been called in in such hordes, we should have been forced to do our own work ourselves and would have been all the happier and richer for it.... There must be a check put upon immigration. Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and the time has come when we must resort to it.... We need time to train our children to compete with these people and during that time the foreigner must be held at bay. Immigration must be checked. The resources of this land are being too rapidly developed by means of these aliens.... Some radical change for the worse has taken place in the last quarter of a century in the fibre of our life, our manhood and our national character.... Indiscriminate and immoderate immigration is, I believe, the main cause of this deterioration. We have ceased long since to assimilate the vast hordes of heterogeneous peoples who have been dumped down upon our shores and who swarm all over this land in the eager pursuit of the mere physical necessities of life. This is the object, the sole ambition of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand. Such an invasion is actually as disastrous to a country as the invasion of Germany by the Huns who were impelled solely by hunger (the very same motive that brings the vast majority of immigrants to this country) and whose ravages devastated the whole of Germany and scattered its inhabitants beyond the Alps to the Rhine and to the borders of the Mediterranean.... Such masses of crude humanity as pour in upon us cannot possibly be taken up into healthy circulation, but must lie undigested in the stomach of the nation, seriously affecting its health and happiness.... The curse these immigrants bring upon themselves is plainly to be seen, for it is immediate. They form a body incompatible with the healthy growth of this country. The greater curse of this country is that they do the work that should not be done by them at all, the work that should be done by natives. They take the work and the bread out of the hands and mouths of native Americans, and the question of their means of living must soon become one of the most pressing economic and social problems of the day.
Such extended quotations are made from one writer (Mr. Monroe Royce; “The Passing of the American”) only because these truths of ten years ago are equally true to-day and more true. In the past ten years our census map has changed yet more. And now into this crude population of ours we have inducted all the seeds of discord of this war. We have learned a sudden distrust of a large number of our citizenry. Our returning soldiers will bring us yet more problems. The spirit of unrest in this hour of anarchy will add to all these problems.
It is time for another oath, sworn indeed for the protection of America.