If we say that a statesman represents Americanism, the question arises what kind of Americanism? The Yankee, the Southerner, each had his place in the political economy of America from 1776 to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and even up to the Cleveland Administration, after which conditions began to change with startling rapidity, when the children born of foreign parents were beginning to come of age and the European ferment began to leaven the lumps of sectional dough.
The man who occupies the White House in 1921 should take Time by the forelock and the profiteer with the padlock, know how to translate “Es ist verboten” into Russian, and say, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” in Esperanto.
If honesty, alone, is the best and only policy, our country would be safe, but honesty is only one of the qualities necessary in these days to carry a President through the mazes of a complex administration. Honesty does not always imply clear vision or even ordinary common sense. The faculties of diplomatic tact and political judgment are infinitely more important, and experience still more so.
In America the roles enacted by professional politicians remind one of a masquerade where everyone is trying to penetrate behind the masks and guessing is the rule. If in this heterogeneous ball-room you slap your partner on the back, you may elicit a grunt from a grouchy bolshevik or a groan from a disgruntled “bohemian.”
And yet Congress enacts laws for Americans who understand no dialect but their own and who have to engage interpreters when they visit Paris. How many wealthy Americans realize that these United States have outgrown the cookie era, the buckwheat pancake era, the corn cob era, the wooden nutmeg era, and arrived at the root-hog-or-die era?
Young America today no more resembles the young America of thirty years ago than a butterfly resembles a caterpillar. Young men and women are sixty per cent cosmopolitan and forty per cent rebel.
During the next five years the number of young people who will insist on thinking for themselves will increase two-fold, because in that time many thousands of children born of foreign parents in America will have become mature enough to have fixed upon some sort of ideal.
Congress will realize the situation when it is too late for regrets to be of any service. Which calls to mind a story apropos of this pressing subject: A landlady, having no means of obtaining meat for her boarders, made a stew out of a litter of kittens. The truth became known in a day or two. One of the boarders said the very thought made her sick, to which the landlady replied: “Feeling sick won’t do no good; them kittens has all been digested.”