This truth cannot be too early or too strongly impressed upon our children. There are enough men, like our distinguished capitalist, who do not believe in it. Their plausible arguments may undermine the convictions of our young people, unless we furnish them with solid reasons for our higher belief.
As Mr. Benjamin C. R. Low has recently written in a fine poem, "America is so new!"
We are new. We realize that we are an experiment. Whether this experiment, the greatest the world has ever seen, is to succeed, depends upon the kind of patriotism that is instilled into our children. They must be thoroughly inoculated with the truth that both peace and war make incessant, expensive and personally sacrificial demands upon every citizen, and that these demands must be met by them, or else America is lost.
There must be no "slackers" in this everlasting conflict.
CHAPTER VI
PATRIOTISM AND HEALTH
Entire abstinence from intoxicating drinks as a beverage, would, with all its attendant blessings, in the course of a single generation, carry comfort, competence and respectability, with but few exceptions, into all the dwellings in the land. This is not a matter of probability and conjecture. It depends upon principles as fixed and certain in their operation as the rising of the sun.—Horace Mann.
WE are accused by our foreign visitors of being a sickly nation, and the numerous exemptions from military service among our young men for physical defects, have reinforced their contention. Our ice-water, our ice-cream soda-water, our custom of bolting our food, and our over-heated houses, make it impossible, they say, that we should ever be a strong and healthy people. And so, of course, we can never hope to be a "world-power!"