Most of them have proved themselves useful and valuable elements in our many-rooted population. Some of them have accomplished eminent achievements in science, industry and the arts. Certain of the qualities and talents which they contribute to the common stock are of great worth and promise.
But some of them there are who have shown themselves unworthy of the trust of their fellow-citizens; ingrates, disturbers, ignorant of or disloyal to the spirit of America, abusers of her hospitality.
Some there are who have been blinded by the glare of liberty as a man is blinded who, after long confinement in darkness, comes suddenly into the strong sunlight. Blinded, they dare to aspire to force their guidance upon Americans who for generations have walked in the light of liberty.
They have become drunk with the strong wine of freedom, these men who until they landed on America's coasts had tasted nothing but the bitter waters of tyranny. Drunk, they presume to impose their reeling gait upon Americans to whom freedom has been a pure and refreshing fountain for a century and a half.
Brooding in the gloom of age-long oppression, they have evolved a fantastic and distorted image of free government. In fatuous effrontery they seek to graft the growth of their stunted vision upon the splendid and ancient tree of American institutions.
IV
We will not have it so, we who are Americans by birth or adoption. We reject these impudent pretensions. Changes the American people will make as their need becomes apparent, improvements they welcome, the greatest attainable well-being for all those under our national roof-tree is their aim; but they will do all that in the American way of sane and orderly progress—and in none other.
Against foes within no less than against enemies without they will know how to preserve and protect the splendid structure of light and order which is the great and treasured inheritance of all those who rightly bear the name Americans, of which the stewardship is entrusted to them and which, God willing, they will hand on to their children sound and wholesome, unshaken and undefiled.
The time is ripe and over-ripe to call a halt upon these spreaders of outlandish and pernicious doctrines. The American is indulgent to a fault and slow to wrath. But he is now passing through a time of tension and strain. His teeth are set and his nerves on edge. He sees more closely approaching every day the dark valley through which his sons and brothers must pass and from which too many, alas, will not return. It is an evil time to cross him. He is not in the temper to be trifled with. He is apt very suddenly to bring down the indignant fist of his might upon those who would presume on his habitual mood of easy-going good nature.
When I speak of the militant Bolsheviki in our midst as foes of national unity I mean to include those of American stock who are their allies, comrades or followers—those who put a narrow class interest and a sloppy internationalism above patriotism, with whom class hatred and envy have become a consuming passion, whom visionary obsessions and a false conception of equality have inflamed to the point of irresponsibility. But I am far from meaning to reflect upon those who, while determined Socialists, are patriotic Americans.