In these times that uncover men's souls and the souls of nations, has our soul come to light, or only our huge, lavish body? In 1865 we had found our soul indeed. Where is it gone? We have been witnessing many "scholarly retreats," and every day we have had to hear the "maxims of a low prudence." Have they sunk to the core and killed it? God forbid! But since August, 1914, we have stood listening to the cry of our European brothers-in-Liberty. They did not ask our feeble arm to strike in their cause, but they yearned for our voice and did not get it. Will History acquit us of this silence?
Meanwhile, the maxims of a low prudence, masquerading as Christianity, daily counsel us to keep our arm feeble. It was not so that Washington survived Valley Forge, or Lincoln won through to Appomattox. If the Fourth of July and the Declaration it celebrates still mean anything to us, let our arm be strong.
This for our own sake. For the sake of mankind, if this war brings home to us that we now sit in the council of nations and share directly in the general responsibility for the world's well-being, we shall have taken a great stride in national and spiritual maturity, and our talk about the brotherhood of man may progress from rhetoric towards realization.
XV
We have yet to find our greater selves. We have also yet to realize that Europe, since the Spanish War, has counted us in the concert of great nations far more than we have counted ourselves.
Somebody wrote in the New York Sun:
We are not English, German, Swede,
Or Austrian, Russian, French or Pole;