Still I was not without my moments of insight and amusement. I found that my friends and chance acquaintances, like those who talked in the parlor car, had one great grievance in common—the activities of agitators, Bolshevists, I.W.W.'s and all who are attacking American institutions. This touches them more nearly than international relations or any criticisms that come from abroad. And all of them dealt with the trouble in the same strain. They are not afraid of these wild men or of their wild ideas. But they are hurt and humiliated to find that people exist, especially within the borders of the United States, who believe the kind of nonsense that these people talk. Real Americans feel disgraced that news of that sort of discontent should be going out to the world. The attitude seems to be one of shame and indignation rather than of fear or anger. They were hurt to find that any one—especially any one who had come to America to live—could fail to see the manifold advantages of living under the Stars and Stripes. No one was afraid that the radicals could accomplish their ends—they were simply a noisy, irrational minority—but it was an insult to every American to have these people denying that the United States is the finest country in the world. It seemed incredible, stupefying.
The man from Seattle on the observation car was able to give first-hand information about the I.W.W. and he proceeded to do so volubly and emphatically. He pinned his faith to the chastening influence of an accurately applied bludgeon in dealing with this element of society, and told with relish of how I.W.W. leaders were beaten up whenever they tried to start something. He established his claim to being a true American by stating that although living in the West he was born in Boston and was descended from one of the seven men who had established the town of Salem. He was all for direct action in dealing with the advocates of direct action.
The sum of the matter is that the unrest is rousing American citizens to a keener sense of their heritage as descendants of the men who laid the foundations of the country, and they are inclined to be intolerant of any one who questions the soundness and essential rightness of American institutions. They have no patience with those who would overturn their system of government. The result will probably be a livelier sense of citizenship on the part of many who have been neglectful of their duties in the matter. They will not leave the conduct of affairs to those who cater to the forces of disruption. They are all for the America of their fathers, and this unrest will probably cause a rebirth of the old-fashioned American spirit. The danger is that a nation that has been roused to a sense of power by the war will act swiftly and intolerantly without discriminating sufficiently between those who would reform society and those who would wreck it.
[CHAPTER III]
BACK TO THE PRIMITIVE
Nor only is there nothing new under the sun, but in New York I find the same views, opinions, and conclusions that I had heard to the point of weariness even in Ekfrid. The transmission of news and the diffusion of propagandas have reduced the world to the same mental level. For instance: a friend placed his car at my disposal so that I could go about the city comfortably and expeditiously. Being full of questions I took my seat beside the chauffeur and invited information. He proved to be a skilled mechanic who had left productive work to drive a car in the city. He had been through the Spanish-American War, but had avoided the Great War, being past the age limit of the earlier drafts. He had had all he wanted of war. "War is simply a scheme by which the big men and the profiteers put it over the plain people. The plain people get all the knocks of war and pay the cost of it besides, while the big men get all the glory and the crooks get the profits."
Nothing new about that. I have heard the same talk in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, and even on farms. The plain people of one country are like the plain people of any other country. They feel that whoever won the war they did not win it. And they don't want any more of it. What they want is to square accounts with the men who made profits from the war, and then go through the rest of their lives without doing anything in particular on which others can make a profit. They even seem to think that they might live out their day on the profits that others have accumulated—if they could only have justice properly administered. Anyway, this business of working hard and letting others have a profit on your work is something that belongs to the old, stupid days before the war, when men were not awake to their rights and privileges.
This is really the philosophy of the Lotus-Eaters, and possibly it is a natural reaction after the war.