AMERICA has been aptly called the Melting Pot. Since 1620, when the Pilgrims established their permanent colony at Plymouth, people from the Old World have been flocking to this country and becoming “Americans.” Every country of the globe has sent its representatives—each a different metal to be merged with the others until the American should be as distinct a type as the Englishman or Frenchman. At first there was natural discord—each was a different metal in the melting pot, but as there was no heat, no fire, they could not amalgamate. Then came the first blast of national fire—the Revolution, and in that, the first great struggle for Liberty, was moulded from the composite alloys—the American. The American as he came from the mould of the Revolution was the foundation on which the country rests, and although the descendants of those Americans are too few in number now to be more than a flux for the steady stream of metal as it pours from the pot, they can at least preserve the standard that their forebears passed down to them as the Golden Heritage, and be examples to these new and untried metals.
In the War of 1812 and in the Civil War the new metals were amalgamated and tempered with the old, but since 1864 there has been no fire hot enough to mould together the millions who have sought the United States as a home. There has been no sword over our heads. There has been no great impending disaster, no danger to the country as a whole of great loss of life or property, and our Liberty and our Honor have not been at stake as they are today.
So it is now in this fierce blast from Hell’s furnace, the Great War, that the National fire is rekindled and each metal is slowly sinking its own individuality into the common form carefully stirred by the hand of the Almighty, and in the white heat, as the pure metal is tempered until it rings true and measures to the old standard, the slag is cast aside. Thus is America the Melting Pot.
PARIS is the place where everything begins and ends. From here during the four years of war there has been the constant departure of men bound for the great adventure, and it is Paris that has received with open arms the greater bulk of the permissionnaires and the réformés. Gay, very gay on the surface, but below the crust it is the saddest of all places. When a man is in great agony he laughs. It is so with the great city, and the laugh of delirium is a poor sham indeed.
The shortage of necessities has also been a damper on the city. In Neuilly, a suburb of Paris, a man was carrying a bag of coal. A few paces behind him a well-dressed woman was walking home. The man dropped a piece of coal from his sack and the woman eagerly picked it up and placed it in her gold bag.
The war hangs over all in a dismal cloud and is in the back of every one’s mind; although it is rare to hear it mentioned it is always before one. There is no Parisian who has not lost some one very dear to him or her, and nineteen out of every twenty women are in deep mourning. The social activities, therefore, are greatly curtailed, and the gay life is left only to the people of the street, the majority of whom have been driven to that life by the reaction of despair and sadness, and in lonesomeness seek the only companionship that they know.
THE old chateau at 21, rue Raynouard, so kindly loaned to the American Field Service for its headquarters by the Comtesse de la Villestreux, is a place of traditions. The great Napoleon has walked here. Rousseau wrote part of his works here, and Franklin walked in the park daily while he was Ambassador to France.