The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God....
And we dispersed to wander among the graves and see the decorations, and add decorations of our own if we willed. Wherever I went, the haunting air was in my ears:
Let him sleep,
Sweetly sleep,
Till the call of the roll on high.
Americans believe very really in the roll-call. They believe that they will answer to their names on a great last day—"When the roll is called up yonder, I'll be there," says a popular hymn. It is all important to the American that he feels he lives and dies for the Right, for the moral virtues. The glory of the wars which the Americans have fought in their history is not only that they, the Americans, were victorious, but that they were morally right before ever they started out to fight.
Well, civilisation has approved the abolition of slavery. The great mass of people nowadays consider slavery as something wrong in itself. The North took up its weapons and convinced the South, and the negro was freed. The peculiar horrors of slavery no longer exist—no one man has power of life and death over the African. That much the war has achieved. But it is strange that for the rest the negro seems to have become worse off, and that America feels that she cannot extend the personal privileges of democracy to the blacks. America has brutalised the nigger; has made of a very gentle, loving and lovable if very simple creature, an outcast, a beast, who may not sit beside an ordinary man. It has in its own nervous imagination accused him of hideous crimes which he did not commit, did not even imagine; it has deprived him of the law, tortured him, flayed him, burned him at the stake. It has made a black man a bogey; so that a fluttering white woman, finding herself alone in the presence of a negro, will rush away in terror, crying "murder," "rape," "fire," just because she has seen the whites of his eyes. Then the hot-blooded southern crowd comes out....
The war was a healthy war. It did much good, it strengthened the roots of many American families; it gave the nation a criterion for future development; it brought many individuals nearer to reality, brought them to the mystery of life, caused them to say each day their prayers to God. But if a war must be judged by its political effect, then as regards the happiness of the negro the war has not yet proved to be a success. The service by the graveside, and the apt words of Abraham Lincoln were a reminder to the American people that though they realise to themselves the maximum of prosperity the New World affords, and yet lose their souls, it profits them nothing. America by her unwritten but infallible charter is consecrated to freedom. If America is going to be true to itself it must work for freedom, it must carry out the idea of freedom. The emigrant from Europe expects to realise in America the idea of freedom, the opportunity for personal and individual development. He does not expect to find repeated there the caste system and relative industrial slavery of the East.
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Clearfield was much touched by the graveside service. The whole evening after it the men in the hotel lounge talked American sentiment. The lads and lasses crowded into the cinema houses, and watched with much edification the specially instructive set of films which, on the recommendation of the town council, had been specially installed for the occasion,—the perils of life for a young girl going to dance-halls, the Soudanese at work, Japanese children at play, the ferocious habits of the hundred-legs, a review of troops at Tiflis, a portrait of the Governor of Mississippi wearing a high silk hat, pottery-making in North Borneo, the Pathé news. It was good to see so many pictures of foreign and dark-skinned people presented in an interesting and sympathetic manner. The Americans need to care more for the national life of other races. For they are often strangely contemptuous of the people they conceive to be wasting their time.