The End of the Hindenburg Line
The Hindenburg line is a menace to every courthouse in America.
In my recent journeys through the West I have never seen a
courthouse tower printed against the sky without relating it to the
great world conflict. We are fighting for all that is embodied and expressed
and safeguarded in these citadels of democracy. A little while
ago I looked with reverence at a log hut preserved at Decatur, Illinois,
the first courthouse of the county. In that little room Abraham Lincoln
appeared as attorney for pioneer citizens who understood perfectly the
promise of American democracy. The laws invoked to preserve their
rights were a crystallization of the thought and the hope of liberty-loving
peoples, and no settler in wilderness or prairie, no matter how humble,
but felt himself a partner in the benefits of American institutions and the
great tradition of English law. Every American courthouse is founded
upon Magna Charta. If we are indebted for anything in our democracy
to the Teutonic-Turkish combination I am unaware of it. Dull of wit indeed,
the Hohenzollern BEAST, to think his mailed fist could ever splinter
the door of one of these American courthouses! The price our fore-*fathers
paid for their liberty was too great for any yielding to a devil
gone mad and attempting to bestride the world. During the Civil War
Lincoln once remarked to Seward, speaking of Weems' "Life of Washington"
which he had read before the fireplace in his father's cabin in
Spencer County, Indiana, "It occurred to me that it must have been
something pretty fine those men were fighting for." It was; and it is for
that same fine thing that America has again drawn the sword.
MEREDITH NICHOLSON.
