prove this, offered partnership in her wealth to any man of the world, under a system of naturalization laws whose like, in broadness and generosity, does not exist. Peace—and the chance to grow and to be happy. Peace—and a partnership in all she had. Peace—and a seat free at the richest table of the world. That was what America offered; and in spite of the pinch and the unrest of growing numbers, in spite of problems imported and not native to our long-untroubled land, that was the theory of American life up to a date four years earlier than this.
In that four years America has changed more than in any forty of her earlier life. But yesterday, young, rich, laughing, free of care, Homerically mirthful and joyous, America to-day is mature, unsmiling, grave, dignified—and wise. What once she never suspected, now she knows. She has been betrayed.
But America, traditionally resourceful, now suddenly agonized in the discovery of treachery at her own table, has out of the very anguish of her indignant horror, out of the very need of the hour, suddenly and adequately risen to her emergency. She always has done so. When the arms of the appointed agents of the law ever have wearied, she has upheld them. She has done so now, at the very moment of our country's greatest need.
The story of how that was done; how the very force of the situation demanded and received an instant and sufficient answer; how the civilians rallied to their own flag; how they came out of private life unasked, unsummoned, as though at spoken command of some central power—that is a great and splendid story of which few ever have known anything at all.
It is a great and splendid story because it verifies America and her intent before all the high courts of things. These men did obey the summons of a vast central power. But it was no more than the soul of America that spoke. It was no more than her theory of the democracy of mankind which issued that unwritten order to assemble the minute men, each armed and garbed in his own way and each resolved to do what he could in a new and tremendous day of Lexington.
It was not autocracy which gave the assembly call to
