Page:The web (1919).djvu/443

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the population of Montana is more than fifty percent foreign-born, or of foreign-born parentage. The same is true of Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, California, Oregon and Washington; all have population thirty-five to fifty percent foreign of birth or parentage! This, in what we have thought was the American West!

There is no American West. There is no America. But for the Grace of God, we are gone. This is no mere rant. Study the census maps yourself—you can have no more thrilling, no more fascinating and no more saddening reading, search how you may. The trouble with most of us Americans was that we did not know our America. For America, this war is not over. It is just beginning. The more we set aside preconceived notions or biased and unctuous conclusions based on suppositions and not facts for premises, and the more we learn the actual facts regarding this country's problems to-day, the more we shall be obliged to that sobering and wholly distasteful thought that America is at the threshhold of her real war. That man does not live who can with any color of authority predict the end of that irrepressible conflict. No Statue of Liberty can avert it; no jaunty melting pot doctrine can conjure it away.

But the great West, which with the great South remains in larger percent American than do the North or the East, was zealously on guard throughout this war. Few of our far-flung marches but had an A. P. L. outpost of Americans, and these were eyes of the same sort that long ago looked down the brown barrels of long rifles in the frontier days. If we had a frontier now, here it would lie, between the Prairies and the Pacific; and the frontier always has been loyal. It was loyal in this war. The next great American will come from the land of the old Frontier. What, think you, will be his message? Will it be of melting-pots?


COLORADO

Denver, Colorado, must have a rather thrifty population, for there were 140 cases of food hoarding reported from that division. Operatives of the League investigated 789 cases of disloyalty and sedition under the Espionage Act,