Page:The web (1919).djvu/467

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

thousands of their brothers with them), to know the language in which our history and laws are written and in which the commands of defense must now be given! May the end of this decade, though so near, find every citizen of our State prepared to challenge, in one tongue and heart, the purposes of all who come, with the cry, 'Who goes there?'"


Who are you, new man at Ellis Island? Are you a demobilized German soldier looking for easy money in America? Let us see your hands. Qui vive! Advance, and give the countersign! And don't let it be in German.

What all the world is fearing to-day is the growth of Bolshevism. It has ruined Russia—and we must pay for that; it is blocking the peace parliaments in Germany—and we must pay for that. It is beginning in America and may grow swiftly in the turbulent days after the war—and we shall have to pay for that. Nobody knows what the Bolshevist is nor what are the tenets of Bolshevism—least of all the Bolshevists themselves. They have recruited their ranks from the most ignorant and most reckless—from the dregs and scum of the world. Their theory is that of force; of government they have nothing. They use the force of law without any surrender of privileges to the law. Their theory of life is self-contradictory. None the less, since they cannot be reasoned with, they constitute a menace to any country. The mischief makers of all classes make recruits for Bolsheviki—socialists, radical I. W. W.'s, anarchists, the red flag rabble of every country united in the general ignorant greed of the wolf pack.

Bolshevism may come to America through the Socialists, through the I. W. W. or through the Non-Partisan League—which in the State of North Dakota to-day hold a two-thirds majority of both House and Senate. It will grow out of the ignorant and discontented foreigners unassimilated in this country. We must expect it naturally to come from these and from the pro-Germans in this country, because those people never have been satisfied with what we did in the war. In general, Bolshevism lives only on its own excitement, its own lack of plans, its own eccentricities. It finds its opportunity in any time of unrest and of slackened government.