Page:The web (1919).djvu/471

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science and their supposed superior way of doing things is bluff and fake. They have done some good work, but no better work, and they are not doing better work, in the field of economics than the English, the French, and the Americans. In the field of business they have nothing on you. For the love of Mike, don't be afraid of them! You can put it over them every time.


We need not fear either the arms, the arts or the artifices of Germany. What we need to fear, really, is our easy-*going, unsuspicious American character, our tendency to forget everything else in the great game of affairs. It is time now that from the great mass of the American people there shall appear silently, standing shoulder to shoulder and side to side as they have in their old organization, a new American Protective League. Our old League determined that our homes and our property should be saved. Let the new League determine that our country and our principles shall be saved. All the eyes of the world turn to America to-day. The remainder of the world is distracted. In Berlin, radicals coming up from the dregs are doing their best to get control of a ruined country. "Bismarck's structure was wonderful while it lasted," says an editorial in an able American paper, "but it was a nation without a soul. It was made of blood and iron, and it could not live because the spirit was left out." Neither can our civilization or our citizenship live if they are made of silver and gold, and if the spirit be left out.

It is time to look at the census map of America. We must revise those colors in the next ten years, or we have lost the war. This distrust of Germany in America, in South America and in Europe, is something which should excite no sympathy and no pity whatever. Wars are not cleared up, for example, on any basis of sympathy. There is no use figuring what we can do to show Germany how sorry we are. The thing to do is to leave Germany sorry. She has coal, iron, timber, copper, potash, phosphate, abundant other natural resources. If she cannot handle them, others can handle them for her. Marshal Foch has threatened repeatedly that if Germany continues cynically to disregard the terms of the armistice, he will march again on Ger-