Page:The web (1919).djvu/473

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  • tioned Fred Würsterbarth, who had been a citizen of America

for thirty years, and Carl August Darmer, of Tacoma, Washington, who had been a citizen in America for thirty-six years. Do you think these two men were any worse than a one hundred thousand others who worked as spies of Germany? Hardly. The war remains still to be fought against these men who still are under arms. Apply this test to your friends and associates—to your lawyer, your doctor, to your grocer, above all, to your alderman, your councilman, your mayor and your representatives in Congress. Why not? It is only the same test which the United States District Court in New Jersey applied to Würsterbarth.

Eight years ago an American minister of the gospel who had lived much abroad, especially in Germany, came back to this country and wrote a book which perhaps never was very popular. He held up the mirror of America to herself. His views to-day would not be so much that of one crying in the wilderness. Let us follow along, in a running synopsis of the pages of his book, a hint now and then from page to page, and see what one man thought in that long ago before war was dreamed of; before the German army of spies, military and industrial, had been unearthed; before the plans of Germany for world conquest had been divulged. That writer says:


In fifty years New York will be what the Italians make it. . . . In New York there is only one native American to twenty foreigners. Waterbury, Connecticut, has a population of 30,000, 20,000 being aliens. . . . New Haven and Hartford, cities of long-established colleges, have an un-American population which in ten years will outnumber the natives. . . . Parts of New Jersey are more hopelessly de-Americanized than New England. Perth Amboy has at least three to one non-Americans. Cincinnati and Milwaukee have been German cities for a quarter of a century; Chicago hardly less so. . . . Wherever I take a meal I am served solely by foreigners. . . . It seems odd that I should seldom ever see or meet Americans except in a social or professional way, and the professions are being rapidly filled by men of foreign names. . . . The Yankee no longer counts in the industrial and commercial life of New England. In his place is to be found the Italians, Hungarians. French, Polocks, Scandinavians and Jews. . . . Thoroughness, therefore, must now