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Show Liberty Cherry Trees VIRGINIA ELLIS JENCKES, congresswoman from Indiana, told the D. A. R. in Washington that, "If we were alert in the maintenance of true national defense we would, through proper legal action, root up every Japanese cherry tree on federal property, saw them up for firewood, and replant them with American cherry trees." How utterly silly! How reminiscent of 1917, when it seemed to be believed over here that it would help win the war to eat liberty fried potatoes, pota-toes, liberty cabbage and so on through a long list than to feed upon the identical items with "German" for a prefix. In Washington in blossom time there is nothing noth-ing more beautiful than those same cherry trees, still remaining as a symbol of American-Japanese friendship. Much better will it be to nourish that friendship than to destroy it. President Presi-dent Roosevelt coined a happy phrase when he succinctly described American foreign policy as that of "the good neighbor." It was a meaningful gesture to theentire world. It echoed the sen-timenfonhe sen-timenfonhe whole-American people, unless it be accepted that there are small groups of small men in this country eager to add to their profits from war. Besides, should the lady lawmaker's notion of true patriotism be carried out to its logical conclusion, we ought to look to the future as well as the past. The consequence would be to uproot all our Norway spruce, Canadian maples, German elms, Italian squash, Rome beauty apples, ap-ples, English ivy, Irish potatoes, Lombardy poplars, pop-lars, French lilacs, Brussels sprouts and who knows what else among the foreigners in the vegetable veg-etable kingdom saving us from sizzling in summer sum-mer sun, from devitalizing ourselves for lack of vitamins, from floods flowing from denuded watersheds and from the ugliness of treeless landscapes. Woodman spare those trees all trees. |