OCR Text |
Show IN Til K SWIM There are many Americans whose lovaliy lias stood every test, and who yet feel unable to reconcile themselves them-selves to our paticipation in the European conflict. They recognize that assaults have been made upon our prestige. They feel that the honor of the Republic has suffered insults against which a merely verbal protest would be only a confession of weakness. They are spending their utmost effort and resource re-source in this gigantic encounter, and yet they feel an abiding regret as they see us drawing further away from that tranquil isolation in which we viewed with the security of spectators the moves and countermoves on Europe's chessboard for over forty years. "This aloofness can never come again," is their complaint. They do not realize that it could not have been preserved under any conditions. We have not always been rich. The spectacle of latteiday prosperity misleads us. We forget that it is the latest thing in modernity. A few years ago this was the pioneer nation ,and pioneers are poor. So short a time has it taken us to become familiar with surplus that we overlook its novelty. When we had barely enough fur ourselves we exported nothing, and our intercourse with other nations remained about zero. Then came the overflowing cornucopia, cornu-copia, and export trade. We lost our political detachment, and we are unlikely ever to regain it. Of course, it is possible for us to make export trade illegal after the war. In a comic opera nation it could be done. With us it would mean the ratification of a tyrranou3 principle more onerous than any enactment en-actment of pre-revolutionary Russia. Such surrender of our bodies and our goods would mean serfdom. Since, then, we cannot reruse to rub shoulders with other nations we may as well make their acquaintance. The founders of the Church were commanded to fraternize with the Gentiles, and here we find a sane precedent. pre-cedent. We may like our neighbors better than we think, and they will not like us the less if we show ourselves our-selves able to protect ourselves from any aggression to which such intercourse inter-course might make us liable. |