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Show THE WAR AS A MELTING POT. We hear much these days of the melting pot as applied to the Americanization Ameri-canization of our foreign immigrants. While the need has 'been great that this foreign element be fused with the national life as quickly as possible, pos-sible, there is yet another phase of American life wherein the melting pot can render great service, and that melting pot will be developed in the war upon which we have just entered. Until recent years America has been distressingly provincial. Not provincial as a whole, but provincial by sections. The down caster looked with suspicion upon anything having its origin outside old New England. The Southerner viewed all parts of the country save the West as alien territory, and only had a tollerance for that section because it was made up largely of his kinsman. The citizen cit-izen of the Middle West has always been convinced that creation ceased with the completion of his territory, and so it ran. The thoughts and customs of the various sections were antagonastic, and it was only grudgingly grudg-ingly that either could be brought to admit that there might he anything of merit come out of the other. All this the war will change. We will no longer be a nation of many elements all antagonistic and out of sympathy. We will no longer waste bur energies in berating and belittling belittl-ing our neighbors because, forsooth, they may not view all of life with our eyes. In France there are today young me:i from every part of this country fighting side by side sharing the same dangers and the same death. As the war progresses their numbers are'in-reasing. are'in-reasing. Each is learning from ithers and each is unconsciously learning to see life from the other's viewpoint. As the association progresses pro-gresses many common views will he developed and where antagonism ex-ts ex-ts close and intimate contact will gradually but surely bring each into harmony with the other. When this war is ended and our boys come home it will not be a crowd of provincials we shall welcome, wel-come, but an army of cosmopolitans world citizens, we may say. These men will have probed to the bottom the character of their fellows and learned all there was1 to know of them. And in that knowledge they will each have found much value when fully understood, and will have learned to appreciate, to the full the ;ood points of all. The w-ar will complete what our great industrial developement had begun it will make of us at last one compact nation, all Americans together, all with a common interest, a common love and a common destiny. |