Chapter V: Part 5

I suspect that the man to blame for it all was a certain young American whose mixed ancestry has created a rare and most effective personality. He has inherited all the grace of his French ancestors, the tenacity (a virtue in which he excels) of his Dutch or double Dutch progenitors, and I am sure he can claim kinship with the first man who "kissed the Blarney stone." He could pull the latch-string to any foreign colony in that great conglomerate of peoples, and always be greeted as one of them. The Young Men's Christian Association, in whose name he served, could not have had a more worthy exponent of its social creed, and America could not have projected against these foreigners a better representative than Charles W. Blanpied.

The reception was held in the Chinese Presbyterian Church, and upon our arrival we found it crowded by a solemn-looking company of Chinese. We were conducted to the platform and introduced to his Excellency the Consul-General, ministers of various denominations, and dignitaries of Chinatown.

This was the first reception we attended where introductions were not followed by vigorous hand-shaking. I am inclined to believe that the softness of the Oriental palm is due to the fact that it is not vigorously pressed every time two men meet each other.

The Herr Director was in ecstasy over the beautiful Chinese girls in the choir. Doubtless he would have preferred sitting among them, rather than where he was, between the Consul-General and the chairman of the evening.

The reception opened with prayer, as if it were a church service; then the choir sang an anthem, followed by four speeches of welcome. The first by his Excellency the Consul-General lasted an hour and seemed much longer, because it was in Chinese and unintelligible to us.

I was asked to respond, and, under the circumstances, my remarks were brief. The clever interpreter made a good deal of them, judging by the length of time it took him, and the tumultuous applause with which every sentence was greeted.

The Herr Director told me it was the poorest speech he ever heard; but I am inclined to believe that he was a little jealous because he was not asked to speak; or perhaps he was merely trying to keep me humble, a course which he had consistently pursued from the day I met him in New York.

The reception closed with the benediction, and the dignitaries and guests proceeded to a Chinese restaurant which was genuinely Oriental; not one of those nondescript Chop Suey places which serve such varied and often objectionable purposes. The entire establishment was reserved for us. It was gayly decorated with the banners of the Youngest Republic, an orchestra played vigorously and so unmelodiously that the Herr Director was reminded of the ultra modern German compositions.

The menu was the most mysterious thing of the evening, ranging from tea to broiled seaweed, and eggs which looked their age and were not ashamed of it. There was fowl which was made unrecognizable to both the eye and the palate, something which tasted like glue flavored with onion, and something else which to my perverted Occidental palate seemed like stewed Turkish towels. There were sweetmeats before and after and between courses. Beside the mystery, the variety and novelty of the banquet, it had one other virtue; it was not followed by after dinner speeches, that common American practice which is an assault upon one's digestion, and, not infrequently, upon good taste.

While there were no after dinner speeches, we had a chance to discuss the problem of the Chinese in California, and their brave attempts to become Americanized in thought and feeling, in spite of the unyielding race prejudice they have had to meet; thus renewing our faith in our common origin and destiny, regardless of our apparent differences. Never before had I realized how gentle these Chinese are nor how altogether likeable, and it was no surprise to find that some of the Californians have made the same discovery, and are treating them accordingly.

We visited the Immigrant Station at San Francisco and I wished we had not; for our treatment of the incoming Orientals lacks all those elements of which I had boasted. We are neither humane, nor fair, neither wise, nor decent. We found young Chinese women who had been detained for more than a year, and were left without occupation or suitable companionship or even a hope of early release. There were Chinese boys who were herded with hardened, vicious-looking men, and the station, although ideally situated, was little better than a prison. What was done or was allowed to be done to make the lot of these people more bearable was accomplished by outsiders. Conditions may have changed since that time, and if they have, it is a cause for profound gratitude.

We also had an unusual opportunity to come in touch with the Japanese all along the coast. In one city we met a young Japanese, a graduate of my own college. He is now serving his countrymen there as a Buddhist priest. He has brought to his sacred calling much of the practical religion which he absorbed through his contact with the college Y. M. C. A., and it is his ambition to make Buddhism efficient and serviceable. He has put into the work all his patrimony and is eager to build up an institution patterned after the Young Men's Christian Association.

We had many a confidential talk, and if the soul of the Oriental is not altogether inscrutable I have had a glimpse of it; although I cannot say that I have fathomed his soul any more than he has mine. He seemed to me to typify his race in a remarkable degree. His is a strong, unyielding, definite kind of ethnos, and while we liked each other and tried to understand one another, there seemed to be a place just before we reached our Holy of Holies where we stood before a barred gate.

When he told me that the American soul is absolutely unemotional in comparison with the Japanese, I knew he did not understand us; even as I did not understand the Japanese when I told him that his people are cold and unemotional in comparison with us.

He took us to his temple in the basement of a shabby looking American tenement. He showed us his Sunday-school room, picture cards with Golden Texts, club and class rooms, and many devices borrowed from us, applied and perhaps improved upon by his Japanese genius. The day we left the city he brought us an invitation to luncheon at the home of the most prominent Japanese merchant in the place. Our hostess was a delightful woman educated in a Methodist school in her native country, and of course spoke English. Her husband, a conservative Buddhist, although he had been in this country for twenty years, was still Japanese to the core and spoke little or no English. There were several notables present, whose English was more or less Japanned. They were keen, well educated, and had absorbed enough of American culture to be baseball "fans."

During luncheon, which in our honor was served à la Nippon, we discussed the anti-Japanese legislation which at that time was menacing the peaceful relationship of the two countries.

All the Japanese agreed that they had no right to demand unrestricted immigration; but they were urgent that no crass distinction should be made between them and other races, and that they too should have the right to obtain citizenship when they had proved themselves fitted for it.

During this discussion the Frau Directorin and our host were carrying on a picturesque conversation; that is she did the talking and he smilingly said "Yes" to everything she said. She felt highly flattered that he understood her English, which was still about seventy-five per cent. German, while his was ninety-nine per cent. Japanese.

That night as we were leaving the city a delegation met us at the station to complete their Oriental hospitality by presenting us with beautiful and valuable souvenirs.

After such brief and friendly relationships with these people it is easy to come to very one-sided conclusions about the problem they present to the people of California. The situation is serious, but not so serious that, in order to try to meet it, we must cease to be gentlemanly in our relation to them.

It is the peculiarity of all people who face race problems, to face them irrationally and to think that in order to maintain racial dignity one must insult, demean, and humble other races; and the people of the United States in general, and those of the Pacific Coast in particular, have not yet learned a better and more rational way.

Strong race prejudice is not necessarily a sign of race superiority, and the people who constantly proclaim their superiority by humiliating and persecuting others have a hard time proving it.

If what I was frequently told is true, that California "wants no immigrants unless they are something between a mule and a man," then I can understand their animosity towards the Japanese; for they are altogether human and want to be so treated.

Beside the many racial varieties with which we came in contact on the Pacific Coast, we found there all the types produced in the United States, and while neither the Herr Director nor myself was able to differentiate them by external variation, we discovered them by different and contending ideals. From that standpoint they were even more interesting than the Orientals. Every shade of political and religious opinion, every kind of economic doctrine, every variety of social standards we found, besides currents and cross currents not easily discerned or classified. In spite of the difference in race, class, religion and politics, we found three well defined ideas expressed, upon which there is such an agreement that they might be called the California Confession of Faith.

First and foremost is the belief in the climate and the resources of the state. There is no religious doctrine in existence unless it be the monotheism of the Jews, which is so dogmatically held as this faith, that California is unsurpassed in climate, productiveness, in all those opportunities for a leisurely existence (provided you have worked hard elsewhere to get the necessary money) as are offered by its mountains and sea, its luxuriant homes and all other factors which contribute to the health and happiness of mankind. The only possible rival to California is Heaven itself, and just because in these unbelieving and unregenerate days so many people are not sure that there is such a place, or if there is, are in doubt that they will have a mansion reserved for them, they are leaving the farms and towns of the more mundane Middle West and prosperous East to get a taste of Heaven in California before they go to that "bourne from which no" wanderer has returned.

The people of California forgive any heresy or unbelief except a doubt, however faint, about its climate and resources. From the shadow of Mount Shasta to the deepest depth of the Imperial Valley, whether we were so cold in summer as to need furs, or were hot enough to melt, or were choking from dust when we travelled through miles of unredeemed desert, we found this faith in the climate and resources of California unshaken.

The Herr Director asked why there were so many cemeteries in the midst of the most crowded streets, and only a nearer look convinced him that they were "for sale" signs of rival real estate agents, who flourish equally with the sage-brush and cactus.

The second idea upon which there is a common agreement is, that while California in particular is perfect as to climate and resources, the world in general is a dire place, and its wrongs need to be righted.

In spite of the fact that the climate invites to leisure, it has not as yet tamed the fighting spirit of this fine, manly race, which is never so happy as when it has something to do and dare. This state has admitted women to the duties of citizenship, that all may have an equal share in the fight. The issues at stake are worth battling for, and nowhere else is the struggle more intense and dramatic. Organized labor and capital have crippled each other in the desperate conflict, fierce always, and often brutal. Protestantism, unorganized and frequently inefficient, faces the Roman Catholic hierarchy, defending, as it believes, the public schools and democratic government itself: awakening, purified democracy is in deadly conflict with the demagogue entrenched by special privilege while the prohibitionists are engaged in most desperate conflict with the vinous industry of the state.

The third doctrine of the California Confession of Faith is, that here on the Pacific Coast the white race has been providentially placed to defend this country against the encroachment of the "Yellow Peril." It was illuminating though painful to find that race prejudice is as intense here as in the South, and as unreasoning, and that one is as helpless against it as against a flood or fire. All one seems to be able to do is to accept it as a fact, and treat it like a contagious disease.

If there is any danger to the white race at the Pacific Coast, it is not the presence of the Japanese or Chinese in limited numbers; it is the attitude of mind which has been created among Americans there, and that may bring its own vengeance.

It was a great joy to introduce my guests to California, its orange groves and vineyards, its marvellous cities and palatial homes. It is a state to glory in; but strange to say I was somewhat depressed when I left it. The Herr Director said he missed my "brag and bluster."

Everything was beautiful and bountiful, even as the real estate agents have advertised; yet there were some things I found and some things I missed which took the "brag and bluster" out of me.

Its pioneer spirit is weakened by the accession of a large, leisure class, and how or where the next generation will find a grappling place for vigor of body, mind and spirit, is still a great question. To eat one's bread by the sweat of some ancestor's brow, to be challenged daily by the luxury of a limousine rather than by the hardships of the prairie schooner, to have as the end and aim of one's day the winning of a Polo match, or the making of a golf score, must ultimately bring about a decadence of spirit, even though one retains for a while litheness of body and activity of mind.

The boasted democracy of California is threatened, not only by the presence of a large leisure class and the necessary serving if not servant class, but also by a lack of faith in humanity, without which no democracy is safe and enduring. To California has been transferred all that unfaith gendered by the advent of the negro, and if there were ever a chance to revive the institution of slavery, that state might offer some hope for its revival.

The Californians who fear for the white race because of the presence of the Oriental, whom that fear has made vain, boastful, ungenerous and reckless of the feelings of others, need to know that a greater danger threatens the race--the decay of the democratic spirit, which languishes and perishes unless it permits to all men free access to the best it holds, regardless of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

Because I had lost my "brag and bluster" and wished to recover them, I took my guests, who were now homeward bound, to the one place which might fitly crown their experiences--the Grand Canyon, where one is apt to forget humanity and its fretting problems.

I must confess that by this time I was quite worn out; for introducing your country to a stranger is wearing business, especially when you are dealing with _blasé_ globe-trotters, who have done all the big things, from the Alps to the Dead Sea, and have had to crowd into a brief month the best which lies between New York and California. To do this with a lover's adulation, endeavoring more or less skillfully to hide defects and make the bright spots brighter still, may well tax one's nerves.

I acted as a sort of shock absorber, for I determined that the journey should be a joltless one for my guests; but in that I partially failed; for not only did I receive the shocks myself, I could not keep them from receiving some.

One of the worst of these jolts I suffered at the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. I was very sure of the Canyon itself; I knew it would put a thrill into the Herr Director, and force an expression of it out of him. I never worried about the Frau Directorin. We reached the Canyon in that happy mood gendered by a combination of Harvey meals and Pullman berths, and the sight of the friendly inn at the brink of the big surprise, and the cheer of the big log fire in the raftered room drew an involuntary exclamation of pleasure from the Herr Director. He registered, then asked the clerk for a room fronting the Canyon.

"Yes siree!" said the obliging young man as he attached a number to the Herr Director's long and illegible signature; "I'll give you a room so near that you can spit right into it."

Naturally I received the first shock; a minute later it communicated itself to the Herr Director. It did not reach the Frau Directorin, for her English fortunately was still limited; she kept on looking at the bright Navajo rugs, while the clerk smiled at his own smartness. The Herr Director commanded to have his bags taken to his room, and turning from the desk said: "Young man, I am a German, and I want you to understand that we do not spit in God's face."

The next morning the great Canyon was full of mist, and only faint outlines of its titanic architecture were visible. As we stood at the edge of the wondrous chasm, watching the last cloud being driven from the depths as the moisture was absorbed by the dry, desert air, the Frau Directorin was shaken by emotion as she gasped at intervals: "_Um Gottes Himmels Willen!_" The Herr Director, his feelings better controlled, said nothing; but after a long silence, muttered under his breath: "I should like to throw that clerk down this abyss as a penalty for his desecrating thought."

Every few minutes I heard him saying, as he shook his head: "Just think of it! Just think of it!"

I did not disturb him or ask him what he thought of it for I knew he could not tell, nor can any one. I think he felt as I felt, that all the cities he had seen were as nothing compared with this wonder of nature; that all the pillared post-offices and libraries which our cunning hands have scattered over this broad land are trifling toys compared with this templed miracle; that all our dreams of what we might paint or fashion or carve, or build, are child's play compared with this, and that we ourselves are mere nothings in the presence of what God hath wrought here in stone and clay, in color and form.

Never before had I so wished that I could rearrange the geography of the United States as when we turned eastward from the Grand Canyon. If I had the power of Him who shaped this earth I would have put it within a mile of the Atlantic Ocean and within a stone's throw of the Hoboken dock, and having shown my guests the Canyon, I would have put them on board their home-bound steamer, and as they sailed away I would have cried out with ancient Simeon: "Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace!"

XIII

_The Grinnell Spirit_

Between the Grand Canyon and the ship there might be "many a slip," especially as I was to conclude my guardianship of the travellers in my own town, prosaically placed in the great Mississippi Valley, which consists of two plains--one at the top and the other at the bottom, filled with corn and hogs, and most prosperous and contented people.

The place towards which we journeyed holds two things which are the biggest, most beautiful, and best things in the world--my home and my work, both of which my guests wished to see. I was anxious that they should; for there, if anywhere, they could come close to that I gloried in most, the American Spirit.

After the barren plains, the monotonous miles of sage-brush, and the long, straight stretches of railroad tracks, it was good to look upon green meadows and commodious farmhouses sheltered by groves of maple and elm, and surrounded by great fields of young corn just peeping above the black, rich clods.

During the last few hours of the trip the Herr Director thought every station at which the train stopped was our destination, and began gathering his various belongings. When finally we reached it he jumped out almost before the train stopped, so eager was he to see the place where he was to spend at least a fortnight, and really see the American home from the inside.

Again fortune favored me. It was early June. The air was soft from recent rains, the grassy lawns were wonderfully green; peonies were opening their buds, adding touches of color, snowballs hung thick upon the bushes, and blooming roses filled the air with sweet odors.

It seemed as if our neighbors had conspired to make the town ready for my distinguished visitors, and I could see that they enjoyed the peace of it, the friendliness of the park-like streets, the sight of well-kept homes set in gardens, and the cordial greetings of the people we met.

Their appreciation of all they saw before reaching the house, and their evident delight in the rooms prepared for them, not to mention their astonishment at finding their trunks awaiting them there, afforded me not only pleasure, but a great sense of relief; I felt that the race was won. I had faith to believe that they would be happy in our town of six thousand inhabitants, which is not unlike other places of the same size. It has its public park, two or three shopping streets, churches, schoolhouses, a few factories large and small, clubs, lodges, and all the things of which like towns may legitimately boast; yet it has a background peculiarly its own.

It was founded by an intrepid pioneer who brought a colony of New Englanders from the hills of Massachusetts to this treeless prairie, and with the imperious will of his race said: "Let there be a town!" And lumber was carted over miles of deep mud, cabins were built and there was a town.

And again he said: "Let there be a railroad!" And he diverted the course of a great railroad system miles out of its way, and there was a railroad.

And he said: "There must be no saloon in this place!" So more than half a century before strong drink was acknowledged to be a social and physical foe, he had seen its true nature and put prohibition into every deed of real estate, thus making it impossible for liquor to gain a foothold.

Years passed and he said: "Let there be a college!" and he brought one across the state, and there was a college; a young, infant thing just started by Christian missionaries who had come from the East, each of them to plant a church, all of them to plant a college.

This infant educational institution was put into its rude cradle in the midst of an unshaded campus, and when it had grown to generous size, with buildings to house it and trees to shade it, a cyclone swept the campus bare, and instead of a joyous Commencement, which was but a few days distant, there were funerals and desolation, wreck and ruin.

On a pile of débris sat the same pioneer with a determined smile playing upon his face, and at once, while the tears upon the mourners' cheeks were still wet, he and others like him began rebuilding the town and the college.

Those men now "rest from their labor" in that bit of rolling prairie saved from the plowmen and the harvester, and consecrated to hold our dead until the great day.

The morning after our arrival in Grinnell, the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin, who, during our travels, had little opportunity to indulge their fondness for exercise, walked out to the cemetery. It is a beautiful, well-kept spot, but half spoiled by crowding headstones. From it can be seen church steeples peeping through the elm trees which shelter the town; the ugly stand-pipe and the tall chimney of our one big factory. At our feet lay the little artificial lake where much fishing is done, and sometimes fish are caught. As far as we could see were prosperous farms with their comfortable homes, generous barns, turreted silos, and wide meadows where calves and colts grazed.

One of our virtues, the Herr Director thought, was that we do not boast about our dead. Whatever boasting we do, and we do not boast too much, it ceases when the earth covers us. He saw no fulsome eulogies carved upon the headstones; often nothing but a name and the two dates of birth and death.

In the face of that great and last achievement we are very humble and honest; although in our little cemetery lie buried men and women of whom I should like to boast. They were the great, real Americans who worked diligently, honestly and humbly, who left no huge fortunes to curse the next generation; but built their modest homes, and before the roof tree was lifted, had built a church and a schoolhouse. They put their tithes into the Lord's treasury before they put money into a bank, and while they were still wading through mud, anchored the college upon a rock, making its growth and permanence their great extravagance.

They believed in an austere Christ, but believed in Him implicitly, followed Him consistently and left a legacy of simplicity, temperance and frugality.

Yes, I boasted of our dead to my guests. I boasted of that grim, fighting man whose name the town bears, who was the personification of the determined, American pioneer, the conqueror of mere circumstances.

I boasted of that firm, unyielding, controversial Calvinist, George F. Magoun, who ruled the college in his own stern way. He was the last, but not the least of his kind, who built deep and strong and straight upon the foundations of morality and religion; so that others could build loftily and boldly.

I led them to the grave where rests the body of his successor, the two differing from one another in opinions and method at every point; for the younger man was the forerunner of a new dispensation, its prophet, disciple and martyr. Yet both men were made of the same stern, unyielding stuff, and both rested their lives and the hope of life's better things to come, upon the same foundation.

When the names of those Americans who prophesied the day of the Kingdom, who worked for it and suffered for it, shall be placed upon the honor roll, the name of George A. Gates, now carved upon a modest monument, will be found imperishably written there.

Near by, under the shade of slender white birches, we saw the simple shaft which marks the resting place of one of the Iowa Band, James J. Hill, who holds his place in the annals of the college, not only because he gave the first dollar to help found it, but because of the continued loyalty of his sons.

I wished my guests could have come to us before we buried the man whose life spanned the old and the new--the white-haired, ever youthful, eloquent teacher, Leonard F. Parker, who smiled benignly upon us all until his eyes closed forever, and with their closing, a benediction was gone. He was the type of missionary teacher who began his career in a log cabin, who, whether he taught in a country school or in a great State University, taught with a passion for men. The impress of his personality remained with his pupils long after they had forgotten his erudite lore.

As great as these great Americans were their wives, and no one can ever think of them as less than the equals of their husbands.

If the American woman occupies a unique place in the world, it is not only because the American man has been more generous than his European brother, but because she has proved her equality. She has attained the measure of rights and privileges still denied to most of her sisters elsewhere because she earned and deserved them.

We, the living, sons and daughters of these great teachers by birth and by adoption, cannot hold in too high esteem the legacy they left us. We do not know with as firm an assurance as we ought to know, how much we owe to them, and that, if we waste our inheritance, we waste spiritual forces which we cannot generate.

They were all, in the true sense, provincial, narrow men. They thought of America and of the world and of the world to come, in the terms of their creed, their town and their college; while we who have circled the globe and think in world terms first, and boast of wider vision and larger faith, may be in danger of overlooking the fact that in our small place and places like it may be decided the fate of America, and through America, the fate of the world.

The Herr Director was astonished and the Frau Directorin pained to find that we lived in a servantless house and in practically a servantless town; that we were our own cooks and housemaids, butlers and gardeners. When the Herr Director saw me mowing my lawn in broad daylight he wondered that I did not lose caste among my fellows.

The Frau Directorin was remarkably adaptable. She delighted in wielding the dustless mop (to reduce "the meat"), she dusted the bric-à-brac, and out of the kindness of her heart and in spite of our protests, became "first aid" to my wife.

One morning, just as I was waking, I heard the rattle of a lawn-mower under my window; not the quick, sharp, sustained noise which usually arouses the neighborhood, but a slow, measured sound, by fits and starts. In between I could hear puffing and panting, like that of a small steam engine. When I looked out of the window I saw something which my eyes could not believe. The Herr Director had begun mowing the lawn, and I let him finish it. It pretty nearly finished him; but after his bath and a generous American breakfast, he glowed from health and happiness.

"I never knew," he said, "the elevating power of physical labor. I think I will take a lawn-mower home with me."

The Frau Directorin put a damper upon his enthusiasm by reminding him that he would have to take a lawn home with him too, and more than that, the town itself; for in their environment he would not dare use the lawn-mower even if he had one.

I am quite sure now that the Herr Director would have liked to take my little town home with him, with the lawn-mower and the lawn. If he could have done so, he might have changed the course of empires.

I urged him, if he really wished to annex us, to do it soon; for there is no little danger that we, too, shall lose faith in the redemptive power of labor, the sufficiency of little things, the grandeur of plain living and high thinking, the exaltation of the humble, the inheritance for the meek and the reward of the righteous. When we lose those, we have lost that which, in our proud, provincial way, we call "The Grinnell Spirit"--an integral part of the American--the World-spirit.

XIV

_The Commencement and The End_

There are some aspects of our American life which I tried to hide from my guests. I kept as many of our national family skeletons as possible in their closets, and made sure that the doors were securely locked.

I was glad that the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin were to leave this country before our insane Fourth of July, which we are endeavoring to make sane. I did not care to have them here on Thanksgiving Day from which, through the superabundance of turkey and cranberry sauce, the element of Thanksgiving has been almost eliminated. I was profoundly grateful that during their visit there was no election day with its sordid partisanship, its ballot box, not yet sacred enough to make beautiful or place nobly in some civic temple; but we did urge them to remain over Commencement day, that most happy, sweetly solemn occasion, unspoiled as yet by rich display. It is the great festival of our democracy, shared by town and gown, when we open the gates to rich and poor, to common opportunity and duty.

We made no mistake in thus planning. The town wore its holiday air. From farm and village, from many states, on every train, parents were arriving, walking proudly beside their sons and daughters, in academic garb.

"Old Grads" were being welcomed back by _Alma Mater_, grateful to her for having helped make life rich, and sweet, and worth living. They hoped to place under her care their children and their children's children, whom they had brought there to give them a foretaste of joys to come.

It was a wonderful experience for the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin to meet them. They were fêted and feasted; they wore class and college colors, and entered into the spirit of it all as if they, too, had been the children of Grinnell College.

Among the graduates they met editors, lawyers and doctors who had come back from the great cities; professors who had won academic renown, and are serving the great universities; teachers who had carried into the public schools the spirit of their college; preachers who have gained prominence, and those who minister in humble places, faithful in their obscurity and proud of their chance to serve. There were missionaries who came back from the ends of the earth where they had started centers of education, places of healing and temples of hope.

They listened to stirring messages from pulpit and platform, to the young dreams of minor poets who sang the lay of their class; to historians who reviewed the four college years as a great epoch closed; to prophets who predicted failure and success, and a golden day of jubilee to the whole weary world, when this particular class got back of it.

On Commencement day they watched the dignified President conferring the degrees of Bachelor, Master and Doctor.

At noon they attended the college banquet and suffered through the after dinner speeches.

That night on the crowded campus they enjoyed the Glee Club's joyful songs, and then, worn to the last shred of their highly emotional natures, walked home with us while the last strains of the Alumni Song faded away into the night.

The Herr Director talked until after midnight, telling of the many things which pleased him. The religious dignity, the fine simplicity, the natural, sweet, pure relationship between men and women; but above all else, the democratic spirit from which these other things emanate.

He had an apt way of singing snatches of German song of which he seemed to command an unlimited supply; and as he mounted the stairs to his room he sang: "_Ach, wenn es nur immer so bliebe._" (Oh, if it would only remain so always.) Then followed the sad note which is the major one of the German lyric: "_Es war zu schön gewesen, es hatt nich sollen sein._" (It was too beautiful and therefore could not be.)

I knew it might not remain so beautiful always; but if life is worth while at all, it is worth while struggling to keep it so.

I do not know what share one person may have in influencing the current upon which a nation is drifting; but I believe in the power of the individual, and I shall "fight the good fight"--and a hard one it is--and "keep the faith"--although it is not easy to keep it--faith in God and men and in the American Spirit.

Four weeks after the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin left us I received the following letter. I have had some difficulty in translating the involved and rather lengthy epistle into straightforward English, but have done so that I may share it with my readers.

MY DEAR FRIEND:

We arrived home in safety after a rather stormy and uneventful voyage. On board the ship we met a number of Lake Mohonk acquaintances, and therefore the atmosphere which you tried to create for me surrounded me even in mid ocean, and consequently you ought to be happy and contented.

When we reached Washington half-cooked, for even your excellent provisions for our comfort were unavailing against your terrific summer heat, your friend and his automobile were at the station; just such a friend and such an automobile as met us dozens of times before.

If anything, this friend was a little more persistent than the other species, for we were taken up and down and in and out, to everything within fifty miles of Washington. We shook hands with half your congressmen some of them seem to be professional hand-shakers, and my hand aches at the thought of it.

State Secretary Bryan received me most affably and talked about his peace treaties. He didn't give me much chance to do any talking myself. He seems so genuinely American; by that I mean simple and childlike in many things, and complex and difficult to understand in others.

He is neither a humbug as some of your papers say, nor a prophet as he thinks himself. His faith in humanity and in himself is pathetically colossal.

It is amusing to find that you Americans, and you are the most American of them all--you Americans who have invented cash registers and time clocks, those symbols of unfaith in humanity, are so full of faith in your relation to big, national and international problems.

Your optimism may, after all, be due to your ignorance, coupled with the fact that you are living in a land vast and isolated, which has not quite exhausted its resources and opportunities. The most materialistic people on earth in your relationship to each other, you leap into remarkable idealism in the sphere of politics and diplomacy. If it is true that "God takes care of children and fools," then God is taking wonderfully good care of you Americans, who seem to me to be both.

In our country we would put a man of Mr. Bryan's type in charge of an orphan asylum, and feel that the children would be safe with him at least till their twelfth year; and yet I know that he has done vigorous fighting, and I shall give him a chapter in my book about America, which as you know I intend to write and have already begun.

It was quite a change of atmosphere when I went from the Department of State to the White House. The President's secretary seems to me a man of large calibre, kind, yet firm. A man to like and yet to fear; just the kind of person a great man needs as a buffer against his friends, and as a guard against his enemies. The atmosphere of the White House is dignified, yet not cold; democratic, yet reserved; you feel that it is a place of power.

Above everything else you have done for me I want to thank you for making it possible for me to meet President Wilson. He is not at all the type of man I expected to find. There is nothing pedantic about him and I do not know a man in any of our universities like him. He is not as easy to analyze as Mr. Bryan, he is by far the greater, more complex and stronger nature. He has the firmness which rulers should possess, and may be too unyielding when once he has made up his mind to anything. He knows more than Mr. Bryan but is not as dogmatic, not nearly as friendly, and yet I came nearer to that which I sought in him, and I think I understood him better. He let me do all the talking, but asked all manner of questions; yet he told me more that way than Mr. Bryan, who did all the talking.

If President Wilson is a politician, he is a new kind which I have never met before. I think he has made many mistakes, which of course is natural. There is only one of your presidents who never made mistakes, and that was President Roosevelt. He made blunders, which he had the pugnacity and the sheer physical courage to turn into political capital, and then blundered again.

President Wilson was in the midst of the Mexican muddle when I saw him, yet he seemed to me very well poised, and bearing his many burdens, not like a martyr or a saint, but as a really strong man ought to bear them.

Of course you do not believe that I took your eulogies of America "_fur baare Muenze_" (at their face value). There are two Americas and you are living in but one of them. Your America lies in the high altitudes of Lake Mohonk, Hull House, and Grinnell College. The other America which you tried to hide from me I saw, just because you tried to hide it. It is sordid, base, selfish, and above all strong; but that you do not seem to know.

You have _modified_ my view of America, but you have not _changed_ it. You are still a big experiment as a nation, and I am not sure that it will be a successful one. You have nothing to teach us in government, business or education. Just one thing I envy you--your faith in your unfinished country and in yourself as a force in its making.

As you know, I do not share your faith; especially do I not believe that one individual or many individuals can change the course of empires.

You think yourself citizen, king and priest; but you are merely an atom, a conscious atom of course, and in that and that alone, in that you are conscious, and know yourself a part of the whole and believe yourself an effective part of it, lies happiness. I enjoyed hearing you talk about the American Spirit; you talked about the soul of a country as if you had seen it and felt it and loved it.

My dear friend, you do not know your own soul, nor the stuff out of which it is made, and yet in your American conceit you talk about the soul of a country. It was an interesting psychological study to watch you, and it gave me much amusement as well as something to think about.

I enjoyed you most of all in your own little town, your college and your hospitable, beautiful home. I feared you would burst from pride and complacency as you interpreted the "American Spirit" from that little place; a speck, and not even a well-defined speck, on the map of your country.

You, a world traveller, have at last become a really narrow provincial, I should say a very happy one, as provincials always are. You wanted me to see your country through the June atmosphere of your Commencement; a democratic, peaceful, rose-laden America. I saw it through the smoke and grime of Chicago, the crowded tenements of New York, the injustice of your courts and the corruption of your politics.

Yet I am glad I saw _your_ America, and I want to thank you for your ardent endeavor to show it to me as you want it to be, and not as it is.

My wife sends her thanks and greetings. She received more benefit out of her visit than I. I have had to promise to remodel the house, and put in another bathroom which is to be between our bedrooms. The new bathtub must be porcelain and we are to have an instantaneous heater. She still talks a good deal of the "_gute_ cornflecks" and "grep frut" which we both enjoyed so much. Above all she remembers the courtesy of the men, and if the servant did not place her chair for her at table, I fear I should now have to do it.

America certainly is a Paradise for women, but it is "_Die Hoelle_" for men.

Remember that when you and any of your family come to Berlin you are to be our guests. I trust you will come soon, for conditions over here look dubious, and the war, "_der grosse Krieg_," may come before we know it.

_Herzliche Gruesse von Haus zu Haus._
_Auf Wiedersehen._

XV

_The Challenge of the American Spirit_

I am sure the Herr Director will not object if I have the last word; for while he was with me that privilege was seldom mine and obtained only by dint of strategy.

Since his departure, the great war which he prophesied has moved over Europe and hides every bit of fair and peaceful sky like a storm-cloud; its thunder and destructive lightning fill the air, leaving scarcely a place safe and undisturbed.

Not a soul is unafraid, not a heart is without pain and sorrow, and the Herr Director himself, although past middle age, has volunteered to serve in the trenches, slippery from oozing blood and foul from the spattered brains of men. The "fiddling, twiddling diplomats, the haggling, calculating merchants of Babylon, the sleek lords with their plumes and spurs" have had their way, and the poor, blind, ignorant millions, made mad by hate, do their brutal bidding.

We, on this safer side, who as yet have not loosed the dogs of war, have calculated the loss to Europe in the fratricidal slaughter of its most virile men, in the loss of its arts and trades, in the wreck and ruin to houses and homes and in the age-long poverty which awaits. Much counting has been done as to what we shall make out of this sure bankruptcy that is to come to the nations which are our competitors for the world's trade, and what glory shall be ours when New York, and not London shall be the new Babylon, with power to make the "Epha small and the Shekel great."

With the incalculable loss to the European nations there has come to some of them a gain in national unity upon which under no circumstances we may count.

It has been with no small sense of pride that I have demonstrated to the Herr Director and to others the fact that, in spite of our youth as a nation, and the varied national, linguistic and religious rootage of our population even in the Colonial period, we have grown to be one people. Even the constant inflow of new and more varied human material has not weakened us but indeed the sense of national unity has grown stronger. I have watched with joy the processes by which this alien element was becoming one with us, the fading away of animosities and inherited prejudices, and the making of a new people out of the world's conglomerate.

The war has brought about a retardation of this process, and we shall have great cause for gratitude if no permanent damage is done to our nation's spirit, a loss for which no possible gain in any direction could compensate. The term "Hyphenated American," which has now come into use, if it indicates anything more than the place of a man's national or racial origin, and the very natural sympathies arising therefrom, is an insult to the man to whom it is applied, and a confession of divided allegiance, if voluntarily assumed.

It may be interesting to note that it was His Majesty, the Emperor of Germany, who repudiated the hyphen when a German-American delegation called on him on the occasion of some royal anniversary.

When the delegation was introduced in this hyphenated manner, he said: "Germans I know, Americans I know, but German-Americans I do not know."

Although the hyphen has always existed, it has assumed new meaning in these troubled days and is applied as a term of opprobrium, largely to Americans of German birth; people who have always been loyal to the country of their adoption, and, I think, are no less loyal now.

If there has been wavering in their devotion, if the process of yielding themselves to the ideals and interests of this country has been arrested, they are not altogether to blame, and we ourselves are not altogether blameless.

It was thoroughly in harmony with the American Spirit that our sympathies should go out to brave little Belgium, and turn from the ruthless conqueror who was much nearer to us culturally and in greater harmony with us spiritually. It was also natural for the German people in this country to challenge the evident bias of the press, and the resultant prejudices arising in the minds of their friends and neighbors. Being German they knew what a German soldier is capable of doing, and of what atrocities he is guiltless; although in the attempt to defend their people they in turn became as unfair as we, condoning every act of the Germans and besmirching their enemies.

How far this bias can carry one is illustrated by the German pastor in a neighboring town, one of the gentlest souls I know, who, when told of the destruction of the _Lusitania_, said: "Thanks be to God, let the good work go on." He will not have to live very long to repent of this.

To match him I may quote a most lovable Quaker lady nearly ninety years of age, who, with a violence in striking contrast to the Quaker character, expressed as her dearest wish that she might be permitted to kill the Emperor of Germany, and I am almost sure she was not alone in that pious desire, even among the members of her family.

The German press and the German pulpit have fanned this reawakened Germanic spirit, not always from lofty motives, and many an editor and pastor have found this antagonism a source of revenue and a hope of perpetuating their influence.

If the American press both in its news and editorial columns has been painful reading to any one who loves fair play, it did not help him to turn to the German press, whose utterances were made more distressing by the fact that not infrequently they contained expressions bordering on treason. Had their editors lived in Germany and spoken of the Emperor in the same words which they applied to their President, their terms of imprisonment, if combined, would reach into eternity.

Even after the war the attempt will be made to keep alive this antagonism, and if possible to widen the breach. It will be a serious challenge to our national spirit, for I doubt that we can maintain a vital unity unless it represents one country, one people, and one language.

I know of no way in which to meet this danger effectively; but I do know that it is not through reprisals or punishments. Perhaps it is best to hope that at the close of the war we shall all recover our sanity. Certain it is that the American people have in the Germans in this country too valuable and powerful an element to alienate, and the German people who have made this country their home have too great a sense of the value of it and its institutions, to them and their children, to be willing to jeopardize the American Spirit, because of that which must be but a passing phase in the history of our poor, misguided, human race.

Besides the threatened break in unity, the American Spirit is being challenged by a call to arms, not merely to avert any momentary, threatened danger, but to be permanently safeguarded, prepared against its predatory neighbors all around the globe. Whether those who join in this call know it or not, or wish it or not, it means militarism. When just such arguments were used for Germany's preparedness, when that gospel was being preached with all possible fervor, one of the wisest Germans said: "_Wehrkraft wird immer Mehrkraft_" ("Defensive power always becomes offensive power"), and I am sure that the average American will say that, in the case of Germany, this has proved true.