LOYALTY

It has become a fashion amounting to almost an obsession for a great many Americans, especially those who are young, educated and have sojourned abroad, to deplore the lack of ideals, the "crass materialism," of their native land. The younger they are, the more educated they are, the longer they have sojourned abroad, in so much greater measure is their contempt voiced, till it has become almost the mark of culture and broad-mindedness to hold in contempt the nation's money, lust, and laud to the point of idolization the noble principles and the high ideals of Europe. It is always easy to find the commonplace in that which a man knows, and to see in that which he does not know glamor and super-material beauty. Burdened by his own provincialism, which he considers cosmopolitan breadth, the highly (?) educated--in the bookish sense,--young man of America is fond of talking in an impassioned way of the infinitely superior knowledge and the supremely finer moral sense of all Europe. Any attempt to reply to such a point of view will receive a blank stare and the answer that your inability to see in itself proves the national mental inferiority as exampled in you. That is a fairly unanswerable argument; the old one of saying a man is a fool because he is not wise enough to see he is a fool.

There are materialists and intellectuals, there are fine minds and coarse, across the water in about the same proportion that they are in America. The present war is not exactly a holy war. For every man who goes in it that the civilization of the world should be saved, there are a score who go in because they like the sound of imperialism, or because they hate another nation, or because they were drafted. Among those who go in for the finer motives and voluntarily lay down their lives for reasons that are the farthest removed from all material considerations, Americans, of "material" America, are not without their glory.

It would do a great many men good, who are weary of the land that gave them birth, and eager for the name of cosmopolites, to strive to see wherein lies the true spirit of America, and what is the real meaning, the true vision, that lies beneath the materialism of smoking factory and busy toll.