AMERICANIZATION.

Americanization as a process has its dangers. All of us are alive to the menace of an unassimilated foreign element; but the problem of making it over is not simple.

If the Americanizer is a Syndicalist or a Sovietist, the cure may be worse than the disease. No greater mistake could be made than to imagine that the Syndicalists and Sovietists of America are all foreigners. There is a large body of Americans--if by the term American is meant one born and bred in this country--who support the Russian revolution; and that does not make them Russians. When such a radical Americanizer approaches an immigrant, there is often no Conservative Americanizer present to compete with him. To take a single example: in a recent meeting of steel strikers in the Pittsburgh district, an investigating Senator asked all those present who could understand English to raise their hands. In the crowded hall three hands were lifted. "At the same time," Lt. Van Buren reports, "the government seized literally tons of the socalled Red Bible of Lenine and Trotzky, which is being distributed among just such people, and still the country is flooded with it."

Between the Scylla of Radical Americanization and the Charybdis of Reactionary Americanization lies the only safe course the country can pursue, Radicalism disjoints, conservatism retards progress. The Americanism which most of us are prepared to support is not the monopoly of any political party; it is that element in all political parties which causes them to work--in so far as they do work--for the national benefit as they understand it. It is not learned entirely from books, nor can it all be put into words. Americanization has been defined as the "grafting of the best ideals of the new world onto the best ideals of the old." In this spirit only must all citizens approach the crises of the day. Without it they will tear the structure of American society asunder.