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Extent of relaxation on the ledge,
Jabbed for a broken lath to whittle on,

Cleared out his throat, and rid himself of this:

"Well, these professors that you ask about
Who come here every year are curious.
I s'pose it takes all kinds to make a world,
And none of us should be too heavy on
A neighbor, even if he don't belong.

Of course they don't belong, that 's sure enough:
The smell of herrin' bait in George's skiff
Would knock the stoutest of them galley west;
And none of them appears to be real rugged.
When they go out to hand-line cod with me
They keep a-lookin' round at birds and boats
And colors on the channel,-scursely one
Can ketch his share of cod,—and never once
Has ary one of them hauled up his sleeves
And helped me gut a fish when we rowed in.

They read the books that other people don't,
And never talk about the books they read,
Leastwise to us; and some of them go in
And pound the type-writer three times a day,
Like I would go to meals; but what they write
Not one of us hears ary word about.

I figger out they write their heavy books
For one another, not for common duffers.
They play book-lairnin' games of hide-and-seek
As we play racin' with our motor-boats
On August mornin's when the shedderin'
And weather has us all a-feelin' good.
I peeked jest out o' curiosity

At some type-written papers once up-stairs,
And found it all about the big mistake
Professor Somebody in Germany

Had made in chapter four of his big book
On quails. I don't suspect that chap could tell
An early oldsquaw from a patchhead coot.
Next thing somebody else will write a book
In which this squid will have his gills hauled out
For some mistake he 's made; it 's all jest like
A batch of kittens playin' with their tails.
Leastwise, that 's 'bout the way I figger it.

They don't go out enough and let the sun
Beat down and make them look like other folks;
They shrink before us lobster-ketchers do;
And hate to have their children roll around
In dirt and mud, like every youngster should.
Of course they would n't take advice from me:
But I can see them gather barnacles
Like my old sloop out there in Lobster Cove.
When barnacles and eel-grass slow her down,
I haul her up and take the scraper to her:
That's what professors need a good sharp scraper
To clean the rubbish off their garboards, clean
The gubber from their engine-valves and pipes,
To perk them up so they 'll get back their sprawl.

Here comes one now through Amariah's field
To see how we behave when we set here
And talk the mornin' out; he 'll listen to us,
And then go back and tell how quaint we be.
It takes all kinds of folks to make a world."

Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty

BY RALPH BARTON PERRY

A

NEW age is undoubtedly dawning. Perhaps, toward evening, when the day's work is behind us, we shall find it in our hearts to say:

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!"

To be perfectly candid, there is nothing very rapturous about it at the moment. It is heaven for those who are so young that they are blissfully ignorant or blissfully irresponsible, but for those of us who are old enough to remember their past hopes and yet young enough to hope again, it is on the whole an uncomfortable awakening. It is dawn by the clock, but it is ominously dark without. We do not feel refreshed, but a bit stiff and tired. There is a bad taste in our mouths. The noise of the milkman is blended with the lingering echoes of a nightmare.

The new age is thus far not all that we had hoped. We hoped that because capital and labor fraternized at Plattsburg, they would walk arm in arm down the corridors of time; and perhaps they will. We hoped that because they were allies in a righteous cause, the English, the French, the Italians, and the Americans would thenceforth live in perfect understanding and love. Perhaps they will. We hoped that enduring peace would result from unendurable war, and that having participated in a world-wide

struggle, we and all other nations would thenceforth think world-widely. Perhaps. We who cannot live without these hopes find ourselves a little sick at heart because we must defer them. It is not blissful or heavenly to say "perhaps" when we had counted on saying "Eureka," or to resume the battle-cry after rehearsing the pæan of victory.

After a war waged against the excesses of nationalism we wake up to find the world apparently more nationalistic than ever. Old nationalisms have been intensified, and new nationalisms have been created. The war was fought by old nations that became superheated in the act of fighting it, and have not as yet recovered their normal temperature; and it gave birth to new nations that are normally superheated. The nationalistic revival in old nations is in part an afterglow of belligerency, but it is at the same time a reaction against the war. The end of the war caught them in unnatural postures, and their first impulse was to recover their balance. The very novelty of the new age following the confusion of the war has led to a sort of giddiness and loss of orientation.

The present cult of Americanism is thus a blend of militancy and selfexamination. Having recently been at war and having tasted success, we

are not afraid of anybody and are not unwilling that this should be known. The resort to force is of recent memory and easily imaginable. But our prevailing disposition is to find ourselves. We recognize neither ourselves nor the world we live in. We miss the old landmarks, and we feel strangely different. For the moment we are somewhat defiantly engaged in pinching ourselves and rubbing our eyes.

The cult of Americanism began with an effort to Americanize everybody. Like many American efforts, this effort was organized before it was rationalized. Nobody had really thought it out, but this was not allowed to delay proceedings. Everybody began with great heartiness and efficiency to carry it out. Then there came an inevitable lull, due to the belated discovery that there was no agreement on the specifications. Americanism is now in its second phase, which is the attempt to discover just what it is that one has been trying to do. To Americanize anybody is to make an American of him. So much is perfectly clear. But what is an American? This, unfortunately, is

very far from clear.

The difficulty of formulating Americanism would be somewhat reduced if we could only avoid certain more or less unavoidable illusions. While it is essentially characteristic of the human mind to link the future with the past by creating the one in the light of the other, there are always people who try to simplify the process by abolishing either the future or the past. To live in the future or in the past would doubtless be simpler than to live in both or somewhere between the two. But it is humanly impossible.

"He that made us with such large discourse,

Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and godlike reason, To fust in us unused."

Those whose Americanism consists in an effort to reanimate the ancestral soul are honestly attempting the impossible. The ancestral soul is as dead as the ancestors who possessed it. It was their way of facing their future. Times have changed, and time is irreversible. But those whose Americanism consists in an effort to begin all over again at the beginning are not less deceived. For we are the natural offspring of our ancestral soul, dead though it be. Tradition is as inalienable as blood inheritance. In short, we shall resemble our past as a son his father, but we shall be so different that our past would scarcely recognize us and would probably disown us. We may, therefore, safely set aside two formulas, that "the only good American is a dead American" and that "the only good American is a new American." We are left to conclude that Americanism is a peculiar slant or bias which consists in looking toward an American future out of an American past.

There is a spacial as well as a temporal illusion. During the Presidential campaign of 1920 a good deal was said about Americanism, and the outcome was widely interpreted as a triumph of Americanism. One of the campaign documents was a statement of Mr. Will H. Hays, chairman of the Republican National Committee. He is reported to have said:

"The big issue, of course, is 'Americanism and patriotism.' No political party, of course, can claim a monopoly

of patriotism [he modestly admits]. But patriotism can be easily weakened by centrifugal forces. The Republican party stands for that type of centripetal patriotism that strives to make and keep conditions right in America and in America first. This is the kind of patriotism that inspired Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt-a patriotism that is in evidence not merely when a foe is at our doors, but which is omnipresent, always on the alert, a dynamic part of our being, day and night, in war and peace, underlying our every thought and deed."

§ 2

This cult of centripetal patriotism, popularized in the slogan "America first," is at first glance very simple. At second glance, however, it is too simple. Like the suggestion of Polemarchus in Plato's "Republic," that the just man is he who does "good to his friends and evil to his enemies," it may be the beginning, but it is certainly not the end, of wisdom. If it means that Americanization begins at home, and that he who would Americanize should begin by Americanizing himself, it still leaves us in the dark as to what it is to be an American. If it means that it is American to think first of yourself and your friends, it claims at once too much and too little. It claims for America a trait that is common to all mankind, and one that is scarcely worth claiming. Construed in his sense, Mr. Hays's creed means that he prefers the near to the remote and neighbors to strangers. But the same creed might with equal appropriateness be professed by a Chinese, a Peruvian, or an Australian. I saw an advertisement the other day, which read: "Be Loyal. Patronize

Your Neighborhood Druggist And Grocer." This advertisement was affixed to a moving train and had the merit of applying equally to any locality through which the train happened to be passing. It could be manufactured in bulk, translated into all languages, and scattered broadcast over the surface of the globe, without losing its pertinence or force. The creed of Mr. Hays would lend itself to a similar device, such as, "Be a Good American [substitute "Chinese," "Peruvian," "Australian," etc.]. Think first of yourself and your neighbors." In short, though localism is undoubtedly a sound principle and the beginning of all social cohesion, it cannot be regarded as the American ideal, first, because it is not peculiarly American, and, second, because it is not peculiarly ideal.

Centripetal patriotism is peculiarly congenial to Americans because most Americans are here because of something which they or their ancestors have wished to leave behind. All Americans are protestants either by experience or by inheritance. They associate Europe with that which they have protested against and left behind. But since some left Europe to escape kings and others to escape the mob, or some to escape Catholicism and others to escape Calvinism, or some to escape their native country and others to escape its enemies, or some to escape injustice and others to escape justice, there is not so much difference as is commonly supposed between what Americans have left behind and what Americans have brought with them.

A few years ago Mayor Ole Hanson of Seattle earned a considerable reputation as a prophet and manifestation

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