Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1915-05-17
STREET TAKERS
AMERICANS ALL
The War in Front of the Bulletin
Boards-Patriotism and Cosmo-
politanism in America-A Re-
birth of Nationalities.
BY FRANCIS WARREN

~ reading the war bulletins 1 paused one
afternoon and listened to the wisdom OF thu
shifting groups. I think IL was earnest
young Socialists who set the fashion for these
street-corner symposlums of democracy'f
own theorsts-for the Socialist missionaries
are unlike some others in inviting criticism
and in trying to meet It, and in the course
of the spontaneous debates which spring vi
at their open-ar seances the Man In the
Street wears off his shyness; even learns
not to be afraid Of his own voice In public
among folks to whom he was never so much
as introduced
on the afternoon I am thinking of there
was some one lecturing on the economies of
that war-some one whose unrehearsed ad-
dress may have drifted later on into social
ism. for all 1 know, but began with the
assertion that the Russian soldier Is the
lowest paid of any in Europe, and is treated
like dog. The speaker had the war bud
gets Of all the combatant nations at his fin
gers end or else
"That feller's all wrong but he certainly
has the dope, all right, all right" as some-
body remarked.
Curbstone Explanations
Some one else was explaining the differ
ence between the true German and the Prus-
explained, "is a dreamy sort of person, In
dustrious all the same. He writes the music
they play at the Metropolitan Opera House.
He's sentimental beer -drinker; we all
know Germans we like. The Prussian aln't
German much as he's Slav. He's less
human than the Russian; less civilized (ex
cept in getting ready for a big war; than
the dirty Serbs. William Hohenzollern-
'Minesef und Gott-ls a crackerjack Prus
sian, but a bum sort of German" Perhaps
the speaker had read DR.. Charles Sarolea's
anglo German Problem; then again, per-
haps he hadn't. Some of the crowd agreed
with him; some Of it very vociferousy did
not.
Another amateur of oratory, belittlng the
tragedies of Termonde, Rheims and Louvain,
reminded his hearers that the British were
burning Washington only a hundred years
ago.
"They're every bit as bad as the Germans.
the John Bulls are" was his sentiment
"Worse!" shouted the voice of stout
Teuton There's over a million Germans in
New York city alone, counting Brooklyn
Don't believe it," yelled n younger man.
but the Teuton came back with,
"Then look 1t up in the new World AL
manac' at the Public Library"
And though there is no immediate connec-
tion, perhaps, between the superior virtue
of the German people and the German pop
ulation of Greater New York. there is as you
reflect a sort of logic in the citing of those
figures. Doubtless it was the Germans hazy
notion that our having all these neighbors
fruit Of the Fatherland, and getting on with
them famously. does somehow show that
Germans are not the complete barbarians
that editorial writer's sometimes depict them.
to 50, tl,I.
country. In times of peace, one is only half
of it. The "people one knows" are
for the most part people very much like
oneself, The fact that ones boots are pol
ished by a Greek. ones onions grown by
Pole. ones dinner cooked by a Frenchman,
ones fruit sold by n "dago" ones boots
mended by a German, ones clothes made
by a Jew. ones coal mined by a Slav-all
these little circumstances count for little be-
yond their picturesqueness. It even gives
one a sentiment of national-or personal
Importance: 10, all the nations cross the
sea to do our chores But the war comes
the reservists sail off-the streets are filled
with anxious watchers of the bulletins: one
realizes Gas never one realized 1t in
reading the statistcs) what a, hodge podge
we are, who are all in one boat: how
little digested the foreign importations.
get that for America to be dragged into the
present war of all wars thinkable, would be
a tragedy of tragedies. More than ever one
Is grateful at this hour for the Man in the
White House; the grave President who is
not citizen of his parish only. but in the
finest sense Citizen of the World.
Nationalities Reborn in America
For If there is ever to be cosmopolitan
SIN. If ever patriotism is to be merged into
4 love of society that will be constructive,
and not, like modern patriotism, something
that pulls down even more than II builds up.
hat cosmopolitanism must be preceded by
The rebirth of the nationalities as Americans.
We are not Pan-Americans In the sense that
some Germans have been Pan-G -Germans-we
nave no wish ever to dominate the earth and
the fruits thereof; no desire to impress all
peoples with the stamp of our own CONNER
,ialism. But Pan-America is, in another
sense, the movement OF the future: that
which means the forgetting of
old hatreds and old Jealousies in the insist
.nce upon wider opportunities for all. with
self set below the folk the lesser tradition
lumbled below the greater: the Pan
Americanism which is founded upon the
Divine Right of Man. We would have the
newcomers proud of their country of origin
and its best heritage, but prouder yet OF a
country where they have attained to fuller
freedom and wider prosperity and richer
service; we would have in their America a
beacon for the older world, a shining exam
pie OF the possibility that there is for men
and women to live and TO prosper without
1earing the yoke OF militarsm, without wor-
Shipping at the altar of hate. In Ireland
asst summer men and women greeted me