New Britain herald., 1916-04-26

dress postcard '$Cuticura, Dept. T. B0s-
 eon.'' Sold throughout the world.
 almost necessary result. of this type
 of thinking is the war which is now
 creeping over the worlds civiliza-
 tion and destroying 1t with the sure l pitilessness of an Alpine glacier. This
 war is the Mem esis of nation-bui1d-
 ing conceived as an end in itself.
 Unless a nation, like an individual, | have some purpose, some ideal some
 motive which lies outside of and be- yond self-interest and self-aggrand- | izement, war must continue on the face of this earth until the day when l the last and strongest man, superb | in his mighty loneliness, shall look out from a rock in the Caribbean upon a world that has been depopulated in it's pursuit of a false ideal, and be left himself to die alone with none to mourn or to bury him.
 ''In the history of nations the story of our America has a place that is all it's own. The American nation came into being in response to a l clear and definite purpose. theory | of human life and of human govern 1 ment was conceived and put into ex- ecution on a remote and inaccessible l part of the earth's surface. The l moving cause of the American nation was the aspirations for civil and po- litical liberty and for individual free dom which was already stirring in the minds of Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These aspirations gained in force as the art of printing multiplied books and as the periodical press came into existence. The high minded, the courageous, the venturesome were drawn across the wide ocean toward the West, carrying with them for the most part the liberal ideas and the advanced thought that were steadily increasing their hold upon l the peoples of Western Europe. Great Britain Holland, France were re- | spending in steadily increasing meas 1 ure to the same ideals that led the | Puritan to Massachusetts Bay and 1 the Cavalier to Virginia.
 l Not True Nation.
 l "On this Atlantic shore distances were great and communication diff1- cult. In addition there were social, economic and religious differences that kept the struggling colonists apart. The result was that there grew up | here not a nation but the material out of which a nation could be made. | There is a sense, deep and strikir g sense, in which the same remains ab- solutely true today. There is not vet a nation, but the rich and fine ma terial out of which a true nation can
 be made by the architect with vision to plan and by the builder with skill 1 adequate to execute.
 When common oppression forced the separate co1onists together they | still sadly lacked that devotion to a. 1 unity higher than any of it's compo | nent parts, which would have saved | so much loss and so much sufferin g l during the days of Revolution and of l the first steps toward a national gov 1 ernment. An enormous step forward | was taken when the national govern
 ment was built; in the adoption of the 1 Constitution of the United States the
 cornerstone was laid for one of the
 most splendid structures in all the l history of all nations. Then followed
 sharp political divergence. There
 were those who would lay stress upon 1 the new national unity; there were l still more who thought it important
 to emphasize the separate elements l out or W1lCn that unity nad been com | posed. The judicial logic of Marshall
 and the convincing eloquence of Web-
 ster were the chief unifying and na-
 tion building forces in the generation
 that followed. Meanwhile sharp diff l ferences of economic interest were
 manifestlng themselves, and the fatal | question of slavery pressed forwar IT q
 both as an economic and as a political
 issue. The new nation which had al-
 ready made such progress upon the | foundations laid by the fathers fell
 apart, and only after one of the most
 terrible and destructive of civil wars
 were the ruins of the disaster cleared | away and the ground prepared for the
 next step in construction. Here mis- | takes were made so numerous and so
 severe that the unifying and nation- | building process was checked and l held back for years.
 Then two sets of separating and
 disintegrating forces began to make l themselves strongly felt. First, the l economic differences which must of l necessity manifest themselves over so
 large and so diverse a territory. row 1 revealed themselves in new force. in 1 part as a result of purely American l condition as involving a class conflict i between capital and labor. Soon there
 were signs that citizenship, with it's
 compelling allegiance to the common