The weekly Alaska citizen., 1918-10-28

to Dlame TOT ms uLClo GermdueS or little Swedens, or little Italics, be- lieves the Mason City Gazette. Here in America there ought to be a movement to teach Greek and other foreigners the American language and as soon as war conditions per. init those who employ these for. eigners should make it a part of their contract that they go to night. school and learn the language, or some other means should be devised.
 In North Dakota, recently, Judge Amidon passed sentence on a preach CT. In passing sentence he made a declaration which ought to be printed in every newspaper in the United States, and specially those printed in any foreign language.
 German Evangelical church, New Salem, N. D., had been on trial at Bismarck. He was charged with hay ing uttered from time to time sedi- tious language for the purpose of interfering with the military activi- ties of the government. The jury re- turned a verdict of guilty against him. In passing sentence Judge Ami :, don said:
 You received your final papers as citizen in 1898. By the oath which you then took you renounced and abjured all allegiance to Ger many and swore that you would bear true faith and allegiance to the United States. What did that mean That you would set about earnestly growing an American soul. That is what your oath of allegiance meant
 Have you done that? 1 do not think you have. You have cherished everything German, and stifled every thing American. You have preached German, prayed German, read Ger man, sung German. Every thought of your mind and every emotion of your heart all these years has been German. Your body has been in America, but your life has been in Germany. If you were set down in Prussia today you would be in har- mony with your environments. It would fit you just as flower fits the leaf and stem of the plant on which it grows.
 You have influenced others who have been under your ministry to do the same thing. You said you would cease to cherish your German soul, and that you would begin to build up inside of you aL American soul. That meant that you would begin to study American life and his tory; that you would open your mind and heart to all of it's in- fiuences; that you would try to un- derstand it's ideals and purposes, and love them; that you would try to build up inside of yourself whole group of feelings for the United States, the same as you felt to- wards the fatherland when you left Germany.
 There. have been good many Germans before me in the last sum- mer They have lived in this coun- try, like yourself, ten, twenty, thirty and forty years, and they have had to give their evidence through an inter- preter. It has been an impressive part of the trial AS I looked at them and tried as best I could to understand them, there was written all over every one of them, Made in Germany American life had not dimmed that mark in the least. It stood there as bright and fresh as the inscription upon a new coin.
 q do not blame you and these men alone. I blame myself. ] blame my country. We urged you to come; we welcomed you; we gave you opportunity; we gave you land; we conferred upon you the diadem of American citizenship-and then we left you. We paid no attention to what you have been doing.
 And now the world war has thrown searchlight upon our national life, and what have we discovered? We find all over these United States, in groups, little Germanies, little Italics little Austrias, little Norways, little Russias. These foreign people have thrown circle about themselves, and instead of keeping the oath they took that they would try to grow American souls inside of them, they have studiously striven to exclude everything American, and to cherish everything foreign.
 "A clever gentleman wrote a TO nance called America, the Melting Pot It appealed to our vanity, and through all these years we have beer seeing romance instead of fact. That is the awful truth. The figure ol my country stands beside me today