Worcester Democrat and the ledger-enterprise. (Pocomoke City, Md.) 1921-1953, 1940-11-29
The Credit Side OF
Americas Long Ac-
count With Germany
Continued from page 81

Continued from page 81
last sentence to the House of Cor
rection stop larceny forevermore.
The struggle for an orderly law
controlled society involves perennial
struggle so long as some men are
bereft of the Christian virtues. Back
Of all law and liberty must be force;
force controlled by law and pledged
to uphold the law. Tragic to say,
nothing we off this generation can
possibly do will wholly protect the
next generation from predatory,
criminal men at home or abroad. 1t
Is a monstrous, terrible truth that
we can not dream that the struggle
for an orderly international society,
for better and more just world end
ed in 1918, or will ever be ended,
80 that our soldiers may be safely
dismissed, our arms melted down.
So long as one nation of many is UNI
regenerate your sons are condemned
to face the equivalent duty you have
borne; to meet the same old problems
complicated by new weapons as best
they may, certain, that like ourselves
and our forebears, they find suffer-
ing, perhaps death, is the price OF
liberty. No other opinion respects
immutable human nature.
The world has never been an easy
place; nothing is permanent, least Of
all tranquility. The significant thing
is that human lives are like the sea-
sons; marked by storm, by disaster,
by beauty, by sunshine. And men,
like plants, are the harder for heat
and frost, for drought and showers.
The important thing is that the vital
spark of patriotism survives to make
men "srong in will = to seek to
find and not to YIELD"
You were disappointed in your OBJ
jectives in the war, but you succeed
ed otherwise in a way and to an ex-
tent you did not expect. You gain
ed brand of patriotism in the trench
es, clarity of understanding, will
to do and make others do their civic
duty that stands Americans in good
stead today. You fed and nursed the
vital spark of patriotism as probably
no other body of men has done in
America with equal zeal.
Notwithstanding your good offices
it must be owned that vital spark, the
will to strive, was dim in 1889. Nor
were we the only people to neglect
the duties of citizenship and to ig-
more the supreme responsibility to-
ward civilization. The French, now
a minor German dependency, and the
heroic British fell into the same deep
slough. We fortunately have time to
pull out, and cleanse our forms of
slime.
Paradoxically German arms, Ger
man propaganda were our allies, and
reinforced unwittingly your efforts
in the present dilemma to lift US out
of our complacent, slippered ease.
We quickly lost our carefree convic-
ton that the British fleet will stand
between America and covetous, ag-
gressive Germany. Measured graph
cally in dollars our new-found convic-
tion mounts up into billions.
We never had, as we now realize,
any valid right to expect the British
to fight for us, unless to serve their
own national ends. We might as
plausibly argue that the British ad-
mirals should digest our food for US.
The defense of ones country is an in
timately personal, honorable duty
none can discharge by proxy or SUBJ
stitutes.
wonder if it occurs to any patient
German Investigator that we owe the
American Legion to German mill
ltarism, or to compute its strength as
a bulwark against Americas foes
within and without? One trembles
to think how far the parlor pinks,