Extracts from Addresses 381
gain enormous advantages, not only from the technical point of view of
military, naval and aeronautical work, but in the domains of commerce
and manufactures, especially of those fabrics and materials that will be
needed by trade, and which we imagined before the war were the products
only of foreign peoples.
What is more, and much more to the point, we have gotten a unity
of national life that we never had before the war. We are a multitude
of people here that have come from all the earth. Our cities are made
up of groups, whole sections of which are totally unable to use the
English language. I can show you forty thousand Poles in a single section
in Chicago, more than in many cities of Poland. I can show you forty-five
thousand Bohemians in one group in Chicago, the most of whom cannot
use the English language at all. I can show you companies of people
from nearly all the Balkan Statês, and from Italy and from Greece,
and from the nations farther to the East. We have come to recognize
in the war the unity of this great mass of people. What a marvelous
thing it is to go into our camps, and to feel there the joy and the
thrill and the exhilaration of finding Americans of every sort ! And
you cannot tell them apart. They have the same uniform. They have
the same songs. They have the same enthusiasm. They have the same
devotion to the Flag, to the Republic. That is a new asset. We never
audited our accounts as a nation so carefully as we are doing to-day,
and we never found ourselves so rich in the sentiment of loyalty and
good-will. Perhaps this is even more conspicuously true among our
German-speaking people. We know perfectly well the different grades
of German population in America. There are the loyal ones, and there
are the disloyal ones; and between the two there is a considerable zone
of those who have been good-willed and placid, but not particularly
interested on one side or the other. When the war came they said:
“This is not our war. We are not going to subscribe for any Liberty
loans, or practise any food conservation, or do any of the things that the
nation is asking of us, because we are interested on both sides. We are
just neutral.” But through the enormous pressure of public opinion,
and sometimes through urgent persuasion of a different kind, we have
made that kind of people realize the fact that this is their country; that
they have got to pay the price of that liberty, that privilege and that
protection which America has so generously afforded to them in all past
days; and we are getting a large measure of response from them. We
have a people unified as never before.
I cannot but think also of the marvelous stimulation of generous
giving. We never knew how to give before to any cause. Education,
religion or charity got along with small, inconsequential, insignificant