The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit by Ralph Waldo Trine online

XII THE WORLD WAR--ITS MEANING AND ITS LESSONS FOR US

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We are also realising clearly now that, as a nation, we have been entirely too lax in connection with our immigration privileges, regulations and restrictions. We have been admitting foreigners to our shores in such enormous quantities each year that we have not been able at all adequately to assimilate them, nor have we used at all a sufficiently wise discrimination in the admission of desirables or undesirables.

We have received, or we have allowed to be dumped upon our shores, great numbers of the latter whom we should know would inevitably become dependents, as well as great numbers of criminals. The result has been that they have been costing certain localities millions of dollars every year. But entirely aside from the latter, the last two or three years have brought home to us as never before the fact that those who come to our shores must come with the avowed and the settled purpose of becoming real American citizens, giving full and absolute allegiance to the institutions, the laws, the government of the land of their adoption.

If any other government is not able so to manage as to make it more desirable for its subjects to remain in the land of their birth, rather than to seek homes in the land with institutions more to their liking, or with advantages more conducive to their welfare, that government then should not expect to retain, even in the slightest degree, the allegiance of such former subjects. A hyphenated citizenship may become as dangerous to a republic as a cancer is in the human body. A country with over a hundred hyphens cannot fulfil its highest destiny.

We, as a nation, have been rudely shaken from our long dream of almost inevitable national security. We have been brought finally, and although as a nation we have no desire for conquest or empire, and no desire for military glory, and therefore no need of any great army or navy for offensive purposes, we have been brought finally to realise that we do, nevertheless, stand in need of a national strengthening of our arm of defence. A land of a hundred million people, where one could travel many times for a sixmonth and never see the sign of a soldier, is brought, though reluctantly, to face a new state of affairs; but one, nevertheless, that must be faced--calmly faced and wisely acted upon. And while it is true that as a nation we have always had the tradition of non-militarism, it is not true that we have had the tradition of military or of naval impotence or weakness.

Preparedness, therefore, has assumed a position of tremendous importance, in individual thought, in public discussion, and almost universally in the columns of the public press. One of the most vital questions among us then is, not so much as to how we shall prepare, but how shall we prepare adequately for defensive purposes, in case of any emergency arising, without being thrown too far along the road of militarism, and without an inordinate preparation that has been the scourge and the bane of many old-world countries for so many years, and that quite as much as anything has been provocative of the horrible conflict that has literally been devastating so many European countries.

It is clearly apparent that the best thought in America today calls for an adequate preparation for purposes of defence, and calls for a recognition of facts as they are. It also clearly sees the danger of certain types of mind and certain interests combining to carry the matter much farther than is at all called for. The question is--How shall we then strike that happy balance that is the secret of all successful living in the lives of either individuals or in the lives of nations?

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