Our golden age of isolation is over. To attempt to return to it would be a mere pernicious day-dream. To hark back to Washington’s warning against entangling alliances is as sensible as to go by a map of the world made in 1796. We are coupled to the company of nations like a car in the middle of a train, only more inevitably and permanently, for we cannot uncouple; and if we tried to do so, we might not wreck the train, but we should assuredly wreck ourselves. I think the war has brought us one benefit certainly: that many young men return from Europe knowing this, who had no idea of it before they went, and who know also that Germany is at heart an untamed, unchanged wild beast, never to be trusted again. We must not, and shall not, boycott her in trade; but let us not go to sleep at the switch! Just as busily as she is baking pottery opposite Coblenz, labelled “made in St. Louis,” “made in Kansas City,” her “army of spies” is at work here and everywhere to undermine those nations who have for the moment delayed her plans for world dominion. I think the number of Americans who know this has increased; but no American, wherever he lives, need travel far from home to meet fellow Americans who sing the song of slush about forgiving and forgetting.
Perhaps the man I heard talking in front of the bulletin board was one of the “army of spies,” as I like to infer from his absence of “come-back.” But perhaps he was merely an innocent American who at school had studied, for instance, Eggleston’s history; thoughtless--but by no means harmless; for his school-taught “slant” against England, in the days we were living through then, amounted to a “slant” for Germany. He would be sorry if Germany beat France, but not if she beat England--when France and England were joined in keeping the wolf not only from their door but from ours! It matters not in the least that they were fighting our battle, not because they wanted to, but because they couldn’t help it: they were fighting it just the same. That they were compelled doesn’t matter, any more than it matters that in going to war when Belgium was invaded, England’s duty and England’s self-interest happened to coincide. Our duty and our interest also coincided when we entered the war and joined England and France. Have we seemed to think that this diminished our glory? Have they seemed to think that it absolved them from gratitude?