AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP A NEW-WORLD INSPIRATION.

Between American citizenship and European citizenship there is a specific difference, ocean wide, literally and morally. We can not think in the same terms, for our American political experience, like our American Constitution and Government, differs profoundly from that of Europe. Their political development has been mainly one of endless wars over a thousand years in the same small cockpits and for the benefit of the same type of men. Deep, sullen, patient, ineradicable vindictiveness has long prevailed in vast human strata in Europe. Hatred and revenge are the gospel of millions rendered quasi insane by centuries of oppression.

Humiliation also is written across the forehead of most great nations of Europe-defeats; losses of territory, population, and resources; dynastic troubles; transfers of allegiance, of religion, of advantage and opportunity; treacheries and betrayals without number, all the known evils of an immemorial secret diplomacy. Since the days of Charlemagne, a narrow strip of land from the Alps to the sea has been dyed to saturation with human blood, and over it have raged all the political passions and vices, all the social and economic conflicts, all the religious bitterness and antipathy, all the personal ambitions and vagaries of irresponsible rulers, vindictive factions, and nameless miscellaneous selfish misgovernment.

How different the origin and growth of American citizenship! Its enmities have been those of nature, i. e., distance and physical obstacles; its conquests those of knowledge and labor, the peaceful conquests of exploration and transportation and intercommunication; the incredible development of the forces latent in the elements of nature, the discovery and uses of the raw materials and essentials of industry and commerce; the growth and movement of harvests that stagger the imagination; the constant knitting together of all human elements and forces within easy range of a broad human democracy! The evidence and the honor of our traditional American citizenship lie in this immense complexus of universally beneficent facts, for they are its proper fruit, and as they stand have so far never been met. with in other political forms and conditions.

We of the United States are preeminently the New World, with all that the pregnant term implies, and mankind yet looks to us in the spirit of those multitudes who quitted the Old World and took up life anew on this side of the Atlantic while yet the radiant figure of George Washington stood before all men as the incarnation of that human love of freedom which had been for ages a will o' the wisp. Sympathy with Europe, yes; aid and comfort, yes; encouragement and charity, yes. But let us not be drawn closer to the maelstrom of

its politics or its statesmanship, for they are decidedly not kin to American citizenship, and are without exception all tarred over with an unclean imperialism, all one long sad chapter of the strong, rich, and masterful beating down the weak, the poor, and the lowly, enslaving them, and dooming them to a toil without hope, reward, or end.

OUR OWN HISTORY THE BEST MEANS OF CIVIC EDUCATION.

Naturally, one of the best means of civic education is the true history of our own country. Its great crises and problems are so near to us; its great figures yet so visible in the background of national life; the great documents and monuments of one marvelous century are yet so intact and legible that there ought to be no fear of our misunderstanding the deeds, the principles, and the spirit of the men who founded this Republic, and with divine aid and great human wisdom conducted it rapidly to greatness.

It needs no Cicero to proclaim the influence of historical teaching. The great war has taught us to what extent the historian can penetrate the mind of a great people, and hurl it blindly and recklessly against unoffending neighbors. Our American history should be widely monumentalized, so to speak, with the conscious purpose of making eloquent by national and local effort our public building, great natural sites and objects, and every occasion of visualizing the salient facts and truths, and the real spirit of our public life.

The arts would profit greatly by this high and noble propaganda. What more patriotic subjects for the walls of our new railway stations than the great oration of Patrick Henry or the Battle of Lexington? Ages can not wither such themes nor custom stale their moral force, nor ought they ever to fade from the consciousness of our people.

INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM THE GENIUS OF AMERICAN LIFE.

Individual freedom, vast and delectable as the prairies or the forests, was the dominant note of this first century of American history. The old pagan concept of the state, as many would have us take it over from Europe, or rather from that prewar Prussia we have overthrown, an absolute omnipotent juggernaut, was both foreign and offensive to this original American citizen, to whom all centralism and imperialism were odious.

In this respect we are drifting away from the type of American manhood that built our Nation, secured its frontiers, and wrote our bill of rights in a few immortal principles. Under specious pretext, and often by reprehensible means, our traditional American concept of individual and local freedom, rights, duties, and responsibilities,

is greatly imperiled in recent times. The family, the home, and the natural rights of parents are injured by legislation, actual or proposed, that ignores the fundamental rule of American democracy, namely, that the State has no right to restrict the liberty of the individual beyond the limits necessary for its own protection and preservation.

Nor will it do to say that new times and conditions, industry and commerce, inventions and discoveries, have created a new order of life in which the American individualism of our golden age can no longer be tolerated. In this personal freedom, for which he defied kings and aristocracies, the American citizen has ever recognized the primal irreducible element of his political life. Pride in it, and exercise of it, have colored our national life, so to speak, in every decade, and wherever the American citizen set foot on his vast patrimony.

ASSUMPTION OF INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR EDUCATION MUST BE ENCOURAGED.

This vast freedom of initiative made and makes the American citizen of the original type a natural enemy of all monopoly, whether in business or in politics, and the same general temper is to be observed in his attitude toward religion. We can not therefore imagine him inclined to a State monopoly of education, for which reason our American life has until recently been spared any serious endeavors to change the fiber of our traditions in this respect.

We may also believe that, as he looked about in the United States and observed the incredible development of education, owing to private initiative and religious zeal, the immense and costly equipment, the personal toil and sacrifice, the rare idealism of the teachers, the secular benefits conferred upon poor and struggling communities, the healthy mutual rivalry, the facile Americanization of multitudes otherwise destined to become politically drift and refuse of their time; as he observed their happy insistence on the highest morality anchored in religious belief, and thereby secured the joyful acceptance of civil loyalty; as he made note of their alacrity and ardor in responding to the call of the American State whenever the hour of its supreme peril was at hand, and in offering their lives for its safety and welfare, he would cordially agree with the educational principles set forth in the following brief paragraph from the recent pastoral letter of our American Catholic bishops, read in all their churches, and accepted by all their people:

The State has a right to insist that its citizens shall be educated. It should encourage among the people such a love of learning that they will take the initiative and without constraint provide for the education of their children.

Should they through negligence or lack of means fail to do so, the State has the right to establish schools and take every other legitimate means to safeguard its vital interests against the dangers that result from ignorance. In particular, it has both the right and the duty to exclude the teaching of doctrines which aim at the subversion of law and order and therefore at the destruction of the State itself.

The State is competent to do these things because its essential function is to promote the general welfare. But on the same principle it is bound to respect and protect the rights of the citizen, and especially of the parent. So long as these rights are properly exercised, to encroach upon them is not to further the general welfare, but to put it in peril. If the function of the citizen, and if the aim of education is to prepare the individual for the rational use of his liberty, the State can not rightfully or consistently make education a pretext for interfering with rights and liberties which the Creator, not the State, has conferred. Any advantage that might accrue even from a perfect system of State education would be more than offset by the wrong which the violation of parental rights would involve.

PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY DOMINANT IN AMERICAN SOCIETY.

The chief burden of American citizenship is the maintenance of law and order, the very framework of our society, without which it must decay or collapse. Now, all law and all compliance with law, where they do not rest upon force, must rest upon certain convictions as to what is good or bad, true or false, just or unjust. In other words, if we would have social peace and progress, there must be some code of morality, some fixed principles of conduct, which shall bind all citizens in their innermost conscience, and by their rock-like truth compel the voluntary adhesion of all to the action of rightly constituted authority. Our American society has hitherto accepted, broadly speaking, principles of Christian morality, as exemplified in the Gospel, the Ten Commandments, the best Christian example, and the immemorial teachings of Christian ethics. On the whole, our legislation has presupposed and confirmed the obligatory force of Christian principles and temper, both as to private conduct and public life. Our people have not yet written definitely into their lives, their laws, and their institutions any other ethical standard or spirit, pagan, agnostic, or opportunist. In this sense, we may yet be described as a Christian state, and Christian morality may yet be said to be the inner sustaining force of American life, in theory at least, in lingering admiration for its civilizing power, and its incomparable grip on men's souls, and in sheer incomprehension of any order of life which would prescind from it or reject it, logically and generally, as for example the Bolshevist régime in Russia or the recent communist fiascoes in Europe.

We may take it for granted then, that American citizenship can not be maintained at the high level of the past unless the education which produces it and sustains it be itself ensouled with the morality

of the Gospel and of the best Christian thought, example, and teaching. This seems a truism in view of the prevalent world conditions described by Pope Benedict: Lack of mutual good-will, contempt for authority, class conflict, pursuit of the perishable goods of this world, and utter disregard of the higher and nobler things of life.

After all, the best security for American education and thereby for American citizenship is religious training. For this we have the authority of George Washington in his farewell address:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness-these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect them. A volume could not trace all their connections with public and private felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for prosperity, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious teaching.

RELIGIOUS FAITH THE ULTIMATE GUIDE.

"Neither education nor philanthropy nor science nor progress can ever take the place of religion," says a certain good man. These merely intellectual agencies are no substitute for a supernatural faith that is a distinct light and guide from that of human reason. Something higher and nobler than flesh and blood, something eternal and immortal, broods over this world for the regeneration of man unto a destiny with God that the human mind within its own natural limitations can neither grasp nor comprehend. The man who knows the world as God's own work and every way related to a divine purpose escapes the hard pessimism of our modern life and its cold intellectual culture, in whose unhealthy light hope and ardor soon wither on the ashes of faith and love. Training in religion offers the highest motives for conduct and exhibits the best examples of a good life and in the holiness and justice of God presents the highest sources and sanctions of respect for authority and obedience to the laws. "Only too well," said Pope Benedict recently, "does experience show that when religion is banished human authority totters to its fall * ** *. Likewise, when the rulers of the people disdain the authority of God, the people in turn despise the authority of man. There remains, it is true, the usual expedient of suppression by force; but to what effect? Force subdues the bodies of men, not their souls."