Germans in America (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: masters and the State is simply their representative acting for them. There is no room in this country for government by the people and a government by the over-individual soul?alias autocracy. And so, Americans cannot agree with Germans in America without a surrender of their own political ideals; for there can be no blending of American and German political ideals. What will Americans do? When an American looks upon his political history extending from the German tribes in England, in whose assembly no man dictated, to Abraham Lincoln standing upon the field of Gettysburg pledging the nation to the defense of government by the people, that American is looking upon a mighty heritage. This heritage is not for the Anglo-Saxon alone; it is for all who come and accept it. It is for the Catholic, the Protestant, and the Jew, the Russian, the Pole and the Hungarian, as well as the German. But there must be no divided allegiance; no attempt to blend American political ideals with old-world political ideals which have been the mortal enemies of civil liberty since the world was. Americans will make it their work to preserve their heritage. The struggle which shakes the world today is the old struggle of democracy against autocracy. That is how England and France are fighting our battle. Americans can sympathize with only one side in that struggle and that is the side which is in unison with their whole history. If Thirty that side wins, the German people will come out of the darkness in which they now live and with all their virtues, abilities, and means of happiness, success and prosperity, will stand side by side with us in the broad sunlight of liberty. If that side loses, Americans must brace themselves to meet an antagonist such as the world never saw before. But we have...