5
MOOSEHEART MAGAZINE
Conversations With Six Hundred Thousand
as usual, churches and schools will Q T?	keep open, and the Loyal Order of
Moose will continue to gain members and confidence. We all believe in our country and feel sure that the good old United States will be safe.
Keep cool about Amercanization! The problem is serious enough. We must not let it go out of our minds that about thirty million of the people within the boundaries of the United States were born in other countries or are the children or grandchildren of immigrants. We must not forget that several ,millions of them are not able to read and write the language of the country in which they have chosen to live, and that over a milion grown men and women cannot read or write the language of the country from which they came. That means that a great effort must be made to bring those people into line, especially to educate the children to be true Americans.
It would in the end destroy the Republic if we could not somehow free ourselves of this mass of undigested material. The country, however, is waking up to the need. The right kind of education can deal with that problem; and Mooseheart is undertaking to set up a new kind of patriotic training, which may be a model for schools throughout the country, wherever members of the Order have influence. It may take five years, it may take twenty years, but in the end we shall Americanize the foreigners and make safe patriots of the children and the native born.
Keep cool over that exceedingly warm proposition, the Bolsheviki; though it is about as un-American a thing as can be found in the world. _ There are plenty of inequalities in every country, including the United States; but Russia, before the war, was the hotbed of inequality. About five percent of the people commonly called “The Intelligence,” owned nearly everything in sight except a part of the land held directly by the peasants. The In-telligents alone had anything that could be called an education. For them were reserved the professions, and the well paid employments and public offices. When the Empire broke down, the least educated and least responsible part of the population had arms in its hands and was able to seize the government. There is no reason to believe that they represent the whole Russian people any more than the old Empire did. The Russian peasants want nothing so much as a piece of land which they can cultivate in peace and quiet. The Bolsheviki are a bad dream, in which all the ideas of private property and of individual freedom, give way to the notion of a big socialist body in which everybody gives orders to everybody else. If the European peoples can be fed and have a chance to work for themselves and support their families, Bolshevism will probably die down in Europe.
Keep cool also about the I. W. W. and the Bolshevist movement in the United States! Without doubt there are agents of the Russian Bolshevist government in many parts of this country. They are printing and distributing circulars and books urging the people to rise and destroy their state and national government; but they are working in very different soil from that of Russia. Ours is a country where on the present scale of wages a man has a chance to save something and push along up; where education is offered by the state to all the children. We have also our own dangerous organization of those at the bottom of the nation who wish to push themselves to the top. The I. W. W. is in part a protest by laborers who are not gathered into regular labor unions; but it is
still more an attempt to bring about a revolution, to put the least trained and the least industrious into power, as the Bolsheviki have done in Russia.
It is no use trying to stop that agitation by sending to prison men and women who talk about a new social system and a new kind of government, unless they call upon their hearers to join in a forcible movement to destroy this U. S. A. You cannot stop the I. W. W. by arresting people who circulate handbills. One way to defeat them is to cut the ground from under their feet by doing whatever can be done by the individual employer and the state to improve the conditions of labor and the intelligence of the laborers. We can depend on the sense of the plain citizen; for the happiness of the “common people” depends on a system of peace and order in which a man may have an opportunity to earn his living and not to be interrupted by revolutions and wars. World peace ought to make the conditions of work and wages better all over the world, inasmuch as so much less of the year’s product need be put into armies and navies and forts and the material of war. So long as the average man goes straight about his business, we need not fear enemies at home any more than those abroad.
EP COOL, MR. MOO
By ALBERT BUSHNELL HART, Mooseheart Governor
Prof. A Ibert Bush nellHart of Harvard University, one of the Mooseheart Governors, wiU write in eaeh. number of the Mooseheart Magazine one of these Conversations. We are anxious to have our entire membership enjoy the advantages which■ those of us who associate with the Professor, have learned to appreciate.
These Conversations will deal with questions most important to the American citizen, such as the New Nations, Relations of the United States with Eastern Asia, What are Mandatories, Is the League of Nations good for the United States, What is the Best Kind of Education, What about American Skipping and other topics of national interest. This department will not represent any party, faction or class. It is intended to be straight talk to a straight-forward audience.
manufacturing and transportation. Commerce is disturbed, central Europe is not yet steadied; but it would be absurd for Americans in time of peace to feel the alarm and suffer from the disorder that have overtaken the people of Europe who have been crushed in the war.
Keep cool about the end of the war. Newspaper correspondents in Paris who pass through a twenty-four hour period without anything remarkable coming up in the Peace Conference, send home scare cablegrams which are made worse by scare headlines, telling us that the fat is in the fire, that there is a hopeless deadlock, that President Wilson is about to throw up the sponge and come home, that the Japanese will not slide down the cellar door of the Allies any more. Don’t believe all that you read (except of course in the Mooseheart Mag-agazine.) The ask of making peace is a very hard and long one. The Vienna Congress a hundred years ago, lasted about ten months, and left many loose ends at that. In fact, no Congress made up of human beings can settle all the questions of Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia off-hand— that is one of the main reasons for a League of Nations to work out the details. A peace treaty will be made before long that will end the war, and make another war unlikely.
Keep cool about the boys coming home and the “problems of reconstruction.” There was work enough in the country for all the men that wanted work down to the time when four millions of the strongest and healthiest and most industrious young men were taken out of the mill and the shop and the farm, the railroad, the store, the office, and the factory, to do Uncle Sam’s job. Just now there is great confusion because of the sudden stoppage of the munitions factories and the dislocation of business by the war. Yet the country is just as big and fertile and rich as it ever has been. There is no lack of coal or iron or wheat or cotton or corn. Just now thousands of returned soldiers are looking about for the right place to start in again. When the confusion is over, there will be jobs for everybody; the demand for labor is likely to be greater than ever before, because the new supply will be smaller. It is likely that immigration will be cut down by acts of Congress before many months; and the indications are that two or three million foreigners will go back to their old homes to see who is left alive after the war, and to take part in setting up and carrying on a new republican government. If they find that new chances are opened for men who have strong hands and clear brains, in the country from which they emigrated to the United States, they will stay there and cease to compete with the labor men in this country.
Keep cool about politics! The Republicans and Democrats appear to be locking horns on a question which has nothing to do with politics. They are trying to divide the country on the question of the nature of the peace. Some kind of peace must be made and the whole country must accept it or else war will break out again. Nobody knows how the political cat will jump in the next twelve months. The People’s Alliance may spread in the Northwest, the Socialists may put up a stronger fight than ever before, though the result of the recent election in Milwaukee does not look that way; there may be a strong Labor candidate. Whatever comes, however, whoever is nominated and whoever is elected, the mines and factories and farms will keep running, trains and steamers will move
THIS is a time of great excitement
and trouble all over the United	Jv Jj,
States. We thought our temperature went up during the war, when every fifteen minutes somebody knocked at the door and wanted us to
subscribe to a patriotic purpose. When the employers bought short-term government notes, and the hands bought liberty bonds, and the children bought thrift stamps, and the baby chewed the thrift stamps up. We thought the world was lively when the fife and drum corps went ahead of the 5005th regiment down the street to the depot, and off went our boys in khaki, while sister sobbed—not wholly on brother’s account. We were in the thick of it when the war bulletins came like snow-A. B. Hart flakes, and everybody bought four newspapers a day, and took a little walk down street last thing at night “to get the latest dispatches.”
That was a continuous movie. Every man, woman and child who was worth anything lived a week every single day. One of the greatest privileges in this world was to be alive during the Great War, and to receive the houxly messages of weal or woe that came from all over the world. Our children and our children’s children will listen breathless to tales that we shall tell them of these terrible days of submarines and trench bombs and gas projectors and aeroplanes raining death on the just and the unjust. We are the people who gasped at the iniquity of the Lusitania; we remember when the Germans were within thirty miles of Paris; we heard the news that Jerusalem had been taken from the Moslems, after they had held the holy places of Christianity for seven hundred years; we were down at the bulletin boards on the night after the American troops drove the Germans back at Chateau Thierry; we heard the newsboys calling out “Armistice! Armistice! on the morning after November 11, 1918! It is a grand and glorious feeling to have been a part of this great war.
Nobody tried to keep cool while hostilities lasted. We wanted to be heated up against our foes. We enjoyed a good, strong, war-proof hatred of the Germans. The man who was not excited in those days was only half a man. The woman who did not work her fingers off for the soldiers lost all the use of life. The childen who failed to collect_ old iron and paper and dead teakettles to turn into money for the Red Cross missed the geratest fun in life. That was the right time to crowd the coal under the boilers, to heap the wood in the fireplaces, to turn on the natural gas, to light the oil-stove. Everything was at high pressure. Everybody was delighted at an opportunity to give up something for his country. The munitions plants ran twenty-four hours a day. The nation poured out its immense wealth in taxes and loans and gifts, and freely offered what no money could buy or replace—the lives of its own sons.
Not to be stirred up then was disloyal. Only slackers didn’t care. Only anti-Americans had no interest in how it was coming out. The country was warmed up as though by a sirocco across the Desert of Sahara. Patriotic orators glowed with passion and patriotism. The people were heated to the bottom of their souls. That artificial summer is over now and the country is going back to normal temperature. Still, millions of people have not yet discovered that the excitement of the war has gone by; and some of them are trying to keep going a private furnace fed by their own hot air. All over the land we hear talk of strikes and lockouts, of capitalists and People’s Alliances, of riots and vigilance committees, of Bolsheviki and the agents of the United States Secret Service. Some very honest and amiable people are sure that our country is going to the dogs.
This is precisely the time to keep cool. Every sensible man sees that the world is very uneasy, which is what we ought to expect after a great war which has smashed four great empires. When the cyclone has gone by, and there is a chance to pick up the pieces of the world, we shall find fifteen or eighteen new European and Asiatic countries made up of what five years ago was Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Naturally the monarchs and nobility that are put out of business feel that the world has come to an end; and the new-born states—such as Armenia and Jugo-Slavia, and Finland—are in confusion. Nevertheless the greater part of the world is going along steadily. Eastern Asia, North and South America, most of Africa, western Europe, are all keeping up their business of farming and mining and