Professor Weatherly repeatedly emphasizes the great point--that “it is not sufficient that peoples should merely have undergone similar experiences” in order to be knit into a nation; “they must have undergone them _together_.” Most of the great modern nations, as he says, have passed through the same processes of social change, “but in actual adjustment to such change each has had its own separate career.” Twenty-five years ago it was true that the term “American” meant one who, of whatever racial descent, represented something very definite, of tradition, experience, and achievement--and of promise, too--“a common glory in the past, a common will in the present”; “great things done together, and a desire to do still greater”; unity determined not by external facts alone, but by sentiment. Now, dimly as we yet realize it, it is true again. A baptism of blood and suffering, of sacrifice and self-denial, and of common experience in a vast world emergency, and out of it a vision of better understanding and a great work before us to be done, have gone far to restore that unity of appreciation of “great things done _together_” and of will to do still greater which was our common glory--and was getting lost. We had, we have now, a right to be both proud and jealous of the heritage left us by our fathers of many races, and now watered by the blood of our own generation, and to look with concern, if not with dismay, upon what might portend a swallowing up of this moral, this sentimental unity, in a great inundation of newcomers, who, however well intending as individuals, have not shared our tradition and experience, and who seem not to have been fitted by any experience of their own to assimilate either the tradition of our past or our aspiration for the future. ESSENTIALS OF “AMERICANISM” There are essentials distinctively American upon which we can base our definition of “America” and typify her in the human being who by spirit, vision, and vigilance best represents our tradition and our aspiration. Such a definition will hold against the world--even against those of our own household who neither exemplify nor understand it. The sum total of these essentials is not paralleled now, nor in history, anywhere else on earth. For of America alone it may be said: That however lamely and insufficiently we have lived up to it, _our country is traditionally the refuge for the oppressed of every land_. That here the individual has found a fuller freedom to seek his happiness in his own way. More than any other nation, America has never recognized a political autocracy, has reckoned Man above every consideration of property, class, or dynasty. That here only has _the individual male from the beginning been deemed the ultimate political unit_--“one man, one vote.” The country-wide adoption of Woman Suffrage extends this concept to include women.