But when he becomes a citizen in the very act and fact of going forth under that flag to lay down his life for what it stands for--what better thing can he do, what better evidence can he offer, of his “inward and self-imposed sense of obligation?” Nay, more, how better may he show that he is enlisting in the service of his new country something that was kindred in the old? There was a ringing challenge to all our smug self-sufficiency in what the Bohemians bore on their banner in that Cleveland parade: AMERICANS, DO NOT BE DISCOURAGED: WE HAVE BEEN FIGHTING THESE TYRANTS FOR THREE HUNDRED YEARS! Many of us looked upon these men as somehow sneaking into a privilege, overlooking the fact that they were bringing us a gift! ASSIMILATING THE ENEMIES OF TYRANNY We are hardly yet awake to the wonder of what happened, to the magnitude of the work of national assimilation that took place all in a moment. We were very stupid about it. One of the most important officers of our army, charged with great responsibility in the preparations for the war, naïvely confessed some time after the United States had entered upon it, that he did not know who were the Czecho-Slovaks, or from what part of the world they came! And it was only with the greatest difficulty that the army authorities were made to realize that most of the races making up that political nightmare known as Austria-Hungary desired nothing so much as the chance to help overthrow the unspeakable tyranny from which they had fled, against which they and their fathers had “been fighting for three hundred years.” Better than the Allies themselves they understood the cause of the Allies, yet to the American army authorities they were only “enemy aliens”! It was in keeping with our statistical customs, not only in the Naturalization and Immigration Bureaus, but in the very census itself, to class an Austrian as an Austrian, knowing little and caring less about the world of difference between a Magyar and a Czech, between a Croat and a Slovak--though all were “Austrians” to the superficial eye of the census enumerator--and the General Staff of the United States army, which was going to war against “Austria” with absurdly, unpardonably vague, notions as to what an “Austrian” might be! It required a vigorous campaign of education before there could emerge even a fair, working intelligence in this regard; but emerge it finally did, and the anti-Austrian “Austrians” at last got their chance to go forth as American citizens under the Stars and Stripes to help give the _coup de grâce_ to the old oppressor of themselves, their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers. EPISODES OF MILITARY NATURALIZATION