_63._ "The United States, July 4 (N.A.N.A.)--'A decent respect for the opinion of mankind' dictates the content of this summary. Less than two centuries past, a small group of smugglers, merchants and planters united in an insurrection which in its course gathered to itself such an accreta of riffraff--debtors, convicts, adventurers, careerists, foreigners, theoreticians, idealists, revolutionaries, soldiers of fortune and restless men, that at the height of their numbers they composed, with their sympathizers, perhaps a third of the people in the country. After seven years of inept war in which they had all the breaks, including that of a halfhearted enemy, they established 'upon this continent a new nation.' Some of the phrases thrown off in the heat of propaganda were taken seriously and despite shocked opposition written into basic law. "The cryptogram is readable backward or forward, straightaway or upside down. Unparalleled resources, the fortuitous historical moment, the tide of immigration drawing on the best of the world, the implicit good in conception necessarily resultant in the explicit best of being; high purpose, inventive genius, exploratory urge, competitive spirit, fraternal enthusiasm, what does the ascription matter if the end product was clear for all to see? "Is it not fitting that a nation calling itself lightly 'God's Country,' meaning a land abundantly favored by nature, should find its dispatch through an act of the benefactor become understandably irritable? This is not to pose the editorial question of justice, but to remember in passing the girdled forests, abused prairies, gullied lands, the stupidly harnessed plains, wasted coal, gas, petroleum; the millions of tons of rich mud denied hungry soil by Mississippi levees and forced profitlessly into the salt sea. "A small part, a heartbreakingly small part of the United States remains at this moment. In a matter of weeks even this little must be overrun, stilled and covered green as all graves are. Scattered through the world there will be Americans, participants in a bitter diaspora. For them--and for their children to be instructed zealously in the formalities of an antique civilization--there can be no Fourth of July, no Thanksgiving; only one holiday will remain, and that continue through all the year. Its name, of course, is Memorial Day. W.R.L." _64._ This was the last dispatch from the once great editor. It was assumed generally that he had perished with so many others. It was only some time later I heard a curious story, for whose authenticity I cannot vouch.