Another people sought the United States to attain freedom. The Poles, oppressed on one side by Germany, on another by Austria, and on the third by the autocratic government of Russia under the Czars, heard the tale of the land of liberty, and set out for our shores in great hordes. So many have they come that Chicago is the second largest Polish city in the world, having almost as many Poles as Warsaw; and Milwaukee, Buffalo, and other American cities attest the surging of the Pole toward a land of liberty. In fact, there has been no country in Europe where people were dissatisfied with their government that has not sent its people to the United States. That France has sent the least number in proportion to her population has been due largely to the fact that the people of France had worked out for themselves a genuine democracy that satisfied the souls of her sons and daughters. Through the hundred and forty-one years that had elapsed between the calling of the Continental Congress and the entrance of the United States into war against Germany this nation had been solidifying that right of individual freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. The war between North and South had been fought in defense of the right of a human being to freedom as against the right of a State to separate itself from the national government. The latter issue was lost, not because it was wrong, but because it was not as vitally important in the history of civilization as the former. For that men and women and children should be held in bondage violated the spirit of America; and the bondage had to be broken. “No government,” as Abraham Lincoln said, “can exist half-slave and half-free.” [Illustration: An immigrant family qualified to enter the United States There has been no country in Europe where people were dissatisfied with their government that has not sent its people to the United States] Some one has called America the melting-pot of the nations. If it is, the fire that fuses the nationalities which have come to our land has been the fire of freedom.