Now, there is no unpopularity to-day in lauding a Jew or a Greek or an Irishman. May I go a step further, and say that the same freedom to express the tradition within them must be extended to the Americans of the old stock, even those who hold a grateful love for France (some of them recently have died for that), even those who love England for her long struggle for political liberty. I cannot feel that Agnes Repplier, Lyman Abbott, George Haven Putnam and the American Rights League are deserving of a certain fine intellectual scorn which Randolph Bourne and Max Eastman have applied to them. The American Rights League is entitled to the same open field and the same respect which the Menorah Society should receive. Why does Mr. Bourne applaud the one and lash the other? I trust he will welcome both. What I think Bourne, James Oppenheim, Walter Lippmann and Max Eastman have failed to see is that the old American stock (of diverse race but common tradition) had a right to respond vigorously to this war, where their inheritance of social, legal and political ideas were battling with hostile ideas. Somewhere, at some point, the new American tradition must plant itself. In some issue it must take root. We of the old stock sought to make this war the issue. We failed. All right. It is now your turn. In the open arena of discussion the ideas of all of us must collide into harmony. I can make clear the difficulty one has in reaffirming the old American idea by quoting from the letter of an American editor in response to what the chapters of this book are stating: "It seems so curiously out of focus in its estimation of the Old, the vanishing, America. Do you really believe that Old America should be raised from the dead:--The America of convenient transcendentalism where religion allowed a whole race to devote its body and spirit to material aggrandizement? If you blame America for Christian Science optimism, you must remember that Emerson and Whitman were our teachers. If you blame America for not taking part in the European war, you must remember that Washington told us to keep out of 'entangling alliances.' It is historic America that was grossly material, out of which our vast industrialism sprang with its importation of cheap labor. But the Garden of Eden always lies behind us, and nothing is commoner than finding Paradise in the past."