For those men and women who are physicians and lawyers and teachers and writers, they are young, and they belong to America. And they who recede into the shadow, they are old, and they do not understand America. But they have made their contribution to America--their sons and their daughters. ROBERT M. WERNAER Robert Maximilian Wernaer was born in 1865 in Jena, Germany, where he received his early education. After coming to the United States in 1884, he took a course in law at the Albany Law School, and attended Harvard University, from which he received his Ph.D. degree in 1903. His studies were continued abroad at Leipzig, Heidelberg, Geneva, and Berlin. He was admitted to the Bar in 1889 and practiced law in Brooklyn and New York. Later he was instructor in German at the universities of Wisconsin and Harvard, being also lecturer on German literature at the latter institution in 1908. In 1917 there was published his stirring, patriotic poem, “The Soul of America,” which leaves no doubt concerning his stand on the great question of the hour. The parts reprinted here are taken chiefly from the opening cantos of the poem. THE SOUL OF AMERICA[11] O America! Land of forests and prairies. Land of races and peoples, Land of freedom and tolerance, Looked-for haven of the nations of the world! To you I came, and you I adopted. I have infolded you as a child infolds its mother. I say to you: “My mother!” I love you because you hold the torch of liberty in your outstretched hand. I love you because your constitution speaks of the people as the rulers. (I am a man--I salute you, brother!) I love you because you are not governed by a king. I love you because princes and nobles are not met on your streets-- The dignity of man is not lowered. I love you because of the true red mixture of human blood that flows in your veins. Blessed are the dreams of the first settlers! I love you because, in the beginning of your history, You gathered together your people; You girded your loins; You armed yourself with weapons of steel; And you fought. You fought for liberty; You fought for independence; O divine freemanship! You fought for democracy; You fought for nature’s own laws; And you won. Blessed are the noble men in whom the dreams of our fathers still live! And since those days, the peoples came from the ends of the earth, And you increased; And your stars now count forty and eight. I love you because of what you did in the middle of the nineteenth century,-- You liberated some millions of dark-colored people living among you; You emancipated them. I love you because you gave your blood for the Cubans. You fought for them, but took no soil. You made them free. The Filipinos will be free also. I love [you] because you are a nation of givers. Above all else, I love you because of your Soul,