Meantime it is still a trifle perilous, sometimes fatal; those who practice it must expect bloody noses and cracked crowns. It may be to the advantage of our countrymen to know that if they have no forethought but thrift they can have no safety but peace; that in the school of emergency nothing is taught but how to weep; that there are no effective substitutes for courage and devotion. America’s best defenses are the breasts of American soldiers and the brains of American commanders. Confidence in any “revolutionizing” device is a fatal faith. 1899. CHRISTMAS AND THE NEW YEAR In our manner of observing Christmas there is much, no doubt, that is absurd. Christmas is to some extent a day of meaningless ceremonies, false sentiment and hollow compliments endlessly iterated and misapplied. The observances “appropriate to the day” had, many of them, their origin in an age with which our own has little in common and in countries whose social and religious characteristics were unlike those obtaining here. As in so many other matters, America has in this been content to take her heritage without inquiry and without alteration, sacredly preserving much that once had a meaning now lost, much that is now an anachronism, a mere “survival.” Even to the Christmas vocabulary we have added little. St. Nicholas himself, the patron saint of deceived children, still masquerades under the Spanish feminine title of “Santa” and the German nickname of “Claus.” The back of our American coal grate is still idealized as a “yule log,” and the English “holly” is supposed in most cases fitly to be shadowed forth by a cedar bough, while a comparatively innocuous but equally inedible indigenous comestible figures as the fatal English “plum pudding.” Nearly all our Christmas literature is, _longo intervallo_, European in spirit and Dickensish in form. In short, we have Christmas merely because we were in the line of succession. We have taken it as it was transmitted, and we try to make the worst of it.