We Americans are a perishing people. From the point of view of history we are being wiped from the face of the earth with a rapidity which almost staggers hope. First let me clearly define what I mean by the phase, "We American People." I mean by that phrase those white, native-born citizens of this country whose ancestry, birth and training has been such as to give them to-day a full share in the basic principles, the ideals and the practice of our American civilization. I do not mean that a foreign-born citizen can not be a good citizen. On the contrary, many of our foreign-born are excellent citizens. Yet I most positively mean what the title at the head of this chapter distinctly suggests. We, the American people, we whose breed fought through the Revolutionary War and the War Between the States, the people by whose courage the great American wilderness was penetrated, and by whose painstaking industry that wilderness was subjugated and made fruitful--that this people, who gave to the world Washington and Franklin, Jefferson and Hamilton, Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster, Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln--this people, our people, is on the downward way to the early ending of its remarkable history. The mighty length and breadth of the soil made sacred by our struggles and our victories is now being given over, with ever greater rapidity, to various peoples of a totally different mold. I am not saying that these other peoples are bad in character or in any way unworthy. May Heaven witness for my colleagues and myself of the Ku Klux Klan that we bear them no ill will whatsoever. I hope that none of us as individuals or as an organization may do them aught but good. We wish, above all, to be moved in all things by that Christian spirit upon which our organization is founded, and which, I trust, moves its humblest member. But we have come to sound a warning throughout the length and breadth of the land--a warning which everyone of our own people from Newfoundland to California and from Florida to Alaska must hear and heed. _We are perishing as a people and the land of our fathers shall presently know us no more._ Emerson once said, "What you do speaks so loud I can not hear what you say." Let me here change the words but not the meaning. The facts cry out so loud that we can not hear the vain and wordy opinions of the theorists and the sentimentalists. The prattle of these sentimentalists, be it ever so noisy, can not prevent us from both seeing and hearing the real drama. We are witnessing the greatest tragedy of the ages. [Illustration: Only Americans May Pass]