It may be that we are too late in starting this movement of "America for Americans and Americans for America." No doubt it should have been begun thirty years ago. But if we can find some method by which, after ten years of entire rejection, immigration can be narrowly and rigidly restricted, and by which the surplus population can be distributed over the vast, uncultivated area of our great country, and slowly wrought into our social life, there is yet a hope left for our country. But if alien populations are permitted, as in the past, to flood our land, colonize in our great cities, and propagate their kind with such amazing rapidity, while only native-born Americans continue to till the soil and propagate their kind in an appallingly decreasing ratio, then our country is lost and everything the fathers strove to build for posterity will sooner or later be wiped out. We do not in the least seek to hide the fact that the Ku Klux Klan is making a last stand for America as the home of Americans and Americanism. CHAPTER XII The Failure of Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe To the average country-born American the period of the war has been a time of painful disillusionment. There may have been among us some who, before the war, had some accurate knowledge of what was going on in the world; but the great mass of Americans were very much shocked by the succeeding event. We took the statements of the leaders of the people in Germany and Russia at their face value. It seems to me to be very much worth while, at present, to trace the various events by which we were led into knowing what central and eastern Europe were really thinking and doing. Let us recall our first period of disappointment. We had always believed that the parties of the people in Germany, especially the great social-democratic party, had the power to prevent the Kaiser from undertaking a war of conquest. The declaration of war was to be the signal for a revolution and the creation of a republic. This was rather taken for granted, without investigation, by reading people all over the world. When we saw the entire German nation, with hardly an exception, turn quite insane with the war spirit, we sat back and wondered what this people was really like.