Personally and nationally, this plain but tremendous concept is beginning to manifest itself here in America. I do not write as a patriot. It is not _my country_ that is of interest, but humankind. America’s political interests, her trade, all her localizations as a separate and bounded people, are inimical to the new enthusiasm. The new social order cannot concern itself as a country apart. American predatory instincts, her self-worship, her attempt at neutrality while supplying explosives for the European slaughter arenas, her deepening confinement in matter during the past fifty years, have prepared her for the outright demoralization of war, just as surely as Europe is meeting today the red harvest from such instincts and activities. For action invariably follows the thought. Yet the hearts of men in America are changing. I do not write as a religionist, but as one very much of the world. For the hearts of men do change, and it is only through such changes that the material stagnation of a people can be relieved without deluges of blood. The high hope is upon us. In being apart from war, America has been enabled to see. One must always remove himself from the ruck to see its movement. In the past six months, within these western shores, the voices of true inspiration have been heard. From a literary standpoint alone, this is the most significant fact since Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, took pen in hand forgetting themselves a little while each day. There is a peculiar strength upon American production of all kinds, as a result of this very act of getting out from under European influence. England and France and Germany are merely national voices now. The voice of the partisan is but a weak treble against the basic rumble of war. War is a confession, as suicide is a confession, as every act of blood and rage is a confession, of the triumph of the animal in the human mind.... If you have received letters from friends in England or Germany or France since the war; friends whom formerly you admired for their culture and acumen, you have been struck by the dullness and misery of the communications, the uncentered points of view, the incapacity of human vision in the midst of the heaviness and blackness of life there; if, indeed, you have read the recent newspapers and periodicals of these countries, you will require no further proof of the fact—that a nation at war is an obscene nation, its consciousness all driven down into the physical, its voice tonally imperfect from hate and fear, its eyes open to red illusion and not to truth.