Our national government may have been inefficient in its details, but taken as a whole it has created a country which for generations has been a haven for the oppressed of the world. How many hundred thousand Germans have immigrated to America? How many Americans have ever emigrated to Germany? We have lynchings in the South, but no other country was ever left a more hideous problem of slavery, and in 1861 when the supreme test came the government rose to it; no one but a visionary can expect an immediate Utopian readjustment. Our municipalities abound in graft, but what country before ours ever faced the problem of absorbing annually the enormous flood of unlettered immigrants that is unceasingly poured upon us by the Old World. The wonder is not that we have graft, but that we have not more graft. We have great wealth and extreme poverty, but they are due to unusual economic causes, namely: great national resources on the one hand, and ceaseless immigration on the other. Our cities are overcrowded and our standards of work are superficial, but would this be cured by a despotism? And always we have the hope that goes with liberty, the undying strength that accompanies the knowledge that you are master of your own soul. A good despot at the head of a military autocracy may for the time being make the most efficient government in the world; certainly a bad despot at the head of a military autocracy makes the worst government. But I will never believe that the total surrender of the individual to the guiding hand of a despotic autocracy makes in the end for the progress of the whole. History shows it to be untrue; the never-ceasing efforts of democracy, as endless as the waves of the sea, show that despotic autocracy cannot last; and the hell let loose upon earth by Prussian autocracy, its modern exponent, clinches the falsity of its creed for all but the intoxicated or maniacs. XI Now has arisen the Menace, the eternal foe of a free people, the Prussian Creed. The following is a composite statement of Prussianism: "compiled sentence by sentence from the utterances of Prussians, the Kaiser and his generals, professors, editors, and Nietzsche, part of it said in cold blood, years before this war, and all of it a declaration of faith now being ratified by action." It is taken word for word from the eleventh chapter of Owen Wister's remarkable work "The Pentecost of Calamity,"[A] and is the most concise statement of the Menace that I have seen. [A] "The Pentecost of Calamity," by Owen Wister. The Macmillan Company.