Primarily among the announced purposes of the Legion is the perpetuating of those principles of justice, freedom and democracy for which its members either fought or stood ready to fight. On the field in France or in the training camps at home, the millions of America's best manhood have learned intimately and well a new lesson of individual and national responsibility. Such lessons, at the cost they were obtained, are not to be forgotten or lost. The ideals of the fighting men of the states, producing the valor and the power which made the American Army irresistible, and the revelations by fire of new realizations and brotherhood and of world and national citizenship are surely to be felt in the calm, happier times of peace. _Philadelphia Record_, April 10, 1919.--... If, as Colonel Roosevelt predicts, the membership shall eventually comprise 4,000,000 men who were in the military and naval service of the United States in the late war, it will have possibilities of power that must be reckoned with. But if, in the long life before it, the American Legion shall have no more to its discredit than is summed up in the history of the G.A.R. whose ranks are now so pathetically thin, it will have been a worthy follower of its fathers. _Paterson_ (N.J.) _Evening News_, May 7, 1919.--... The new organization starts its career deserving and receiving the good wishes of the entire country. The character of the men of the American army who are promoting it and the high ideals which it professes and proposes to maintain are a guaranty that it will be a power for helpful service in the common family of the nation. _Duluth_ (Minn.) _Herald_, May 24, 1919.--There is a great field for the American Legion, the organization of American veterans of the World War, and judging by the spirit of the recent convention and by the expressions of the returning delegates as reported in the press of the country, it is going to fill that field. And the field that awaits it, and that it seems to intend to fill, is a field of a vigorous and aggressive effort to demand and enforce a strong and coherent and consistent Americanism. Not the swashbuckling kind of Americanism--the chip-on-the-shoulder kind--the we-can-lick-the-world kind. These lads of ours are the last in the world to preach that fool kind of Americanism. For they--or at least those of them who crossed the seas and fought for liberty and peace on the other side--have seen in the case of Germany what that kind of nationalism comes to, and they are against it.