America is the vanguard of the European civilization moving westward. It has taken the sum of the civilizations of the earth to bridge the chasm of the Atlantic. America is the last section of the circle of the world, which completed, civilization moves back to its starting place. Power increases with civilization and, with each step civilization has taken, the conquests have been proportionate. Each has tried world conquest and failed, but each has come nearer and each time the world has been nearer ready to receive it. The present war is the attempt of a representative of the civilization of Europe to control the earth, and proving _per se_ its unfitness to do so. Consequently, the relation of America to the War is that she is coming of age, and is at last ready to take her place among the great nations of the world as a power that can never again be disregarded, a mighty guardian of the Right. * * * * * AMERICA has been aptly called the Melting Pot. Since 1620, when the Pilgrims established their permanent colony at Plymouth, people from the Old World have been flocking to this country and becoming “Americans.” Every country of the globe has sent its representatives—each a different metal to be merged with the others until the American should be as distinct a type as the Englishman or Frenchman. At first there was natural discord—each was a different metal in the melting pot, but as there was no heat, no fire, they could not amalgamate. Then came the first blast of national fire—the Revolution, and in that, the first great struggle for Liberty, was moulded from the composite alloys—the American. The American as he came from the mould of the Revolution was the foundation on which the country rests, and although the descendants of those Americans are too few in number now to be more than a flux for the steady stream of metal as it pours from the pot, they can at least preserve the standard that their forebears passed down to them as the Golden Heritage, and be examples to these new and untried metals. In the War of 1812 and in the Civil War the new metals were amalgamated and tempered with the old, but since 1864 there has been no fire hot enough to mould together the millions who have sought the United States as a home. There has been no sword over our heads. There has been no great impending disaster, no danger to the country as a whole of great loss of life or property, and our Liberty and our Honor have not been at stake as they are today. So it is now in this fierce blast from Hell’s furnace, the Great War, that the National fire is rekindled and each metal is slowly sinking its own individuality into the common form carefully stirred by the hand of the Almighty, and in the white heat, as the pure metal is tempered until it rings true and measures to the old standard, the slag is cast aside. Thus is America the Melting Pot. * * * * *