Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 131, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 June 1919 — WHAT SOME THINK OF US. [ARTICLE]

WHAT SOME THINK OF US.

Our popularity in certain quarters abroad is not of a character that is flattering to our own good self-opin-ion, as is evidenced by the following quotation from the London World: “To study American psychology is a pastime not without interest just now. Indeed, it might not 'have been altogether a bad thing if our ‘statesmen’ had taken, a turn at it some time ago. Before we had been committed, and helped to commit Europe, into the hands of America’s president. Before we were robbed of victory in war, and, probably, of victory in peace—all by this Old Man of the Sea from across the sea, that has so fatally fastened on us. “At our invitation, alas! If only the prime minister, in his blackest 'mood of Celtically desperate despair, .had not sent that S. 0. S! If two years ago we had clenched our teeth and gone on standing alone—we and France and Italy and our smaller allies! There is a growing belief that we could have won through without the help of .the egregious author off the egregious fourteen fourteen points. And it is a might-have-been that looms before us even more maddeningly as we learn more of the kind of ally we have let ourselves in for. No, not ally, associated power or, something, isn’t it! Even here there is an air of assumption of being ‘not as other men.’ “By now there is not one of the European 'countries that they have overrun —and they are to be found established in the remotest corners—where the Americans as a whole have not become intensely unpopular. France and Italy are more than ‘fed up’ with them. And the reason, I -imagine, or one of the chief reasons, is that they are an inferior nation posing as a superior one. “The arrogance of the aristocrat is detestable.. But the arrogance of the mere plutocrat; is unbearable. And, after all, it is on wealth au fond that America depends for her influence. As a race the Americans are, as they might put it themselves, all-sorts-of-Bagoes. Their kinship with us is of the remotest. Not more than, say, .001 per 1,000 (I have not the figures by me) have a drop of British blood —though, as some one has remarked, if all the claims to descent from the Mayflower immigrants are true, she must have been a liner more monstrous than even the twentieth century has ever seen. For the rest, a regular world-mixture is responsible Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Russia, Spain, yes, apd Germany. „ “As a matter of fact, a great proportion of so-called Americans are really Germans. No wonder President Wilson feels such a stirring pity and kindness to the boche., I have talked to Americans —wearing khaki, too, though only of the Red Gross— Who are nothing but pro-Germans. —Lafayette Journal.