CHAPTER IX

THE UNITED STATES AND INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM

In the soul of every human being, no matter how clogged it be by traditions, lives the desire for freedom. It is this desire, this spark of fire, which has peopled the continent of America. For, long before the colonies revolted and established a republic the great territory which has become the United States beckoned to the peoples of the Old World a welcome to a land which would give them opportunity for the freedom they sought. The whole history of the American colonies is a history of the search of mankind for individual freedom in which to work out his ideals without governmental interference. Political refugees, religious refugees dared the dangers of the ocean to come to the new land that they might live and worship as their souls urged them.

The settlement of Massachusetts was made by the Puritans of England who were seeking a refuge from the oppression they had suffered in England on account of their religious beliefs and practices. They braved the stormy northern Atlantic to come to the wilderness. They braved the Indians to stay. They established their homes, their schools, their meeting-houses, their government, and dwelt according to the dictates of their consciences in that freedom which they had desired.

No less for freedom did William Penn and his colony of Quakers come to the western hemisphere. They sought a place where they would be given a chance to worship God according to their belief. A peaceful sect, they sought peace, and they brought into the new country standards of living that set their impress upon the infant nation. Liberal to others as they desired liberality for themselves, they were destined to sow seeds of thought that were to be harvested in the effects of the Constitution of the republic, when it was formulated.

The Huguenots in the Carolinas, fleeing religious persecution, found haven. Lord Baltimore established the Maryland colony of English Catholics who could not practise their religion in the old country. And where the motive for the establishment of the colony was not in itself purely a question of finding a place of religious freedom, the interrelationship of the colonies became so close that in time the spirit of religious freedom became warp of the fabric of the country that was to be the American nation.

Political freedom was promoted, in the beginning, by the distance of the colonies from Europe. France, Spain, and England were too far away, and ocean travel too hazardous, to make the bond between the mother countries and the colonies tight. Men and women who had been venturesome enough to cross the seas were not of the sort who would be held for long by mere traditions of allegiance to old lands. Little by little the people of the colonies gained larger measures of political freedom until the time arrived when the unjust tax imposed by England aroused them to revolt. The Boston Tea Party expressed the spirit of America. The Declaration of Independence voiced America’s aspiration and America’s intention. The War of the Revolution settled the right of Americans to their own government. The Constitution of the United States guaranteed to Americans their rights to the enjoyment of that freedom which had been the mainspring of the foundation of the nation.

Gradually the fact that this was a country where men could have a share in the government, could speak their minds, could worship God in their own way, could work out their ideals and ambitions without governmental interference as long as these in no way conflicted with the interests of law and order, went over the earth. It found its way into those countries of Europe where men were eager for its coming. The English, after the War of 1812, when the United States definitely established our standing as a nation, were among the first to come as settlers. And from other western countries of Europe came other settlers, led by the knowledge that here could they enjoy individual freedom.

To America, as to the Promised Land, flocked the Irish. Restless under the English yoke, denied economic, political, religious, and educational liberty by a government of an alien neighbor, the Irish people turned westward. The famine and the political revolution of 1848 sent them out from Ireland by the tens of thousands. To our land they brought a passionate yearning for freedom and a passionate gratitude to the country which opened it to them; and because they were, as a people, gifted with the power of expressing their emotions, they spread the fame of the United States broadcast over the world as a haven for those who sought liberty.

After them came the Germans, led by the political refugees of that country who had incurred the enmity of Prussia in the Revolution of 1848, which had striven to bring some measure of freedom to the German people. Denied it at home, hundreds of thousands of Germans came to America to find liberty in their individual lives, to find opportunity. It is these Germans and their descendants who, understanding what the Prussian yoke means, have become among the best of our American citizens. Knowing what they escaped, they know what America fights against now.

The third great movement of a people to the United States has been the westward coming of the Jews. In this country, as in no other, they possessed full religious freedom, and to this country they have flocked from every land of Europe where they had huddled, unwelcome, for centuries. Here they have found no opposition to their faith. Here they have had full chance to worship as they would. For the first time in thousands of years the Jew could build his temple unhindered. For the first time since the Roman had gone into Palestine the Jew was a citizen of the land in which he dwelt.

Then came the peoples of eastern Europe, peoples of the vast empire that is called Austria-Hungary for lack of a better name. Ruled by a man not of their race, a man of one of the oldest, most corrupt, and autocratic of the reigning families of Europe, they were struggling upward toward freedom when the growing commercial dominion of the United States took the word to them of our nation’s beacon. To us they have literally surged. Among us they have found the freedom denied their peoples at home.

Another people sought the United States to attain freedom. The Poles, oppressed on one side by Germany, on another by Austria, and on the third by the autocratic government of Russia under the Czars, heard the tale of the land of liberty, and set out for our shores in great hordes. So many have they come that Chicago is the second largest Polish city in the world, having almost as many Poles as Warsaw; and Milwaukee, Buffalo, and other American cities attest the surging of the Pole toward a land of liberty.

In fact, there has been no country in Europe where people were dissatisfied with their government that has not sent its people to the United States. That France has sent the least number in proportion to her population has been due largely to the fact that the people of France had worked out for themselves a genuine democracy that satisfied the souls of her sons and daughters.

Through the hundred and forty-one years that had elapsed between the calling of the Continental Congress and the entrance of the United States into war against Germany this nation had been solidifying that right of individual freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. The war between North and South had been fought in defense of the right of a human being to freedom as against the right of a State to separate itself from the national government. The latter issue was lost, not because it was wrong, but because it was not as vitally important in the history of civilization as the former. For that men and women and children should be held in bondage violated the spirit of America; and the bondage had to be broken. “No government,” as Abraham Lincoln said, “can exist half-slave and half-free.”

[Illustration: An immigrant family qualified to enter the United States

There has been no country in Europe where people were dissatisfied with their government that has not sent its people to the United States]

Some one has called America the melting-pot of the nations. If it is, the fire that fuses the nationalities which have come to our land has been the fire of freedom.

That is why America’s entrance into the world war is so much more vitally significant than a mere attack in defense of certain violations of international law. It is a defense of the principle of individual freedom. Were the United States not to oppose a force that threatened the freedom of the world, we would not be worthy of the trust which the peoples of other lands have reposed in us. The Irish, the Germans, the Jews, the Slavs who came to America would eventually have come in vain. For Germany threatens the liberty of all peoples, if she wins to victory in Europe. Germany stands for all those ideas of government from which these peoples fled. Germany stands for the suppression of the individual as a political unit. Germany stands for might. Against all that we have always fought. If we failed to fight now, we would be but deferring the issue. And so to-day the United States sends our soldiers to France and our sailors out on the seas in defense of that right of mankind which is God’s gift, no matter how men have tried to take it from him, the right of the freedom of the individual to live his life as he sees best, according only to the dictates of order, of moral integrity, of justice, and of righteousness.