TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE AMERICAN LEGION.
IN the Observer of Sunday last Mr. Price Bell, the well- known American publicist, describes the organization of the American Legion, a political but non-party body which appears destined to accomplish very great things in the Republic. If the members of the Legion remain true to their principles, they may save the United States by their action, and, like England of old, save the world by their example. At any rate that example, not the first which we have had from the new England beyond the Atlantic, may save us from the crimes and miseries of that form of violent minority rule which for want of a better word we now call Revolution. The American Legion has already two million male members and a female mem- bership which will very soon outdistance that of the men in numbers. Women are less bound by existing parties and existing organizations and are admittedly quicker in the uptake.
The aims and objects of the Legion are thus described by Mr. Price Bell :—
Essentially, the American Legion is America's answer to gratuitous outrages upon American citizenship. It has a peculiar significance for the I.W.W. traitor, for the Bolshevik traitor, for the Sinn Fein traitor, whose treason consists in his effort to involve America in war with England, and thus devastate American civilization, all civilization, and ruin humanity. The American Legion was born to watch these plotters against the civil'rad world."
The following is the preamble of the Legion's Constitution. In spirit it is worthy of the best traditions of American Constitutionalism :- " For God and country we associate ourselves together for the following purposes : To uphold and defend the Consti- tution of the United States of America ; to maintain law and order ; to foster and perpetuate a 100 per cent. Americanism ; to preserve the memories and incidents of our association in the Great War ; to inculcate a sense of individual obligation to the community, State, and nation ; to combat the autocracy of both the classes and the masses ; to make right the master of might ; to promote peace and goodwill on earth ; to safeguard and transmit to posterity the principles of justice, freedom, and democracy ; to consecrate and sanctify our comradeship by our devotion to mutual helpfulness."
Colonel Franklin D'Olier of Philadelphia, the first Com- mander of the American Legion, has further described its aims and objects as follows :— " The American Legion will combat Bolshevism and incen- diary radicalism all the way. It will fight every form of lawlessness aimed against our Republic. It will fight anti- American and un-American propaganda and propagandists. We shall have a National Americanism Committee charged with realizing in this country the basic ideal of the Legion-100 per cent. Americanism. We shall drive home the great democratic principle that the interests of all the people are above those of any special interest or any class or section of the people."
Finally, Mr. Price Bell, who has lately returned here from a journey into every part of America and is not speaking by hearsay, describes the sort of men and women who belong to the Legion :- " Now, who are in this great patriotic society, with its love of democracy and its call for peace and goodwill among men ? Are they pietists ? Are they superannuates ? Are they men and women given to inaction and to idle reverie ? They are soldiers, sailors, and marines, and the mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters of these. They are the manhood and the woman- hood that played America's part in the war. They are of America's very own and very best. Many strains run in their veins—English, Scotch, Welsh, Irish, Dutch, German, what you will. But their spiritual core is American. There is not the ghost of a hyphen in them. Their spirit is the spirit that con- quered the far-spreading American wilderness, and built a mighty civilization there. If they show themselves illiberal, lawless, intolerant, in places, it is illiberalism and lawlessness and intolerance answering to their like. Personally, I am delighted with these irregular acts, these evidences of a new
virility. They are pink with health. And, anyway, changing the metaphor, they are but bubbles and foam on a tremendous tide bearing towards a beautiful shore."
Such a Legion, with a difference or two, is what we want here. We need an organization with similar aims and objects and obligations which shall bind the best men and women in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland to maintain and extend a true democratic system of govern- ment, and carry out what must be the essential aim of every good citizen under a democratic Constitution— the will of the majority, legally, constitutionally, and correctly expressed. Instead we now get mere guesses at the will of the people, mistaken assertions as to what that will is, or impudent declarations that this or that class is the only class which knows what is good for the nation, and therefore the only class that ought to be listened to.
In a word, we must make here an active stand against the claims to minority rule put forward by the Labour Party, although it must always be remembered that such a League would in truth be the friend and not the enemy of Labour. Labour and the Labour Party are in no way synonymous terms. Just as our forefathers withstood and destroyed in turn the tyranny of the King, the aris- tocracy, and the middle class, so a British Legion may bar the citadel of the Constitution against the arrogant claims of the extremists of the Labour Party, as proud, as heart- less, and as ruthless an aristocracy as ever attempted to monopolize the Government of these islands.
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