s almost without challenge; the American has grown so
accustomed to the denial of his constitutional rights and to the minute
regulation of his conduct by swarms of spies, letter-openers, informers
and _agents provocateurs_ that he no longer makes any serious protest.
It is surely a significant fact that, in the face of the late almost
incredible proceedings under the so-called Espionage Act and other such
laws, the only objections heard of came either from the persons directly
affected--nine-tenths of them Socialists, pacifists, or citizens accused
of German sympathies, and hence without any rights whatever in American
law and equity--or from a small group of professional libertarians,
chiefly naturalized aliens. The American people, as a people, acquiesced
docilely in all these tyrannies, both during the war and after the war,
just as they acquiesced in the invasion of their common rights by the
Prohibition Amendment. Worse, they not only acquiesced docilely; they
approved actively; they were quite as hotly against the few protestants
as they were against the original victims, and gave their hearty
approbation to every proposal that the former be punished too. The
really startling phenomenon of the war, indeed, was not the grotesque
abolition of liberty in the name of liberty, but the failure of that
usurpation to arouse anything approaching public indignation. It is
impossible to imagine the men of Jackson's army or even of Grant's army
submitting to any such absolutism without a furious struggle, but in
these latter days it is viewed with the utmost complacency. The
descendants of the Americans who punished John Adams so melodramatically
for the Alien and Seditions Acts of 1789 failed to raise a voice against
the far more drastic legislation of 1917. What is more, they failed to
raise a voice against its execution upon the innocent as well as upon
the guilty, in gross violation of the most elemental principles of
justice and rules of law.

Thus the Americano, put to the test, gave the lie to what is probably
his proudest boast, and revealed the chronic human incapacity for
accurate self-analysis. But if he thereby misjudged and misjudges
himself, he may find some consolation for his error in the lavishness
with which even worse misjudgment is heaped upon him by foreigners. To
this day, despite the intimate contact of five long years of joint war,
the French and the English are ignorant of his true character, and show