e and Pascal and
Montesquieu and Descartes? repeats the friend of France; and by others
are trumpeted the fraternal relations that we ought to cultivate with
the countrymen of Dante, or of Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles.
This is phantom friendship, and we all know in our heart of hearts,
that we would fight any or all of them at the drop of a handkerchief,
if they hurt our feelings, ruffled our national pride, or maltreated
in a foreign land the meanest of our racial brothers. Straining after
such artificial bonds of union is as irritating as it is unreal.

Germany has few heartier admirers of Bismarck than am I; England has
few franker friends of her great gentlemen in peace and war than am I;
I have read and profited by French literature far more than from
anything America has produced; if I can write so that here and there a
brother has profited therefrom, I owe it to the Frenchmen I have
studied; but these are all nothing as compared with my heart's real
allegiances. There is a gulp in my throat when I dream of that weary,
misunderstood, but patient and humble peace-maker, who held the scales
between the millions of my own countrymen, shooting and stabbing one
another to death fifty years ago. No other man can be quite like him
to me; he remains my master of men, as is Lee my ideal of the Happy
Warrior. I understand the grim humor in his sad eyes, I love that
lined face, cut from the granite of self-control, that tamed volcano
face, seamed and scarred by the lava of his trials and his tears; I
can see how the illuminating and conciliatory anecdotes were his
relief from the pain of an aching heart; my muscles harden and my
nerves tingle as I recall the puppet politicians and fancy self-advertising
warriors who crucified him slowly. The country and the
people that Lincoln believed in, I must believe in and fight for too.
Washington was an Englishman and baptized us, but Lincoln was an
American who officiated at our first communion as a united people.

I ask no Englishman, no German, no Frenchman to agree with me, but I
ask them to leave me alone with my dead, to leave me in peace with my
living problems, to force no artificial friendships upon me, and thus
to let our respect for one another increase naturally.

Has the Englishman, has the German, no sanctuaries to be left
undisturbed; no heart-strings that are not to be fumbled at by busy
fingers; no personal dignities to be shrouded from investigations; no
sw