pent's Tooth" Is an Ungrateful Immigrant

One of the things that no patriot can ever understand is the ingratitude
of the Germans who fled from the Fatherland to escape German militarism
and autocracy.

Lecturing in a Western State, I met a banker who had returned from a
schoolhouse in a rural district where he had been talking about the
Liberty Bonds to a German audience. One old German refused to attend
this meeting. He was very bitter in his attacks upon our Government. He
had made no subscription to the first two Liberty Loans; he had refused
to help in the campaign for the Red Cross Fund; he insisted that he paid
his taxes and that was all that the Government had any right to demand
from him.

He went one step further: The old man said that he had not read a single
American newspaper since the war began, and that nothing but a German
newspaper should cross his threshold until the war ended. Not until that
banker descended upon this pro-German with the indignation of an
outraged patriot did the rich old farmer capitulate.

The story of that German is typical. He came to this country about 1859.
When the homestead act was passed he received from the United States one
hundred and sixty acres of land in the very centre of one of the richest
States in this Union, and his one hundred and sixty acre farm is now
worth about $100,000.

When he ran away from Germany he was receiving twenty cents a day. He
rose at daybreak, cleaned stables, milked cows, toiled in the field,
began his milking after dark, worked sixteen hours a day, had nothing to
eat except what could not be sold by his employer. He was a German
plebeian, with no chance ever to improve his condition. He was ignorant,
stupid, a mere beast of burden.

So the German boy slipped across the line into Holland, came steerage to
this country, slept among the rats of the ship, but the people of the
United States welcomed that miserable refugee. The American school,
without any charge, gave him four months' instruction every winter until
he was twenty. The American people gave him a farm as a free gift. This
Republic educated his children, his grandchildren and enriched them with
land, office, honours and wealth. Once he hated autocracy and militarism
in the Fatherland--but in 1918 he loved them.

No sooner did the Kaiser invade Belgium and commit rape upon that land
than this German farmer passed through a revulsion. Whatever the Kaiser
did was right. If German