n upon instrumentalities that are in no way formal, and that
have no dogma and have no creed, and which can not be put into writing, and
can not be set upon the press--to a thought that I have had in my mind for
some time as to the advancing of a new organization in this country--and,
perhaps, you will sympathize with it--I have called it, for lack of a
better name, "The League of American Fellowship," and there should be no
condition for membership, excepting a pledge that each one gives that each
year, or for one year, the member will undertake to interpret America
sympathetically to at least one foreign-born person, or one person in the
United States who does not have an understanding of American institutions,
American traditions, American history, American sports, American life, and
the spirit that is American. If you, upon your return to your homes, could
organize in the cities that you represent, throughout the breadth of this
land, some such league as that, and by individual effort, and without
formalism, pledge the body of those with whom you come in contact to make
Americans by sympathy and by understanding, I believe we would make great
progress in the solution of this problem.

I do not know what method can be adopted for the making of Americans, but I
think there can be a standard test as to the result. We can tell when a man
is American in his spirit. There has been a test through which the men of
this country--and the women, too--have recently passed--supposed to be the
greatest of all tests--the test of war. When men go forth and sacrifice
their lives, then we say they believe in something as beyond anything else;
and so our men in this country, boys of foreign birth, boys of foreign
parentage, Greek and Dane and Italian and Russian and Polander and
Frenchman and Portuguese, Irish, Scotch--all these boys have gone to
France, fought their fight, given up their lives, and they have proved, all
Americans that they are, that there is a power in America by which this
strange conglomeration of peoples can be melted into one, and by which a
common attachment can be made and a common sympathy developed. I do not
know how it is done, but it is done.

I remember once, thirty years or more ago, passing through North Dakota on
a Northern Pacific train. I stepped off the platform, and the thermometer
was thirty or forty degrees below zero. There was no one to be seen,
excepting one man, and that man, as he stood before