Page:Oregon Exchanges.pdf/44

November, 1917 democracy, England, ﬁlls up the ranks of the 'blue-blooded' ". Note the sarcasm! Yet he also glories in the fact that the ﬁrst American soldier reported killed from the front in France bears a German name, because "it is concrete proof that. . . the ties that bind them (the Germans) to the land of their adoption are stronger than the blood ties that bound them to the land of their birth or their parents' birth." "Perhaps," he says, "it will be a signal for a let-up on the persecution that has been heaped upon those Germans who did not shout wild hatred of Germany when war was declared."

He also has an eminently sensible editorial on the attempted violation of the draft law in some of the southern states. He says, "The dangers they encounter are tenfold what the battle line in France would offer, while the disgrace that is sure to fall upon them can never be effaced by later deeds of valor. There was only one way to oppose the draft after it became a law. If it was against the public will Congress should have been petitioned to repeal it. If it was contrary to the Constitution and is the will of the majority of the people, it should be obeyed and rigidly enforced on those who evade it."

Such a pronouncement cheers one with hope that the editor is conquering his native passion of sympathy and that his leadership will ultimately ring true in all respects. Yet we are doomed to experience more disappointments. For, shortly before this paper dropped its German dress and became the Portland American, the editor contended that if the members of Congress go home and go into the fields and workshops where the real people of the nation live and there learn what they think about the eleven billion dollar appropriations, instead of taking their cues from Northcliffe editors, munition manufacturers, and scheming politicians as they have been doing, then they will discover that the La Follettes, Stones, and Gronnas will be in a majority when Congress convenes again.

About this influential paper enough has now been said and quoted to show, as I think, these things: First, that its German readers have received from it very little encouragement to go into the war with wholehearted zeal. There is nothing to help them see, and less to help them feel the rightfulness of the American cause. Second, these readers, nevertheless, are expected to do their duty under the conscription act when the government shall call for their services.

Turning to the Washington Staats-Zeitung of Seattle, we find that in the issue of April 5 the editor urged all "patriots" to send night letters to senators and representatives in Congress urging them not to vote for the resolution declaring a state of war which was requested by President Wilson in his war message of April 2. After the declaration of a state of war, he advised his readers to conduct themselve in a manner to prevent giving cause of offense. His editorial utterances were usually cautious, yet he was venomously anti-British, and reprinted such stuff as the Illinois Staats-Zeitung's article headed"An Alibi for England," in which Britain is falsely and maliciously charged with having begun. the war to strangle the economic growth of Germany. Other articles are of a more wholesome character. In the number for August 19 is a reprint from the Los Angles 3