«<» • ' . '>^/ .' % "^^-^^s ^f\ -'!^:° y \ \^ ^'^ ..^'•-. "oV" ^■^^4'^ •• ^-^^ -^^ • aV^ : r^o^ S^C^ \.<'^ '^A\ S-/ ''^'. %/ rAQi A^ , • • , '^o * ' t ^ 4-^ -^^^ • 'bV '^0^ .0' t -n^-o^ .%>Cr .^^ "** %^ c / 'bV" .0 uluuimiULiiiiiiiiiiiii ii iiiiniiiiiiiiMiiiiiii inaiiM.miiiTMiiii awm iiiiMiinMiiiMiiiiMniiPiiiiiuMwwBiiiiMiiiBiiiiUBii.iiiJiimiiimN Cor Mundi The Heart of the World ONE DOLLAR, NET By NICOLA GIGLIOTTI 77 A Contribution to the Mission of the UNITED STATES OFAMERICA I in the Modern World n " """"I" ""II" "" iiiniimi.i tiii wiiiiinuiiiiiiiiNiiNiHi ■H rimtwtiwgrii«i wMiiiiMM..inuL.iiiiimiwii.Mwiiii.ii]ii iiiiuiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiiMiii ki Cor cTWundi The Heart of the World OLLAR, NET By NICOLA GIGLIOTTI COPYRIGHTED 1918 BY NICOLA GIGLIOTTI SLP 18 i9id THB A-K-D PBINTINC CO. ■ RIE. PENN'A To SAMUEL E. HOLLY, Editor of the Erie Evening Herald, Modest, Able, Conscientious, Foresighted, Who has seen into the future in the same spirit which has dictated the following pages and who loves this great country with the same love that inflames me. This little hook is affectionately inscribed. To the Reader: This modest contribution to American just propaganda I have dictated from bed. While doctors were insisting that I should keep absolutely quiet, because my life was and is in danger, I have dictated the following pages, jumpingly and disconnectedly, but with unity of purpose. If I shall live, my modest mission in life will be continued, and if God's will is that I must answer my summons, these pages ought to be con- sidered as my political testament. My children and my grand- children, if my memory will mean anything at all to them, must continue the work of loving free institutions and man- kind, and of doing everything in their power to keep kindled in theirs and in their neighbors' hearts the noble flame of pure patriotism. NICOLA GIGLIOTTL Erie, Pa., March 1st, 1918. 2905 Poplar St. The Heart of the World Cor Mundi. The name of peace is sweet; the thing itself is most salutary. But bettveen peace and slavery there is a wide difference. Peace is liberty in tranquillity; slavery is the worst of all evils — to be repelled, if need, not only by war, but even by death. CICERO. I have been in this country for over twenty-five years, and I take pride in the fact that my political adversaries in Italy, when they did not accuse me of being a friend of France — one of the men who, with Cavallotti, Bovio, Imbriani, and others, wished to see the ruin of my motherland, in the interest of the great nation which proclaimed the rights of men — they nicknamed me the AMERICAN, on account of my love for the United States of America, and of my worship for Wash- ington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. I had lectured on the great- ness of republican federal governments, and I had tried to popularize the doctrine that peace could be enjoyed in Europe only when all empires, monarchies, and republics would be united in a federation of states. I had been very active — in order to check the menacing invasion of the doctrines of Karl Marx and of the materialistic conception of history — to give as much diffusion as it was possible for me to two books of typical American authors— PROGRESS AND POVERTY of Henry George, and LOOKING BACKWARD of Edward Bel- lamy. The last book was responsible — I am sorry to say — ^to help the spread of Socialism much more than all the mission- ary work of Andrea Costa, and all the books and pamphlets of Marx, Engels, Lafargue, etc. Signor Oddino Morgari, a lead- ing member of the Italian Parliament, after he read and re- read LOOKING BACKWARD, deserted the ranks of the Re- publicanism of Mazzini, and became one of the prophets of the so-called Scientific Socialist Party. It was not my fault, though. In Italy, in season and out of season, year in and year out, I advocated the principles of a republican federal form of government, as had been proposed by Carlo Cattaneo, Alberto Mario, and Giuseppe Ferrari, the eminent philosopher to whom we owe the magnificent edition of the works of Giovan Battista Vico. I worshipped Mazzini, on whose knees I played in my infancy in the hospitable house of Giovanni Nicotera in Naples. I bought and gave — as a sincere mission- ary of the protestant faith would have done with the Gospel —thousands of copies of "I DOVERI DELL'UOMO (Duties of Men) of Mazzini, because the doctrine advocated in them was 6 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi and is the greatest message of freedom, virtue, unselfishness, and righteousness any liberty loving man could wish. From the French encyclopedists to our time, the majority of people who advocated the fall of tyrannies seemed to deny the exist- ence of a living God, and made an effort to banish from history the government of Providence. To the exaggerations of Bos- suet and Vico, and to the "hazard" of Voltaire and Frederick the Great, they substituted gradually the pantheistic fatalism of Hegel, the positivistic fatalism of Comte, the revolutionary fatalism of Thiers, and the historic materialism of Marx and his school. I always saw God immanent in mankind, and what Bancroft eloquently said in his famous speech to the Histori- cal Society of New York in 1856, seemed to me that every man should accept and try to teach. Mazzini understood the des- tinies of mankind better than any other man, living or gone, and he knew that no man was entitled to claim his rights if he was not ready to perform his duties. And while everybody else was proclaiming at the top of his voice the rights of indi- viduals, he wrote The Duties of Men. Even our glorious Dec- laration of Independence speaks too much of certain inalien- able rights, and says very little about imperative duties. By circulating widely the teachings of Mazzini, I tried to give my modest contribution to make men better. Every man, no mat- ter how modest, has a mission in life. I tried to perform mine to the best of my ability. I proposed the United States as a model of free government, because of all governments in the world it was and it is the only one where, in spite of all un- avoidable faults, people have real freedom, equal chances, and all the blessings of civilization. People who talk so much about the perfection and the freedom of Switzerland don't know the country, and yet write books about it, and propose it as a model to our nation. People who worship France as an ideal form of government, seem to ignore that the great Latin na- tion is an aristocratic republic. So that, if they called me American on account of my political faith, they were right. But they were wilful disseminators of falsehoods when they made me appear as a blind worshipper of France. I contend- ed and I contend that next to the United States England was and is the most liberal country in the world, so far as political freedom is concerned, and in spite of her immense faults. I have been compelled to make this statement in order to show that I was a logical American long before political and personal upheavals brought me to this country. In Europe, lecturing and teaching Philosophy of History, I advocated this doctrine. And even in a course of Comparative Literature, il- lustrating the works of the greatest geniuses of mankind — Job, Isaiah, Homer, Aeschylus, Lucretius, Dante, Shakes- peare, and Moliere, I paid the greatest homage it was pos- sible for me to America in the person of Ralph Waldo Emer- son. Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 7 In the United States of America, from the moment of my landing to the very moment I am dictating these pages, I have preached, day in and day out, month in and month out, year in and year out, the very same doctrine, from the platform, from the newspapers, in my essays and poems. Of course, having become a naturalized citizen, I found that many of the natives of this country — in politics and out of politics — were making blunders, which would, sooner or later, hurl the United States into the turmoil and the uncertainties of Europ- ean countries. And I raised a voice of protest and warning meeting with ridicule, scorn and contempt. Why? Often people, born in other countries, see things from a more objec- tive standpoint, and judge with serene impartiality things which natives, blinded by passion, belittle or exaggerate as partisan motives dictate. They try to convince me that an American scholar has published the best book on Cavour ; but he has been particular- ly honored by the Italian government, and monarchical gov- ernments in general do not bestow honors on impartial his- torians. Truth always hurts. My warnings, inspired only by the unmistakable lessons of history, were not well received, just because they were undeniable truths. Italians were ac- cusing me of treachery because I was making relentless efforts to transform my countrymen into good Americans (and this, in spite of the fact that I always championed the decent sons of Sunny Italy, who were belittled, offensively nicknamed, per- secuted by men who came to better judgment only when they begun to realize that they needed badly their votes to remain in public life). Americans felt that a citizen born in a for- eign land had no right to give them suggestions about the way of conducting themselves, and their vanity, false pride, conceitedness and sometimes ignorance, induced them to ridi- cule, abuse and persecute me. But I had and I have a message to deliver, and I went and go ahead. People who have been busy writing calumnies about me, doing their level best to deprive me of my honest daily bread, ridiculing doctrines their limited knowledge and their natural pretentious asininity could not comprehend, paying white slavers, deserters from the army and German spies to besmirch me, can continue their nefar- ious work to their hearts' content. My self-respect, and the pity I have for their mental chronic coprostasis and their mor- al ugliness, advise me to pay no attention to them, and to go forward, repeating the world-famous verse of Dante : Non ti curar di lor, ma guarda e passa. George Ticknor, an American from Boston, wrote the best history of the Spanish Literature, and Carlo Botta, an Italian from Piedmont, wrote the best "History of the War of Independence of the United States of America." Gigliotti — Cor Mundi II I had not been in America six months ere a truth — self- evident and full of menace for the future — was revealed to my mind and filled my heart with grave concern. New York, the great metropolis of America, was by no means an American city. It was a mosaic of nationalities not blended, but abso- lutely distinct, separated from each other and even antago- nistic, kept together by selfishness, greed and resentment, if not contempt for the glorious country which offered them hos- pitality, freedom, independence from slavery and oppression, chance to become men, when in the countries of their birth they had been little better than human cattle. Poor devils who had no education and no human ways, were praising at the top of their voices the countries of their birth, saying everything mean of the great American commonwealth, and living sordidly and even shamefully to save money, in order to go back and live — they were saying — in the old country, among civilized beings. They were encouraged in their base ingratitude and ignorance by men of their own nationalities, and even by representatives of their governments, who were parasitically living in comfort and even in luxury at the ex- pense of them. Among the Italians, the Russians, the Aus- trians, the Germans, the French, and every other nationality, the private bankers, the interpreters, the publishers of news- papers as ignorant as their readers, but cunning and rapa- cious beyond measure, the brokers, the real estate sharks, the unscrupulous labor agents and padrones, the middlemen, who acted as go-between the dispensers of police, judicial and po- litical protection, the shysters, and even several professional men, had an interest to keep their unfortunate countrymen in ignorance and abjection, because they were harvesting large profits by their rascality. But I have to say something about it later on. For the present I shall only point out the truth which impressed me and followed me everywhere, as Banquo's spectre did Macbeth. Noting the large foreign population in New York and its disloyalty to the country, even among many of those who had applied for and been granted naturalization papers, I suffered untold agonies, because I knew that if ever the United States of America would be forced into war with any of the nations of the earth, our country would be betrayed by the very men who had found in America bread, dignity, protection and opportunity. And I raised the cry for better citizenship, for better education, for the spread of real understanding and patriotism among the children of the slums, the human brutes of the over-crowded foreign boarding houses, the oppressed of all countries, who had come here only to make money, and who regard the sacred soil of America as a free for all fight for af- fluence, no matter how obtained. I was not worrying very much about the spy system of foreign governments, because its Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 9 cradle is in the foreign embassies and consular offices ; and it is the duty of the Secretaryship of State and of the Depart- ment of Justice to uncover it. There is not a government, not one, which has not its spy system, and the chief representa- tives of it are the military and naval attaches of the embas- sies. Their brilliant uniforms, their strong physique and handsome figures, their insinuating manners and methods, must be wisely employed to gain the esteem, the friendship, the admiration, the love of the wives, daughters and sisters of men entrusted with military, naval and state secrets. How many times the betrayal of a very important secret of state has been preceded by the ruin of a woman, by the tragedy of a heart, by the disruption of a family! And how many times the position is reversed! Aristocratic prostitutes take the place of the attaches and with their wiles make fools and traitors of men of previous unimpeachable reputation ! Money has been seldom the tempter of generals, admirals and states- men: Aspasia and Phryne often. Cherchez la femme! The most fantastic of all fiction could not equal in emo- tional, sensational, psychological, unexpected development and climax any of the plots carefully studied, planned and exe- cuted by many of those priests and priestesses of evil, called spies. Edgar Allen Poe could be the only historian for them. But I am referring to them only incidentally. My real concern was and is with the greatest menace to the security of the country, constituted by the very elements I have been talking about. Politicians, who wish only to be kept in office or to conquer it, gave and give me the laugh, because they have no other patriotism than that of their own pocket and power. And when they show so much devotion to the country, I think of the words of a wise editor who beautifully said that the patriotic effusion of the enemy is a false flag covering contra- band goods. Perhaps a few words about espionage will not be wasted in this eventful moment of our history. Ill Espionage is as old as the history of the world. A spy is the basest of all knaves. Whoever said that it takes a thief to catch a thief was practically right. Only a criminal can in- dulge in criminal pursuits, as it is that of spying his fellow be- ing in order to do him harm. Leo Tolstoy said to me, during a conversation I had with him in his estate of Yasniaga-Poli- ana nearly thirty years ago: "The spy is the meanest, lowest and basest animal in creation. I love everybody, no matter how low in the human scale. But I cannot look at a spy with- out experiencing the creeping sensation a clean man suffers at the sight of vermin." The definitions given of spies by fa- mous men are well known. The purest men in the world al- ways had a holy horror of spies. Only unscrupulous poli- ticians and rulers said practically that no government could 10 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi do without the scourge. I like to pick here and there what some of nature's greatest noblemen had to say about spies; hear them : "Every spy has in his veins and arteries the blood of Judas Iscariot and lago." (Garibaldi). "You find all forms of criminality blended into a spy." (Emil Zola.) "Knead putrefaction and you have a spy." (Victorien Sardou). "The spy is the offspring of Cain." (Gustave Flaubert). "How can you avoid to execrate the ones who with ne- farious inclination find work for the executioner?" (Leo Tol- stoy). "Spies are the disgrace of mankind." (Gustavo Modena). And I could give a hundred more, all of men famous in the history of the world's heroism, literature, science, philoso- phy and art. But as the kind of spies I have reference to now are the secret agents of foreign offices, and as Germany has in this particular and nefarious endeavor excelled every other nation in the world, even Japan, I like to quote here what the foremost statesmen of modern times — Napoleon Bonaparte, Cavour and Bismarck — had to say of political spies, because their definitions are very illustrative of their aims, and quite a contribution to the study of the Teutonic and the Allies' history of activities in the present appalling conflagration. The great Napoleon, whose moral character has been depicted by Madam De Stael better than by anyone of his historians, wrote : "Spies? They are a political necessity." And his comment stopped there. Napoleon III, who was, after all, a modern man and sovereign, moaned: "To be a spy? A nefarious job." But the arch-demagogue of modern times — Leon Gambetta — made liberal use of spies ,and yet had the ef- frontery to write: "Spies — especially political spies — are a proof of the extreme state of baseness of those who employ them." With these words Gambetta wrote his death warrant before the tribunal of history. Cavour, the most wonderful and honest statesman of mod- ern history and one of the purest glories of civilized Italy, which produced the greatest of all masters of statecraft — per- haps the most commanding personality in the statesmanship of all times — Niccolo Macchiavelli (misunderstood, distorted and libelled by all the rag peddlers of moral pruriency, and by all the short-sighted and revengeful second-hand dealers in philosophical and theological junk) ; Cavour made the follow- ing statement and lived up to it to the letter: "It is better to meet with a reverse than to win a victory by the help of spies." I have mentioned the glorious name of Macchiavel- li, because he did more than invent the system of statecraft and the art of war. He predicted many of the things which are happening now, and taught lessons that, had they been Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 11 learned and put into practice by the allies, the Central Em- pires would have been defeated long ago, and the sacred soil of Italy would not have been invaded by the barbarians. Whatever in Italy was connected with the inspiring names of Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour and their best lieutenants, was pure and noble and great and immortal. When people departed from the path shown by them, everything tumbled down. I had and I have no love for the House of Savoy, no more than I have for any other royal or imperial house; but it is only fair on my part to admit that she deserves praise and admiration for many worthy deeds she has performed, from the appearance of Humbert the Whitehand to the present time. With few exceptions, she has been perhaps the most honorable royal house in the world. The republicans of Italy never forgave and never will forgive the hideous crime of Aspromonte, where Garibaldi, after he had given a kingdom to Victor Immanuel II, was infamously crippled by the troops of the latter. It is true, however, that such an infamy would never have occurred had Cavour been alive. At the time Signor Urbano Rattazzi was prime minister of Italy, the one who wrote: "I greatly blame the idea of making use of the treacherous and loathsome work of spies, but at times they are, indeed, a painful necessity." What a difference between the clear-cut, sharp, trenchant, manly, inspiring statement of Cavour, and the obliquitous, hypocritical and cowardly dec- laration of Rattazzi! But to ask honor of Rattazzi is as to ask honey of a rattlesnake. He was the husband of the no- torious Madame Rattazzi, whose exploits are still green in the memory of us all. Bismarck was more explicit, but more brutally hypocrit- ical than Rattazzi. It is true, however, that Moltke, the Deus ex machina of the Franco-Prussian war, had frankly defined the trend of Germany, when he stated: "In life we are in- deed compelled to walk in mud." Bismarck wrote: "/ have nothing but contempt for spies, but I make liberal use of them because they are indispensable to me. Nevertheless, I mistrust very much women spies, because they can be easily bought by the enemy." And yet, in spite of his dislike for secret service women, Bismarck made large use of them. Tartuffe of Moliere is for me the prototype of all spies. And because the foremost German spy resembles Tartuffe so much, a little sketch of him is not out of place, especially if you take into consideration that he was the genius and the founder of the modern spy system. Stieber was his name, and Bismarck proclaimed him the king of spies. A man of great talent, education and nerve, exactly as Tartuffe by Or- gon, Stieber, in 1847, was befriended and given a home by an industrial of Silesia, who took him into his house, gave him the management of his business, introduced him to his friends and associates, and did not dislike the discovery that 12 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi he had inflamed with love the heart of his niece. Stieber, affecting a noble heart, a great love for justice and freedom, and a deep concern for the welfare of the people, posing as a social democrat, preached to all he could reach the doctrine of the rights of man, and found many who had the same principles and many more he converted. But in 1848, after the famous revolutionary outbreaks which seemed to have in Paris their storm center, the factory of the benefactor of Stieber and the shops of his friends were filled with liberal ferment, and became the houses of refuge for many of the political refugees. The Prussian government suddenly falls upon the factories, imprisons the owners, and arrests men galore. Exiles, stiff sentences, capital punishments follow. Tartuffe, in the comedy by Moliere, when discovered, ends as men of his kind richly deserve. But Stieber elopes with his benefactor's niece — who discovers too late that the man was a spy — and goes to Berlin, where King Friedrich Wilhelm gratefully greets him, appoints him chief of police of the kingdom, gives him extraordinary powers, and requests him to spy the very members of the royal family. Kings have al- ways been more or less suspicious of their families. The Prussian ruler did what other sovereigns did and do. Have you not perused the confessions of Nicholas Romanoff, former czar of Russia? A few years after, Bismarck becomes the molder of the destinies of Prussia, and of the future of the German em- pire. Stieber becomes the chief instrument for Bismarck's plotting, and his system reaches the highest peak of man- agement, organization and efficiency. Stieber had submit- ted to the king a project for the reorganization of secret serv- ice, and encouraged and empowered to go forward and stop at nothing, he had become acquainted with the secrets of everybody, princes, ambassadors, generals, members of the cabinet, politicians, courtiers, ladies of high rank, people of influence in every walk of life. He sees everything. He dis- guises himself as army and navy officer, pastor, confessor, butler, man under the influence of liquor, peasant, simpleton, in order to uncover society, family, workingmen's secrets. Bismarck unfolds to him his plan. He is going to build a German empire headed by Prussia. In order to see the tri- umph of Teutonic hegemony, which was the dream and goal of his life, it was indispensable to crush France; but such task could not be accomplished unless Austria would be put out of the way. Stieber understands, and goes to Bohemia, where he prepares the ground for the safe passage of the Prussian army. Wonderful is his sagacity, and his plan is highly successful. Prussia wins. Austria is humiliated. At his return to Berlin, Stieber is received as a national hero. The king, who had already conferred on him the cross of the red eagle, showers new honors upon him. The provinces of Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 13 Alsace and Lorrain are needed. He is asked to organize the espionage in France, which has to pave the road to a Prus- sian victory. Before he is ready to undertake the gigantic task, Stieber asks full powers and one million and five hun- dred thousand marks in cold cash, which are given him with- out hesitation. He goes to Paris, recruiting eighteen hundred spies, instructing and directing them with the utmost care, sending them in every department of France, and directing them to report to intelligence centers established in the cities of Geneva, Lausanne, Berlin and Brussels. From Paris he requested the government at Berlin to furnish him with five thousand farmers and gardeners, nine thousand girls to em- ploy as waitresses and maids in cafes, restaurants and hotels ; seven hundred officers on leave of absence to be employed in French government offices, four hundred beautiful and gay Prussian girls to be placed in Parisian wine houses, and four hundred accomplished and nice young ladies to be govern- esses and maids in the best homes in the capital of France. The strategy of Moltke and the master political mind of Bis- marck could not have taken Napoleon prisoner at Sedan, dic- tated the peace of Versailles, and consolidated the German empire without Stieber, the spy. The success of Stieber induced the German government to continue and improve the spy system. In spite of the con- fession of Bismarck that he mistrusted spies in petticoats, for certain information they relied and rely chiefly on women. Ger- man women, with many accomplishments, were sent to Eng- land, Russia, Italy, France, America, whenever they needed to spread their nets for future operations. Those women often write poetry, compose music, speak several languages, con- tract marriages with great facility, and bigamy seems to be a pastime for them, use philanthropy as a decoy, art as a pro- curer, smooth calumny as the most efficient weapon to dis- credit those who know them and are in a position to set the minds of people thinking. You often find them married to men handsome, smooth, accomplished, and much younger than themselves, who have the mind of foxes, the heart of tigers, the voracity of wolves, the greediness of misers, the man- ners of college boys. Their chief task is to seduce and enslave to them women of public officials in a position to give valuable information ; but there is no infamy which would deter them. The more nefarious the job, the better they like it. Many of the women in the employment of the German spy system had to become the mistresses of men in power, in order to win their confidence and steal state secrets, the wives of men of the nationalities mentioned for the purpose of performing their nefarious tasks with more freedom and arousing less suspicion, to be the secretaries and confidantes of the ladies of army officers, cabinet members, diplomats, employees of state, navy and general staff departments. People who be- 14 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi lieve, for instance, that German spies in America are ex- clusively German are greatly mistaken. Some of the worst German spies are men from allied countries, and even Ameri- cans, native born Americans of pure Anglo-Saxon descent. Do I say men alone? No! Women, as well, and many of them; and men and women, conspicuous in society, in poli- tics, in industrial, educational, philanthropic and religious en- deavor. What Stieber did in France is done every day in America, under the very eyes and many times with the com- placency of municipal, county, state and national authorities. I know of real patriots — pure, unselfish, capable, incor- ruptible citizens — who think and perform what there is of nobler in the life of man and of higher in the history of the world, set aside as stumbling-stones in a footpath, if not pitied as fools or spurned as imposters ; and of smooth, insin- uating, honey-tongued and candid-looking rascals, who, under the mask of patriotism, hid the blackest plans of treachery, pushed forward, acclaimed as models of virtue, trusted with delicate positions in the service of the country. Pan-German- ism has attracted in its orbit prejudice, ignorance, greed, ras- cality, rapacity, and has made capital of that natural tend- ency of the rabble, which pays attention to gossip and cal- umny and ignores praise and virtue, is jealous of happiness in others and enjoys their misfortunes. A certain famous re- ligious sect which became celebrated in history, more for po- litical intrigue and power than for piety, admonished, refer- ring to the most important harm to be done to their enemies : "Calomniez, calomniez; il en reste toujours quelque chose." People who are shocked by German methods, and are in- dignant only after the awful crimes of the last three years, and after a chancellor called treaties "scraps of paper," are justifiable, because they knew nothing of Teutonic intrigue and perversity. But statesmen, politicians, and scholars, who in their posthumous resipiscence, raise their voice of bitter re- monstrance, must be congratulated only on account of their conversion and repentance. When they were in a position to avoid the conflagration, or to prepare for future emergencies, they fornicated with Germany. State departments for years and years have been aware of what was going on. We deal with recent events. The times of the war for the independence of America have nothing to do with the present conflict. Ger- mans who came during that time to America had the right spirit, made admirable citizens, and their progeny are worthy citizens of the United States of America. General Muhlen- berg? Why, he was born and raised in Pennsylvania. Hein- rich Melchoir Muhlenberg, his father, was born at Finbeck, Prussia, one year before the birth of Frederick the Great, by whom he was preceded by one year to the grave. Educated for the Lutheran ministry, being a man of pure mind, heart and body, he was disgusted with the injustices and the un- Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 15 godly tendencies of the Prussian government and emigrated young to the United States, settling at Trappe, Pa., where his son, the celebrated American Revolutionary general and politi- cian, John Peter Gabriel, was born in 1746. Henry Melchoir was founder of the Lutheran Church in the United States but his descendents, who became all very distinguished citi- zens, were Episcopalians, and it is worth while to mention Henry Augustus Muhlenberg, preacher and politician, who was mmister of the United States to Austria from 1838 to 1840, and William Augustus Muhlenberg, pastor of St. Luke, m New York, and a famous hymnologist. Who among the Protestant worshippers is not familiar with his hvmn "I Would not Live Alway" ? Mr. Roosevelt— to mention no others— in the times poli- ticians were praising the Kaiser to the skies— forgot that the supreme rule of Prussia's political morals was set by Freder- ick the Great when he wrote : "If it will be profitable to us to be honest, honest we will be; but should crookedness be nec- essary, crooks shall we be." It is, after all, the creed of all governments, which are very far from practicing the splendid rule^set by Montesquieu in his much discussed "L'Esprit des Lois" : "Honor shall be the rule of monarchies, justice of re- publics, fear of despotic governments." The spy system as even the blindest of the blind can see, is the very negation of honor and justice. IV. Of course, all history shows that there is not a single people, no matter how glorious or unfortunate, that has not been guilty of the very same crimes which they reproach in others. Homo hominis lupus. They suffer from others what they made others suflfer from them. Modern history differs Irom ancient only in ways and means ; the aims are the same. 1 he legendary homeric trap of the Greeks to the Trojans has nothing for envy to Stieber's spies or to Austrian and German soldiers invading Italy in Italian uniforms, and preaching the gospel of brotherhood with lips, and keeping the stilleto of the assassin hidden m the treacherous sleeve and ready to mur- der mercilessly. Many of the people, who are so much shock- ed by German cruelties, have done the same thing in a dif- ferent, but not less reproachable way. The soldiers sent to Uiina to repress the Boxers practised outrages that make us shudder with horror. Officers oppressed, tortured, murdered ^^^^ J^^hinamen, in order to rob them of their treasures. Many who had gone there poor, came back rich. The trial of an Italian officer— Modugno— cannot be forgotten. Was our great country always free of blame? In order to rob the Indians, did not the citizens of this country follow to the let- ter many of the methods we curse in the Germans? Did I^ngland not use the greatest of all callings— the ministry of 16 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi religion — to expropriate savages of their holdings? I can- not read, without a sense of deep emotion, the magnificent speech delivered by Red Jacket, chief of the Senecas, in the summer of 1805, after the Rev. Mr. Cram had outlined to the six nations the work he intended to do among them. The words of Red Jacket sound as a warning to all mankind, to all Christianity, rather, who seem to have forgotten the im- mortal teachings of the Master: "Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of this- tles?" "Brother," said Red Jacket, "we are told that you have been preaching to the white people in this place. These people are our neighbors. We are acquainted with them. We will wait a little to see what effect your preaching has upon them. If we find it does them good, makes them honest and less disposed to cheat Indians, we will consider again of what you have said." We are right in being indignant for what has been done to the poor people of Belgium. But did the Belgians treat any better the poor devils of the Congo? We curse with sin- cerity and justice the wrongs done Serbia. But how can we forget the history of intrigues, crimes and bloodshed of that unfortunate country's government? In the times of the scandals of King Milan and Queen Natalie the writer of these pages went to Belgrade to gather information and write letters for newspapers. We pity Poland, the Niobe of na- tions, and I must confess that I have a particularly soft spot in my heart for a country for the independence of which my family's blood was shed. And yet history, which is an unde- niable testimonial, shows that when Poland was powerful she did everything to oppress, dismember, ruin Russia. The glorious name of Kosma Minin, the poor butcher of Nijni Novgorod, cannot be cancelled from our minds. On Palm Sunday of 1611, one of the bloodiest days in the history of Russia and of mankind. King Sigismond and his Polish sol- diers, not satisfied with the most atrocious tyrannies and spoliations with which they were oppressing the enslaved neighbors, butchered unmercifully the people of Moscow. The massacre of St. Bartholomew, led in France by the Duke of Guise, Catherine de Medici, and Charles II, was not more atrocious. The French Catholics, in order to celebrate the wedding of Henry of Navarre, butchered thousands upon thousands of Huguenots, guilty only of believing in the Gos- pel, and noted for the purity of their lives. The Polish op- pressors of Russia massacred thousands upon thousands of inhabitants of Moscow only for the pleasure of making flow rivers of innocent blood. But from the massacre of St. Bar- tholomew sprung a religious war vividly registered in the pages of history, and came to America that Huguenot seed which still has in itself the power of regenerating this country of promise; and from the Moscow butchery came the revolt Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 17 against the Polish oppressor led by Kosma Minin, the butcher, and by Pogiarski, the soldier; and from the revolution was born the dynasty of the Romanoffs, which ended so pitifully and ignominiously in the recent Russian upheaval, which, on account of the vanity, the inefficiency and the cowardice of the supreme demagogue, Kerensky, has been so sterile in results and so rich in new misfortunes. I wish to say, in order to invite the reflection of the reader, that the adverse fate of the Romanoffs was sealed since the second ruler of that dynasty, Alexis, created that execrable tribunal of state inquisition, the Secret Chancery, in the name of which the foremost citi- zens could be arrested, jailed, tortured, deprived of life, through the accusations or even insinuations of the most un- reliable wretches in the country. Institutions of the kind are always pernicious. They are the cornerstone of that evil building of degradation, depravity, and disintegration, which sooner or later, will ring the fatal knell of agony and death of a nation. Through institutions of the kind human society becomes the prey of that most abominable of taints — hypoc- risy and duplicity — which slowly but fatally rot the very nature of the nation, and carries it to dissolution and ruin. The law which God made to individuals applies to nations. Death is the salary of sin. Many of the present sufferings, uncertainties, deprivations of the Russian people are to be traced to the very cause I have referred to. And what I say of Russia is true of every other people, ancient or modern: the East, the West, Nineveh, Babylon, Egypt, Israel, Greece, Persia, Rome, Europe, America. Sus- picion and the execrable spy system made of people created by God in His likeness nothing but human vermin. La Roche- foucauld says that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. No. For mercy's sake, no! Hypocrisy is the ruina- tion of individuals and of nations. Germany will be punish- ed. No matter how loud her cry : "Gott strafe England ! Gott strafe Italien! Gott strafe Amerika!" The punishment will fatally descend on the Kaiser and his allies. The spy system alone is enough to shake Germany from her very foundations. But other nations should take care! When I referred to Italy and Cavour, I did it for a purpose. I wished to illus- trate the truth of my contention. Rome had her great faults. She did an immense amount of good to every nation she con- quered, but she oppressed and spoliated, too; and she had to suffer for it. But the good she had done made her spirit survive and be a blessing to mankind. Middle ages gave Italy glories, and sufferings, and divisions, and oppressions, and tyrannies of all kinds; made of her sacred soil the coveting and battle ground of all tyrants and the bloody platform of her internecine enmities, discords and fratricide wars. But her spirit survived. In the darkest moment of her hopes, Macchiavelli sent to the centuries to come his prophetic word 18 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi of unity, independence and freedom. Misfortunes accumu- lated, but the voice did not die, the spirit lived and worked. Germans, French, Spaniards, Austrians alternated their ne- farious work of oppression. Theocratic tyrants widened her wounds in the name of a Redeemer, whose very words had been of brotherhood, freedom and justice. But her spirit kept her spiritually alive. When Vincenzo Gioberti publish- ed his immortal book, which has been unjustly forgotten — Del Progresso Morale e Civile Degli Italiani — on the Civil and Moral Progress of the Italians — the spirit worked won- derfully. And it was the very same spirit which brought to the world a new, magnificent message of civilization, when Cesare Beccaria, in his immortal little book "On Crimes and Punishments," directed the blind and ferocious distributors of law : "Do not kill." It is true that they will kill yet, even in America. May God inspire some of the readers, if they happen to be legislators or judges, to search their consciences and repent for the crimes they have committed in keeping in the penal code the capital punishment or in condemning criminals to death. The very same spirit inspired Cavour to reach the goal, when he proclaimed: "L'ltalia fara' da se." Italy has offered to mankind a phenomenon unique in history. All -ancient na- tions had disappeared completely. Israel? Only a brilliant souvenir, an immortal testimonial in the most wonderful crea- tion of genius, the Bible. Greece? Only a necropolis. Her geniuses had shone thousands of years ago in the firmament of her glory ; and shine now only to the students of past ages, to the scholars, the philosophers, the artists, who drink in the immortal fountain of their beauty ! But Italy ! Always alive. She lives in the glories of her past and in the magnificence of her present. The Roman Forum is gone. But the temple of Minerva is still there, transformed into the Pantheon, where the remains of the kings of the third Italy rest. And St. Peter, the temple of mankind, as with the inspiration of genius calls it Lamartine in Graziella, is there and will remain there for the admiration of the centuries. Virgil is succeeded by Dante, Cincinnatus by Garibaldi, Cato and Cicero by Maz- zini. Macchiavelli comments the celebrated Roman historian, and writes "Essays on Livy and Government," which are one of the greatest contributions to the science and art of real statecraft in the world. And comes Cavour. Beccaria had reaffirmed Italy's belief in humanity; Cavour states in the most emphatic way possible that without honor and justice there cannot be a government worthy of men's dignity and of the favorable judgment of history. His words about spies are the most inspiring lesson to diplomacy founded on duplic- ity, and to governments which repose on the infamous theory of Frederick the Great. Cavour states the aims of Italian history and emphasizes the meaning of Italian spirit. Know- Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 19 ing that the rights of nationality and the independence and freedom of peoples of the same race and language and aspira- tions are the fundaments of international peace, and that they cannot be secured unless diplomacy is shorn of her se- crecy, he squarely sets before nations the lesson dictated by the much-abused Macchiavelli in the following sentences, which are taken from the History of Florence : "Whoever has no hopes of good, will not be afraid of evil." "Every chain is a great weight and every alliance a con- straint to the man accustomed to living free." "Who is afraid of every man never will be able to trust anybody." It is necessary to add, now that I have again said great things of Cavour and Macchiavelli, a few lines, in order to show that, in spite of the perversity of the Italian rabble, which is no better and no worse than all mobs (did not the Florentine Secretary admonish us that "to take pleasure in evil is the nature of the multitude"?), the Italian armies are the most civilized and humane in Europe. Arson, pillage, mas- sacre are unknown to them. Why? Italy for centuries has been visited, devastated, subject to the most unbelievable in- dignities by foreign oppressors and assassins in soldiers' garb. Of all foreign soldiers the very worst had always been the Huns, the Germans and the Austrians, real bands of robbers, human tigers, who took and take delight only in rape, mur- der, and extermination. Even the tradition of Wallenstein, who brought to Lombardy desolation and pestilence, is still vivid in the minds of the peasants. The tyrants and the popes, in order to preserve their power, surrounded themselves with mercenary troops, which were a subject of general execra- tion. Mercenaries from Switzerland are still a decorative souvenir of times not distant in the Vatican. The only foreign armies which left no ill feeling were the soldiers of the first Napoleon, who, tyrant as he was, did good to all people con- quered. The French army which fought for Italian freedom against Austria was and is blessed; and had the French left Italy and the pope alone, certain lamentable misunderstand- ings and recriminations between the two generous Latin countries, would never have occurred. The Teuton soldiers of today are no different from the mercenary bandits of yore. The proclamations of their commanders which have been published show it. When a nation allows to be shouted at peoples, whose territories have been invaded, the outrageous words the Austrians and the Germans have been shouting at the Italian soldiers, men in this country, who feel not ashamed of coming from German or Austrian parentage, show an ab- solute absence of moral sense, and deserve pity and contempt ! In Belgium, Poland, Serbia, Roumania, France, in the strip of invaded Italy, they have amply proved they are al- ways the nefarious soldiers of Attila. Their aerial and sub- 20 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi marine atrocities have shown the world that they are even worse than their ancestors. Nature does not change: Natur- am expellas furca tamen usque recurrit. And yet, in spite of all protests and demands for reprisals, the order issued by the commanders to the soldiers of Italy has been and is : "Vic- tory at all costs, but without treachery, and, above all, with mercy and humanity to the defeated." Why? Because Italy has been oppressed and lacerated, she hates even the idea of oppressing and lacerating other people. Because she knows by sad experience what arson, pillage, rape, massacre, are, she spurns the very idea of making use of them in retaliating. Because the leading minorities have been and are the soul of honor and justice, the genuine custodians of the spirit I had reference to, she went to war against the wishes of the king, against the machinations of the courtiers who were the friends and admirers of Germany, against the exhortations of the corrupt politicians who have been morally convicted of fornication with the enemies of civilization and progress, against the exhortations of the false friends from abroad and the prophets of evil from within. I have branded Gambetta, the French politician, as the worst demagogue of modern times. But I must brand as particularly dishonest Italian modern parliamentary politics, which started to deteriorate after Premier Agostino Depretis, dead long since, put into practice a shameful system of corrupting influences, which was defined "transformism," and could have been called more properly "prostitution." But the system of corruption and baseness inaugurated by Signor Giovanni Giolitti — the for- mer premier and despot of the Italian parliament — has no parallel in the history of Italian politics. A quarter of a century ago, after the bankruptcy of the Roman Bank, Signor Giolitti was compelled to relinquish the premiership, in dis- grace and under censure. In England and somewhere else, he would have been unable to regain prestige and power. Big- ger men were retired from public life for much less. A man of very modest education, of unsignificant past, of little elo- quence, but a master of intrigue, of unscrupulousness and of cunning, he became premier again; and the very people who had denounced him in pamphlets as the reincarnation of the worst banditism (I refer principally to Signor Filippo Turati, the leader of the "Official Socialists" in the Italian Parlia- ment, the author of a publication in which he made a compar- ison between Giolitti and Tiburzi, the bandit, with the results favoring Tiburzi, and a man of unusual education and of great mental attainments, who became, later on, one of the most willing tools in the hands of the fox of Dronero), were and are his most enthusiastic supporters! Everybody knows the intimate friendship between Prince Von Bulow and Sig- nor Giolitti, who has been always very friendly to Germany and Austria; and everybody knows the relations of cordial Gigliotti — Co7' Mundi 21 comradeship existing between the former premier and the Socialists named! These Socialists have been playing all the time into the hands of the Teutonic social-democrats; and have been, with the Vatican, very busy in preaching peace at any cost. Gen- eral Luigi Cadorna has been a victim of circumstances. To blame him for the disaster of last fall is unjust. But the ma- jority of the Italian patriots, who have always looked upon the pope with suspicion, because the Catholic Hierarchy has always been particularly friendly to the Teutons — the Austri- ans above all — have grown suspicious of General Cadorna just because he is so extremely religious and Catholic that he hears Mass every day, and goes often to confession and com- munion. Things of this sort must be known in America. No serene appreciation of recent events is possible without the exact knowledge of conditions as they really are. It has been stated that the Italian court was friendly to Germany. A few months before Italy was compelled to go to war on the side of the allies. King Victor Immanuel III, advised by the false prophets of his cabinet and his entourage, and following his own inclination, sent the following telegram to the late Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria : "Faithful to my alliances, I maintain a benevolent neutrality." History is no fiction, and facts remain "facts" in their cold eloquence. Governments do not always represent the country. Italy — the real Italy, brimming with the spirit and traditions mentioned — could not forget all the sufferings Germany and Austria had caused to her ; she knew her just vindications had not been fulfilled yet; she heard the voice arising from the graves of the martyrs and of the heroes of the noblest of all causes. The voice of Garibaldi was still thundering the very same words he delivered in Naples, September 10, 1860 : "To this wonderful page in our country's history another more glorious, still will be added, and the slave shall show at last to his free brothers a sharpened sword forged from the links of his fetters. To arms, then, all of you, all of you. And the oppressors and the mighty shall disappear like dust. * * We shall meet again before long to march together to the re- demption of our brothers who are still slaves of the stranger. We shall meet again before long to march to new triumphs." (Garibaldi to his soldiers, London Times, Sept., 1860). Maz- zini, who died a prisoner in his own country, March 10, 1872, is still thundering to the Italians the prophetic words he de- livered July 25, 1848, at Milan : "You are endowed with ac- tive and splendid faculties, with a tradition of glory which is the envy of all nations. An immense future is before you. Your eyes are raised to the loveliest heaven and around you smiles the loveliest land in Europe. You are encircled by the Alps and the sea, boundaries marked out by the fingers of God for a people of giants. And you must be such or noth- 22 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi ing. Let not a look be raised to heaven which is not that of a free man. Love humanity. You can only ascertain your own mission from the aim placed by God before humanity at large. Beyond the Alps, beyond the sea, are other peoples, now fight- ing, or preparing to fight, the holy fight of independence, of nationality, of liberty; other peoples striving by different routes to reach the same goal. Unite with them and they will unite with you." Such are the ideals of the men whose souls have been visited by the spirit of Latin civilization. Such are the ideals of the men who know that no peace can come to the world before the fight of independence, of nationality, of liberty is won, before all the oppressors and mighty have disappeared like dust. Kings and emperors have to go. The triumph of democracy alone can save civilization and give permanent peace to the world. President Wilson is right in everything, except in his views about Austria; and his mistake comes from what I humbly consider a wrong conception of his- tory. No matter how religious, the President of the United States gives history a materialistic conception, basing the in- terpretation of facts almost exclusively on conditions and mo- tives of an economic nature. He belongs to the utilitarian school ; and I say this without disrespect, but only in the spirit of serene impartiality, which informs these modest pages. My impression is derived from the conscientious study of his his- tory of the American people. Some of the acts of Mr. Wilson, which make indignant Mr. Roosevelt, are only the logical con- sequence of his honest interpretation of history. England is generously paying a very high price for the blunders of her mediocre statesmen, who unconsciously — through narrow-mindedness and selfishness — planted the seeds of the present conflagration in 1859. Kossuth is dead. But his work is alive. Edmondo De Amicis, Achille Majoc- chi, and myself went to see him in his home at Turin, Italy, a little time before he passed away. Dr. Timoteo Riboli came a little after to inquire about the health of the great Hun- garian patriot, who was a follower of Mazzini and Garibaldi, and who became an Italian, after Hungary had become an integral part of the dual monarchy headed by the emperor of Austria. We were speaking of the conception of the United States of Europe. The grand old man said: "A federal re- publican form of government for all Europe? A magnificent vision. But England ruined everything. On account of her blunder (it seems to me he said, crime), before justice will prevail in Europe, rivers of blood shall flow. Germany and Austria — cursed Austria, the country of oppression, the cradle of infamy and crime — will shock the world with their atro- cities." Kossuth was right. He had tried to avoid the massacre long since. He had warned England more than half a century before the conflagration set Europe and the world afire. Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 23 England has always been the cradle of political freedom. To deny it would be ignorance or bad faith. But freedom has been more the result of the will of the people than of the gen- erosity of governments. In no other nation is public opinion as powerful as in England. From the death of King Charles I on the scaffold, British governments and rulers have been more careful than they used to be. Liberal governments m England have been near the people, and have done much good. Conservative governments, on the other hand, have often been wrong to their country and to foreign nations, when they have not stupidly played into the hands of Germany, as has been the case in years not very far from us. Reason has been the dominant trait of the former ; selfishness of the latter. Lord Palmerston, liberal, had seen clearly the future, and had encouraged the sentiments which prompted the re- volts of 1848. He wished sincerely the freedom of Italy and Hungary. The letters of Gladstone from Naples are an his- torical document of the highest importance. But the liberal government of Lord Palmerston was in 1858-59 supplanted by that of the conservatives and Lord Derby, who remained enough in power to do immense harm. The first seed of the present conflagration was sown by Lord Derby in 1859. Other British premiers and foreign secretaries unconsciously con- tinued the work, helping Germany in many of her schemes, and giving her Helgoland. The best history can say of them, is contained in a popular saying: "The snake did bite the fakir." Piedmont, under the leadership of the immortal Cavour, had started, with the help of France and Napoleon III, the war of national independence, winning one victory after another against Austria. Italian and French armies were pushing the discomflted Austrians into Venice. The crum- bling of Austria seemed very near. All Italy was rejoicing. Kossuth and his friends were happy, because they knew that an Austrian disaster would open the door to Hungarian emancipation. The oppressed Polish saw the hope of free- dom in bloom. The people of England were heart and soul with the Sardinians. But the government of England, pre- sided by that sinister friend of tyrants — Lord Derby — took the side of Austria. Praise and gratitude to the generous people of England, who atoned so magnificently for the sin of the government by encouraging Garibaldi, by sending the flower of their youth to fight and die in the glorious cause of Italian independence! Eternal shame to a cabinet which helped op- pressors and made possible the horrors of later years! The cabinet of St. James intimated that unless the French and the Italian advance would come to a halt, England should in- terfere in favor of Austria. The British people were indig- nant and protested. An indignation mass meeting, presided 24 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi by the Lord Mayor, was held in the London Tavern, May 20th, 1859 ; and Louis Kossuth delivered his most impassioned speech, which cannot be read today without a sense of deep emotion, closing his magnificent outburst of heartfelt elo- quence with the following imploration : "I love my fatherland more than myself; more than anything on earth. And in- spired by this love, I ask one boon — only one boon — from England, and that is that she should not support Austria. England has not interfered for liberty ; let her not interfere for the worst of despotisms — that of Austria." Ways and conditions and times have changed; but the cause is the same. Had the British government been more enlightened and less selfish, Europe would have had peace from that time. With the elimination of Austria, the vindi- cation of the principle of nationality and a better asset of Europe, Prussia would have been compelled to become more modern and democratic, the Prussian-Austrian and the Franco-Prussian wars would have been avoided, Spain would have been able to maintain the Republic she had formed (as Signor Emilio Castelar stated to me in an interview I had with him in Madrid), Russia would have been pushed toward salutary and substantial reforms, the Balkan volcano would have been impossible, and — this is an idea of my own — Great Britain would have granted the requests of the Irish patriots long ago, and probably she would have avoided misunder- standings with the United States of America, keeping away from her activities in the Civil War. V. Peace? Is peace a thing of this world? As Prussia is the chief disturber, it is advisable to ask the opinion of the holiest man in Germany, the philosopher, who redeems in a way the whole country — Immanuel Kant, of Koenigsberg. His book "Ziim Eivigen Frieden," or philosophical essay, as he used to call it, should be consulted, studied, circulated by every lover of truth and fair play. It was in 1795. Kant was seventy-one years old, and he became famous all over the world for his "Critique of Pure Reason." A firm believer in justice and fair play, he was deeply disgusted with the violent invasion of Silesia by Frederick the Great, the triple parti- tion of Poland, the invasion of France in 1792, and all the in- famous aggressions, injustices, violations of every law of hu- manity he had witnessed during his life. Stopping at one time at a cabaret in Holland, he was struck by its strange sign : there was painted a cemetery, and under it the words "Zum ewigen Frieden," ("for perpetual peace"). He gave this pes- simistic title to the book of the closing of his life — he died in 1804 — which was humanitarian to the highest degree. Kant was an extreme partisan of peace at any cost. In this essay you hear the voice of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount : "And Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 25 if any man will sue thee at the law and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also." You notice in it the seed which will develop into the doctrine of non-resistance of Tolstoy. But you learn from it also a supreme lesson. He tells you that the only government to secure peace is the republican. War seemed to Kant the manifestation of savage life, be- cause it represents anarchy between nations, survived to an- archy between individuals, who, attracted by reciprocal in- terests, had agreed to unite and obey the same laws. Now, how can we look with contempt upon the savages, who live without restraint, always ready to jump on their neighbors and massacre them, always submitting human nature to the laws of mere animality, when we have plunged into a state of continuous unrest, which perpetuates among nations the anarchy which dishonored the individuals? When war be- comes an impellent necessity it must have its customs: it must exclude treachery and acts of savagery, which would de- stroy mutual respect between belligerents. Every war im- plies that the enemy of today may become the friend and the ally of tomorrow and, naturally, it must never plan the suppression of a nation, which is not a more or less large ex- tent of territory, but an association of men, speaking the same language, and enjoying inalienable rights. Kant's idea about republics being the most adaptable form of governments to maintain peace is right, because jus- tice is the rule of republics, and where justice rules, wars, which are the offspring of injustice, cannot find favor. But they must be real republics, something similar to the "Ideal City" of Plato. Tolstoy took much from Kant's essay, as has been inti- mated above. But from what has been rapidly condensed, it is self-evident that there is a deep, irreconsilible difference between the doctrines of the philosopher of Koenigsbrg and the nobleman turned peasant of Russia. The aberrations of the Russian people are the inevitable result of centuries of serfdom and sufferings. The system in- augurated by Alexis Romanoff could not help but make the people suspicious of their own government as much, if not more, than foreign governments. Always slaves, the change of government — whether domestic or imported — meant only change of master. Among the enlightened, who felt repul- sion for autocracy, the idea of a peaceful, orderly form of de- mocracy could not penetrate. Lvoff and Miliukoff, who were the only ones who could have saved Russia, are tramp stars in an immense firmament. The tendencies were revolution- ary Socialism, of the pattern represented by Lenine and Trot- zk^^; anarchistic and nihilistic, as represented by Bakounine, Stepniak and Kropotkine ; ascetic, as represented by Tolstoy ; and socialistic inaction, as typified by Maxim Gorki. Tolstoy, a man of the spirit, felt to be a part of all humanity, and the 26 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi restricted society of the world he placed in the immense father- hood of heaven. For Gorki the ideal man is the tramp. He believes it is a useless task to flush a sewer and a fruitless ex- ertion to bury the dead. Tolstoy not only took literally the Christian command of non-resistance, but he carried it to its extremest radicalism. It has been said by several v^^riters that Lenine is a fol- lower of Tolstoy. Nothing is more erroneous, or, rather, out- rageous. Who is Lenine? A Russian? A German? A He- brew? A Christian? A man of education and talent, or a fool of genius? These questions ask themselves and try to answer many of the men who are sincerely against Germany and who are naturally bitterly disappointed for the trend of affairs in Russia. Passion is always blind and misguiding, and to make of Lenine a pupil of Tolstoy is an aberration. There is not the slightest ideal or spiritual relationship be- tween the author of Anna Karenina and the head of the Bol- sheviki government. Tolstoy is the only man of the nineteenth and of the beginning of the twentieth century who resembles St. Francis of Assisi. Lenine is the man in Russia who has more points in common with the worst leaders of the French revolution. The Russian revolution was a wonder of accom- plishment: the constitutional leaders — Lvoff and Miliukoff — and their followers, affected the most extraordinary change of government in history from night to morning, without con- vulsions, without violence, without bloodshed. Had the So- cialism of the rabble and of the conceited mountebanks of the type of Kerensky left them alone, Russia would have work- ed already her own salvation, and the huge fetid cancer of Teu- tonic oppression, instead of eating into her heart, would have been extirpated by the surgical skill of Brusiloff, Korniloff, Kaledine and, perhaps. Grand Duke Nicholas Romanoff, who had given unmistakable proofs, in the early part of the war, to be the ablest of all generals of the world's war. But the vanity of Kerensky and the stupid weakness of his associates opened the way to Lenine, Trotzky and their friends. Trotzky is an honest man, misguided but in good faith ; and probably by the time these pages are printed he has been eliminated from the Bolsheviki government. But Lenine is Lenine: immense in his perversity, ferocity and stubbornness. The program of today is the very same he outlined in 1905, when he prophe- sied the "Revolutionary dictatorship," which he defined as "the poiver not limited by any law or rule, hut founded exclu- sively 071 violence; a 'poiver which should not belong to the people, but to a small revolutionary group." This reign of terror exists only between Socialists. Lenine has developed a new form of czarism. His proclamations to the public are almost similar to those of Von Bissing to the people of Brus- sels in the beginning of the occupation of Belgium. He de- nies even the power of the "Soviet," which seems to him a Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 27 prejudice of the capitalistic society. Lenine is a monstros- ity. While he advocates universal love, universal kindness and universal justice, he is unjust, wicked, ferocious in the extreme ; he is mad with hatred, and visits his neighbors with plunder, persecution, revenge, arrests, calamity, murder. While the immensity of the Russian madness may be, in some respects, a logical consequence of the reasoning insanity of Tolstoy, which has admirers galore even in America among people of small brains and big hearts ; Lenine is by no means a product of the doctrines advocated by the Saint of Yasni- aga-Poliana. Tolstoy, in his advocacy of a universal religion of love and brotherhood, based on a new revision of the Gospel, suc- ceeded a Russian peasant — Sutaieff — who wanted everything abolished — laws, public institutions, private property, social and national barriers — so that love could rule over humanity m.ade free. Sutaieff was an illiterate peasant, and his aposto- late was not noticed outside of Russia. But Tolstoy belonged to the highest Russian nobility, was a man of learning and genius, and his system, filling his vast literary production — novel, drama, essay, translating — created a deep impression and produced almost a moral revolution in Russia and all over the world, except Germany, the country of the superman, who has amply proved to be no more and no less than the super- animal, as I have contended. Whoever has said that Tolstoy took much from J. J. Rousseau was greatly mistaken. Outside of his religious and universal love, he preached the doctrine of single tax of Henry George, of whom he translated into Russian "Progress and Poverty"; and he was deeply impress- ed by the "Life of St. Francis of Assisi," by my late friend Paul Sabatier, whom I accompanied more than once during his researches and peregrinations in Umbria, and whose memory should be particularly dear to lovers of freedom in general and to Frenchmen in particular. Paul Sabatier, pro- fessor at the University of Strasbourg, and an ardent French patriot, was subject to the most abominable indignities and persecutions by the Germans. While Russia was engaged in the war with Japan, Tol- stoy was writing from Yasniaga-Poliana the following testual words: "My conscience tells me that to kill, in any form and no matter what the excuse, is execrable, that war is a mons- trous shame, a bloody aberration, and whatever prepares war must be condemned." In the same communication he wrote: "So far as I am concerned, I would leave to the Japanese St. Petersburg, Moscow, Yasniaga-Poliana, where my hearth is, and whatever else they would ask." In order to justify his attitude, Tolstoy did not limit himself to the commandments of the gospel. He screened himself behind the authority of Tertullian and Origen ; and amassed quotations from St. Paul, Epictetus, Leo-Tsee, Kant, Lichtenstein, Anatole France, and others. 28 Gigliotti^Cor Mundi The attitude of the Russian soul cannot be understood in America. Tolstoy was regarded as a genius before the pres- ent war. Now in many places things have changed. People are always ready to abuse and curse whatever seems in op- position to their wishes and interests. The Hebrews of Amer- ica, especially the ones of Russian extraction, became, with very few exceptions, bitter enemies of President Roosevelt as soon as the Russian-Japanese peace was concluded through his efforts. They had been hoping for a sweeping victory of the swarthy Orientals and for the hopeless crushing of the Russian empire, sincerely hated by them on account of the unbearable persecutions against their kinsmen. Many of the Russian refugees who came to America, found here sufferings, ridicule, contempt. Because they were learned and honest, they were kept down ; while the rascals of their own national- ity were prosperous, respected, influential. The first impres- sions are always deep and far-reaching in the hearts not only of children but also of grown-up people. Instead of investi- gating the cause of the strange phenomenon, which is by no means the fault of the American institutions, but of peculiar circumstances which have dictated these pages, they persisted in living in the peculiar settlements where they first landed, as an oyster lives in its shell ; they allowed the first resentment to guide them, and they returned to their native country un- der the impression that we are living here under the worst capitalistic slavery and that our government was free in words, but in fact as bad as that of the czars. Have not the very same things been said even in Socialistic open air meet- ings, in the interests of Mr. London's candidacy for Congress, of Mr. Hillquitt's candidacy for mayor of New York, of any- one who has been elected or who ran for an officee on the So- cialistic ticket in every nook and corner of the United States? Have not state and federal governments allowed the most ven- omous and lying agitators to preach this nefarious and un- truthful doctrine from the platform and from soap boxes on street corners? At one time I felt compelled to shout at an agitator, disturbing the meeting and creating a free for all fight: "You are a scoundrel and the most brazenly liar. If this government were not the most free in the world you would have been sent to the penitentiary long ago." Trotzky was one of the men who felt humiliated by the treatment he received in the United States of America; and he went back to Russia convinced, honestly convinced, that democracy in our country was a huge hypocrisy ; that every public office was sub- servient to the aristocracy of money and that the common peo- ple were as unfortunate and as slave as in his native country. Did Mr. London or Mr. Hilquitt, who owe to America what they are, absolutely all they are, try to persuade Trotzky that he was mistaken ? Extreme poverty and extreme wealth make men equally deaf to the voice of that greatest of virtues — charity — which Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 29 dictated to St. Paul : I Cor., 13, one of the most divine passages of the New Testament. The treatment which Trotzky received is received every day by men of ability and of conscience of other nationalities who are compelled to live in those sickly outgrowths of American communities, called foreign settle- ments. They may produce once in awhile some good; but the little good is a drop in the bucket compared to the enor- mous amount of harm they do: they are a great menace to the country and to the future of civilization. And poverty does not always compel people to live there, no matter what the luxuriant fancies of settlement writers see in their mor- bid fictions about the children of the slums. My personal in- vestigation in the time I was the editor of "II Progresso Italo- Americano" and ''L'Araldo Italiano," of New York, proved to my satisfaction that rents were much higher in the crowded tenement districts than in other sections, much more desir- able and clean and salubrious, of the city. People who come to the United States and stay here for a little while have a tendency to judge our country from the bad they see ; they seldom take the trouble to see the good. A number of years ago, on a transatlantic steamer, I heard some passengers saying horrible things of Naples, the city of my birth. They had never visited anything more dirty : the only beautiful things were the panorama and the surroundings. Among the people who were blaspheming so, I noticed two con- gressmen, a minister, a judge, a banker, and several ladies. I asked of them if they were judging New York from the Bow- ery, Chicago from, the slaughtering house district, and Denver from Market street, and I offered to show to them Naples. I did. Charlotte Kent, the famous American pianist, said to me before she left Naples for Vienna : "Why ! Naples is a dream ! I had seen the city before, but I never knew it was so beauti- ful!" But I have to speak of the foreign settlements later on, in the hope that my observations will not fall on deaf ears. The United States of America have the keys to the future of humanity. Magnum nunc saecida nostra venturi discrimen habent. VI. A great seer, in a moment of prophetic effusion, enunci- ated a theory which may prove one of the most radiant laws of the history of mankind. Philosophy of history is the work of Providence in the destinies and actions of humanity. Haz- ard, fatalism, climate, are only the limited and sterile excuses of limited minds. The only and universal God of mankind rejects them as He rejects the diseased vagaries of the mater- ialistic conception. He dictates to Aeschylus the observation, w^hich must shake the very heart of the Kaiser and his allies : "They have seen more than once the punishment of the ones who undertook unjust things and went too willingly into war." 30 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi (Agamemnon, v. 372-376). He, as Carducci beautifully said, blew the triumph in the bugles of Joshua. He pushed the ships of Themistocles in the Aegean Sea, and announced to trem- bling Rome the news of the king's drowning in Lake Regillo. He struck with terror the horse of Barbarossa at Legnano. Before Him, preceding and following the victory, kneeled George Washington, whose head had not been dishonored by a crown. Will civilization, born in the East, return there via the West? If we have to judge from the signs of times, civiliza- tion is proceeding almost accordingly to such a theory ; and in its long march will stop for ages in America, and select as its abode Washington, which will surely be, in our times and in times to come, what Rome used to be in a glorious era gone by. The dream of America becoming the guiding spirit of a rejuvenated and better world is not new. My increasing faith in the radiant destinies of the United States, which have been picked by Providence to become the Republic of the World, started in the beautiful and distant days of my youth, when I heard some of the conversations of Gen. Garibaldi, Gen. Avez- zana, Louis Kossuth, and others who had been in America after the fall of the Roman Republic and the European revolution of 1848. The radiant aspirations of 1848 had been stopped by a flood of blood, not killed. Even the Germany of 1848, in spite of the communistic manifesto, was filled with republican spir- it, and men imbued with the warnings of Immanuel Kant were compelled to ask the blessing of hospitality and of freedom to this land of promise. Mazzini had been the prophet of Ger- many as he had been the prophet of Italy, Hungary, and of every other country which was smarting under the whip of tyrants. And Karl Marx had started his nefarious work of abusing Mazzini, of discrediting him, of writing against him everything human perfidy could invent. The Socialists con- tributed to the ruin of the movement of 1848, as they have tried — a part of them, to be just — to ruin the efforts of the nations which are engaged in the present struggle for freedom against the combined efforts of the cross of Luther, the cres- cent of Mohammed and the cenobitic garb of Austria. But, while the leading Socialists had emigrated to England, the foremost republicans of Germany had fled to the United States of America, where they hold also congresses. America had as guests many of the greatest men in Europe, above all Gari- baldi, the knight of mankind, who came to the United States after the fall of the Roman Republic and the death by ex- posure of Anita, his wife and partner in perils and battles for freedom. But Garibaldi was almost unnoticed and made a living as a candlemaker, in the little factory of his friend An- tonio Meucci, the discoverer of the telephone, cheated of his invention. Kossuth, who obtained his freedom from Turkey through the requests of England and the United States, came Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 31 here in 1851 on an American battleship as a conqueror, and delivered speeches and addressed Congress, and advocated with eloquence and dignity the cause of freedom in Europe. He would have obtained much, instead of going to England disappointed, if his plans had not been disconcerted and com- promised by the Irish and the coming to America of Thomas F. Meagher, who had escaped from Van Dieman's Land. But it seems a great misfortune for oppressed Erin that, while imploring her own freedom, she should always be a stumbling block on the freedom of others! Her handicap to Kossuth's plans was a matter of accident. But her attempt to help the Germans against a cause sacred to the triumph of democ- racy, and the last exploits of Roger Casement have filled the people who believe in the freedom of nations with disappoint- ment and amazement. In the time Kossuth was preaching to Americans the cause of freedom for the slaves of Europe, came out "Uncle Tom's Cabin," by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and inflamed the souls. While he was not the exponent of any great cause, Franklin Pierce was elected President of the United States. Free spirits took as a matter of course that his sympathies were with them. The German republicans en- treated him to become the head of a movement to convert the United States of America into a world's republic. The great trouble was that Germans, no matter how much inspired by Kossuth, remained German to the core, supermen and selfish to the limit. They wanted the United States to become ger- manized. None of them rose to the height of the situation and to the sublimity of the ideal. They hated the universality of Rome and of Paris. It was impossible for them to conceive anything different from England and Germany : the first, the classical country of utilitarianism ; the second of metaphysics. And they made no mystery of the fact that metaphysics were the gases of that particular time which should asphyxiate England and empower Germany to rob her of her utilitarian- ism. Mazzini was an idealist : God and the people. The father- hood of God and the brotherhood of man. Love for one's country, but reverence for humanity. Germans could not un- derstand that. They followed Kossuth because he was a Mag- yar, and they considered Magyars people of their own race, as they are claiming now as men of German blood the fore- most men of the modern world. Did they ever stop to con- sider that Kossuth was a pupil of Mazzini, as pupils of Maz- zmi were all men of the first half of the nineteenth century, who, even in England, had their souls inflamed by the purest and noblest ideals of liberty? Russia, Austria, Prussia, and all countries ruled by tyrants, were more afraid of Mazzini than they had been of the armies of Napoleon ; and they had him shadowed and spied continually. Karl Marx wrote his own moral death sentence when he called Mazzini an old idiot. The aspirations of the German republicans in America we find incorporated in a book entitled "The New Rome," 32 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi and published in 1853 by G. P. Putnam & Co. Authors of it were Mr. Theodore Poesche, of Leipzic, and Mr. Charles Goepp, of Pennsylvania. Both of them impressed by the cy- clone which had passed over Europe in 1848; and both Ger- man to the core, they set their hopes on the United States of America, an immense country, which nature itself had des- tined to be the most powerful nation on earth, provided it knew enough to take advantages of the extraordinary re- sources of its climate, products and geographical position. The London Times, referring with bitterness to the future na- ture and Providence had assigned to the United States, ex- claimed : "A continent and two oceans are in the hands of that people." Washington, being almost in the center of the world, should become the New Rome, not in inspiration for good, but in a decidedly imperialistic way. The entire book, full of quotations and crammed with Teutonic vagaries, seems to the superficial observer a glorification of the United States of America, an unselfish attempt to induce the United States to assume the supremacy of the world, an effort to open the eyes of Washington, so that she would grasp her opportunity and become the "New Rome." But to the eye of the scholar, the historian and the philosopher accustomed to plunge into the heart of things and analyze hidden human motives, it was only an effort to teutonize America, to sick her on England, in order to take away from the British Empire trade, colonies, wealth, influence, world supremacy. It is the old refrain of German jealousy and dull hatred, embittered and perhaps pol- ished by a streak of Napoleonic rage instilled into the hearts of Teutonic republicans by Heinrich Heine. Wellington and Blucher had parted ways. Germans dreamed of an alliance between Blucher and an American Napoleon (Franklin Pierce) to destroy Wellington. People familiar with Ameri- can history cannot understand how gentle Pierce, one of the most inconspicuous men in that age of giants, could, even in a sickly dream, become the archangel of destruction for Eng- land. But the German mind was unconsciously but surely beginning to sow the seed of the conquest of a Teutonic world. Wilhelm II has been the logical heir and fulfiller of that mad Apocalypse forced into bankruptcy. And America has been and is yet the battling ground of those ideas. Let me quote from page 87 of the book I have unburied, in order to give new matter for food to American minds who, emotional in their sparks of genius, produce doctrines like those expressed by Theodore Roosevelt in the famous editorial published in the Cosmopolitan of February, 1918. Read now carefully what Poesche and Goepp have to say : "The stupendous greatness of England is factitious, and will only become natural when that empire shall have found its real centre. The centre is in the United States. The anglican empire is essentially oceanic. Its dominions extend along the Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 33 coasts of the Atlantic and the Pacific, the lesser and the great- er ocean. America, lying in the midst of the ocean, is there- fore its natural 'point of gravitation. The realization of an idea higher than could he developed in the mother island, that of the republican democracy, required a temporary segrega- tion of the centre; that task accomplished, it is time to call for a reunion; but the former adjunct being notv no longer merely the geographic centre, but the political and social focus, must take the lead. ENGLAND, WITH HER COLONIES, MUST BE ANNEXED TO THE AMERICAN UNION." If you are acquainted with the secret history of the Prus- sian court, which is very different from the historical ro- mances of Mulbach, and if you have fully understood the sin- ister mission of Stieber, a spontaneous suspicion glides into your minds: "Did not Friedrich Wilhelm look with complac- ency upon the efforts of the German republicans in America?" On the 29th of January, 1852, a congress of Germans at Philadelphia formed the "American Revolutionary League for Europe," designed, we are informed, to assist in the veri- table liberation of the European nations. At this congress the following resolution was presented: "That in the opinion of the present congress, every people, upon throwing off the yoke of its tyrants, ought to demand admission into the league of states already free, that is, into the American Union ; so that these states may become the nucleus of political organ- ization of the human family and the starting point in the World's Republic." It received the enthusiastic support of a respectable minority ; but the greater number, though profess- ing entire confidence with its views, considered its adoption injudicious under existing circumstances. On September 18 of the same year a second congress of the league was held at Wheeling, W. Va., and the very same resolution was submit- ted again and passed unanimously. It was, we are told, the official expression of the political views of the German emigra- tion ; but we know positively, too, that it had the hearty sup- port of people who were in cordial relations with the govern- ment of Prussia. The reader must first consider that the Ger- mans — and the Germans alone — were speaking in the name of every oppressed people, whose representatives they had been very solicitous to keep away from their congresses ; sec- ond, that their agitations were not seen with disfavor in Prussia and other German states. The German courts, which were the legal weapons of the German govern- ments, did not consider the German propaganda in Ameri- ca as seditious, because they acquitted the Germans at home who had been circulating its doctrines in Berlin and else- where. And we learn this from the very authors of the book. Open at page 101, and read for yourself: "Few, indeed, would hesitate to exchange the present German constitution for the American, if the choice were offered. The idea of annexation 84 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi has already been discussed in the German papers, and was re- ceived with ivarni approbation. It has been a matter of judi- cial investigation in the crimiyial courts of that country, who acquitted the authors of all seditious intentions on the ground, though their projects involved the subversion of the German governments, it did not appear that such subversion was nec- essarily a forcible one." It seems to foresee the work of Stieber in Austria and France. A few more lines: "We are not in want of natural allies. The German press of this country now numbers 180 newspapers ; unequalled in any other language except the Eng- lish. It is not yet on a level with the present state of the German mind, but the reactive influence of that mind must soon be felt and seen." From such a movement sprung Karl Schurz. Such a movement was going to develop in due course of time the Ger- man-American Alliance. The lineal descendents of that move- ment have been Hermann Ridder, Hugo Muensterberg and the editor of that paper truly inspired by the spirit of Stieber, ''The Fatherland." Immanuel Kant? An excuse. Mazzini? A reproach. Washington? A weapon against England. Jefferson? Well, they could use to some advantage the theory: "That govern- ment governs best which governs least." Poesche always professed to be a German. Goepp said he was an American. But both men met at the German Congress at Philadelphia; they stood side by side. Goepp had publish- ed a pamphlet during the Kossuth furor, entitled "E Pluribus Unum," and that pamphlet is incorporated in the book, "The New Rome." Neither malice nor sympathy guides the humble writer of this criticism. Even if the authors of "The New Rome" were moved by the best of motives, they misunderstood the mission of the United States. More than moral greatness, they were advocating material prosperity. Rather, material prosperity alone. Accumulation of wealth does not create the power of nations. I have been — just because the political philosophy of Mazzini has attracted me from childhood — a firm believer in the mission of the United States in the history of the world ; a mission of love and democracy and not of imperialism and greed. President Wilson, in his message which was received iii Europe and America as the gospel of democracy, stated in an unmistakable, inspiring way, the real aims of our country. The trouble of the European nations, the hatred between Ger- many and England, is much deeper than that from 1740 to 1914, illustrated by historians guided only by diplomatic doc- uments. Diplomacy is perfidy, lie, deception, intrigue, insid- iousness. It has nothing to do with statesmanship and will re- main the curse of nations till it is shorn of its evils and made honest and open. In writing history, diplomatic documents Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 35 should be properly sifted and interpreted or history will be one-sided and misleading. England, at its worst, was always liberal. Germany, at the best, was arbitrary, militaristic, des- potic. German liberals, then, if sincere, should have been more inclined toward England, which had and has such a wealth of German blood, traditions, ties, from the ruling dyn- asty to many of the leading British families. No. From 1740 to 1914 they had few agreements, and many disagreements, which increased after 1815. Bismarck, the evil spirit, helped to prepare the present conditions: he avoided war, which seemed inevitable, a few times, only because he was afraid Germany was not ready yet to crush the world. Greed was the motive power of the actions of the two nations. The country of metaphysics wanted to grab the wealth of the country of utilitarianism. The country of utilitarianism, when it discovered that the country of metaphysics was slow- ly but surely depriving her of her commerce and wealth, took notice. The famous Tory article of the Saturday Review (Sept. 11, 1897) — Germania est delenda — expressed the view that "were Germany destroyed tomorrow there is not an Eng- lishman who would not be richer." Naturally the Germans were indignant, and became more pugnacious than formerly. The "repetition of Jameson's raid by the English government dictated by banking and mining speculators" filled with deep disgust and horror the very few Germans who had admired the free institutions of England, and above all Theodore Mommsen. Long before that. Sir Charles Dilke, the greatest statesman of modern England, sacrificed to British prudery and hypocrisy, had seen into the future. He wanted Belgium strongly prepared and fortified, because he felt that in the case of another war, the German general staff would invade France through it. Be it as it may, I am not relating history. I am only inferring the lesson of history. Greed has been the motive of Germany. Greed has inspired England. To the ones — blind, selfish, utilitarian — who believe that trade, traffic, commerce, are the supreme goal of nations, the secret of pow- er, glory and lasting influence of peoples, it is difficult to con- vey the solemn lesson of history. The worst form of blindness is that which afflicts those who have eyes and refuse to see. Moloch is the most wretched of gods. Greed ruined the Phoe- nicians ; brought the downfall of Babylon, Egypt, Israel, Per- sia, and Greece; caused the decadence and the ruin of the Roman empire; destroyed the power of Spain, ruined the Netherlands, brought abjection to the Republic of Venice; is the cause of the troubles of utilitarian England; will fatally bring Germany into dust, sooner or later, before this war ends or after. Greed to nations is like tuberculosis to individuals: if not cured, will carry them fatally to the grave. May greed — which has made blind, deaf and dumb to the voice of human- 86 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi ity many of the leading men of the United States — depart from our midst. May justice inspire all the actions of men in public life; and convince them that many national calamities are the result of the very actions which have been shown in the preceding pages, which seem to lack system only apparent- ly, but which are connected strongly by links which will not be seen by the ones who have eyes and yet refuse to see. We find in one of the greatest masterpieces of the literature of mankind — Job: iv, 8 — the warning: "Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity and sow wickedness, reap the same." Socrates said to his accusers, as we are informed by Plato (Apology) : "He who in earnest contends for justice, if he will be safe for but a short time, should live privately and take no part in public affairs." It is, of course, the kind of public life which has been displayed so far. But when public life shall be inspired by the principles of honor and justice, on which our country must stand, things will be fundamentally different. We need an intense spirit of nationalism combined with an intense spirit of justice. Deeds and facts, not words and phrases. Liberty in tranquillity, not peace resting on a vol- cano of rapacity of large interests and of hatred and greed of proletarians. No "Act of Enclosure" of Commons, and no communistic manifesto. VII. Did modern history start with the discovery of America or with the Reformation ? Many years ago, in a pamphlet en- tirely and perhaps justly forgotten, I pointed out that the portals of modern history were opened by Martin Luther, who had redeemed human reason from the blind tyranny of Cath- olic dogma. I was wrong, and more wrong have been people who have ransacked my booklet and offered my vagaries as discoveries of their geniuses in establishing the laws of his- tory. The human mind had been freed before Luther, who had the extraordinary merit of founding the German litera- ture so rich in material and so poor in quality, had preached the Reformation, which was as far from the spirit of real Christianity as the present European war is from the views expressed by Immanuel Kant in the essay mentioned in an- other chapter. In Italy, Bernardino Telesio, from Cosenza, Calabria, had disentangled philosophy of nature from the ter- rible coils of that boa constrictor of reason which was the syllogism of scholasticism. Christianity of the Reformation was no more Christianity than that of Rome or that of Cal- vin who, more contemptible than Torquemada or Cardinal Ximenez, had Dr. Servetus burned for heresy in a public square of Geneva, Oct. 27, 1553. To be more correct, I would like to state that both the dis- covery of America and the proclamation of religious freedom, Gigliotti — Co7' Mundi 37 were the sounding knell of modern history, which gave place to a NEW ERA as soon as the United States, coming out from their Chinese wall of the Monroe doctrine, entered the world's war, not for conquest or self-aggrandizement, but in order to save civilization and democracy. I have my reasons to believe that, in spite of the magnificent words of President Wilson, America would have remained out of the conflict had not Ger- man intrigue, arrogance, greed, and frightfulness forced the government of Washington into the affray. If the only motives had been humanitarian, the deliberations of the American Government would have been taken after the invasion of Belgium and the sinking of the Lusitania. More than the interests of democracy and of humanity, the instincts of self-preservation, prevailed in Washington. A victorious Germany would have meant an oppressed America. Many of the American politicians and statesmen, who have been relentless in their criticism of President Wilson, had spent years in preparing the huge banquet Germany longed to en- joy. In the last presidential campaign, the Republicans, while displaying American flags and appealing to efficiency and American rights, had, as their chief exponents, the German American Alliance, and employed as their chief pub- licity agents the men who had served faithfully Dumba, Bernstorff, and Bolo Pasha. They did it perhaps innocent- ly, but they drove from Mr. Hughes thousands who had intended to support him, especially in Ohio, and on the Pacific Coast, where people are less shallow and more re- flexive. I apologize to the readers and to the men in politics for this observation, but the lessons of history should never be ignored by people who carry in their hands the destinies of mankind. The discovery of America opened a new field to the op- pressed of the world. Christopher Columbus, who was seek- ing glory and wealth in a scientific discovery for commercial purposes, instead of reaching India, navigating westward, found an immense continent unknown before, and rich be- yond the fondest hopes. The miserable Teutonic historical junk dealers, who tried to belittle Columbus with the tales of Norsemen navigators, found willing and busy henchmen in American educators, who took and take delight in deco- rating school rooms with German rags. But the oppressed of the world had in Columbus their first liberator, when he first found the way to this great continent. France, Spain England, the Netherlands, exploited it. Adventurers, pirates, and convicts, before Germans and Sein Feiners started to come, settled it, and disgraced it. But Columbus had, against his own expectations, become the greatest benefactor of man- kind, because, if many evils were introduced into the new 38 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi continent, inhabited by the Red Skins, numberless blessings found their way into it, too. Nobody can read the history of New England without deep emotion. From England — unjustly abused by indi- viduals and nations, which nicknamed her "Perfidious Al- bion" — came the two institutions, which slowly but persist- ently brought the American colonies into Independence Hall in Philadelphia. As rightly says Dr. Edward Elliott, the House of Burgesses became the bulwark of popular lib- erties, and through it the people demanded and secured a large share in the government of the colony. The religious motive was primarily responsible for the migration to the New World of the Puritan colonists of New England. These Puritans, who very soon became Congregationalists, had a system of Church government which contained the seeds of democracy. The Pilgrims who first arrived to the now cel- ebrated Plymouth Rock were misguided Christians, too; nar- row and intolerant, as the Independents of England and the Calvinists of Switzerland, and very jealous of their faith and their freedom, but very ready to commit murder to ad- vance their cause; they persecuted, tortured, jailed, burned for witchcraft innocent people who had other beliefs and observed other religious practices. It is true that the Quakers, under the guidance of William Penn, came to Amer- ica and, in spite of peculiarities which amused and shocked people, restored the simplicity and brotherly love of Chris- tianity, which has been revived in the purity and in the spirit of the first centuries by the so-called Plymouth brethren. America, the promised land of the oppressed and the downtrodden, had to shake her yoke from English sovereign- ty. The brilliant selfishness of Benjamin Franklin, the dec- lamatory but heartfelt patriotism of Patrick Henry, the en- cyclopedism of Thomas Jefferson, the inspiring faith and magnificent heroism of George Washington, the bravery of the immortal signers of the Declaration of Independence, preceded the French Revolution; and, proclaiming the free- dom of the thirteen original states, eliminated forever the British master, established a permanent government of the people, by the people, and for the people; and defined very clearly the rights and the duties of free men. The French Revolution seemed to Mazzini the end of an era, and not the beginning of one. The most violent convulsions, arson, pil- lage, murder, blind and frightful vengeance: the red flag, the guillotine, and the directorate. Louis XVI ascends the scaffold ; and when the tigers, who thought the rights of men could only prosper in carnage and blood, did not find any more enemies to slay, they started to slay each other. The heads of Danton, Desmoulins, Robespierre rolled into the ghastly basket. And Napoleon arose in the carnage: from the aristocratic monarchy, the empire of the upstarts; the Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 39 grandson of "le roy soleil" had been executed to make room for the little corporal! The French Revolution had been an appalling cataclysm: ruins of vast proportions were natur- ally strewed in its path. It could not last. Mazzini was right. The French Revolution closed an era. It was a period in one of the most important paragraphs in history. But the American Revolution was the beginning of a new era, the announcement of a radiant hope to mankind. Napoleon sealed the past. George Washington unfolded the future. The men of 1848 in Europe took inspiration from the United States of America. In France, where the people had been kept awake with "Granny" of Beranger, they were blessed with the coup d'etat of "Napoleon le petit", as Victor Hugo called the third Bonaparte. In America were brew- ing the events which twelve years later brought Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, precipitated the civil war, and abolished slavery. France had shocked the world with the horrors of the revolution; the United States had filled the peoples of the earth with the blessings of their achievements : anarchy there, order here. The "Declaration of Independ- ence" stands as the proclamation of the new generations: the declaration of men's rights was the last will and testa- ment of a disappearing world. No rights unless men are ready to perform duties faith- fully. The new spirit which pervaded the Declaration of Independence, the Revolution, the formation of the United States of America, was the new gospel of redemption to the people, who had freed themselves from British yoke, and the oppressed of the world. All the revolutions of the past — big and small — had been limited in scope and bloody in method; instead of being the achievement of a lofty goal, they had been the bursting of desperation and the outburst of revenge, the breaking loose of the uncontrolled and uncontrollable savagery of the rabble. Spartacus, Tell, Rienzi, Masaniello, Minin, become insignificant shadows when George Wash- ington appears. And after Washington, Garibaldi. But this country, intended to be the abode and the bless- ing of the oppressed, naturally made huge blunders. The evil influences of adventurers, the atavic tendencies of the criminals imported here, and the selfishness of the Anglo- Saxons, intelligent, alert, wise, but extremely utilitarian — as typified by Franklin — mixed with the impulsive, inordinate, proud, and misguided generous instincts of races other than English, were the causes of calamities, which culminated in internal strife in that Pharisaical autonomy of • extreme selfishness called "the Monroe doctrine" and in the Civil War. But Abraham Lincoln, one of the most benevolent and resplendent suns in the history of mankind, saved the country and gave the greatest of all testimonials that the United States had been destined by Providence to be the bay of 40 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi safety for the oppressed and down-trodden in the storms of savagery and fury of intolerance, militarism, and tyrannies. Nevertheless, after the Civil War other evils came: seri- ous evils, which might cause the ruin of our institutions and our country. The building of enormous fortunes has made of a very few individuals the uncrowned kings and emperors of one hundred millions of people, who are the enemies and the great menace of our immense commonwealth: like Dam- ocles' sword, they are continually suspended over our heads, ready to fall at any moment. They have corrupted every branch of our government; and, having in their own pocket- books the destinies of hundreds of thousands of men, they can trouble for their own selfish ends the most vital interests of a whole nation. Oil and coal fields, railroads, steamship lines, industries, farm products, banks, everything, have been concentrated in their owm hands. The government, which they believe their own creation, is at times powerless against them; they give to the poor one and extort four; compelled by the unions to pay better wages, they get everything back with very heavy interest, sending prices sky-high, profiteer- ing, robbing openly, unscrupulously, brazenly, in spite of the law; and, often, with the connivance of the law. In all times and in all nations, the worst enemies of the people — as I had occasion to demonstrate a number of years ago, while running for a legislative oflJice — are the very rich and the very poor, the men who have become conscienceless through great accumulation of wealth, and who believe every- thing is for sale; and the very poor, who have lost every sense of pride and honor, and, like brutes, know no other moral than the satisfaction of the stomach and the sexual instinct. Both extremes are very dangerous to the security of the state, and they should be eliminated; but, before they are eliminated, the very rich and the very poor should be de- prived of the rights of citizenship. Anti-trust laws are a ridiculous joke, when the ones who enforce them are the ser- vants of the kings of wealth. But, as this great country of ours produced Washing- ton, who smashed the British yoke, and Lincoln, who abol- ished slavery, she will certainly, sooner or later, give us the new liberator, who surely shall accomplish the wonderful task of making the United States the ideal government of the world, the new Eden. God bless President Wilson, if he is the one! Bad* is Germany. Horrible is the condition which would be our lot were the central empires of Europe victorious. But our lot would not be very much better if the ascendancy of the enormously rich has to go on at the same pace as be- fore. The war will make them much richer, far more power- ful; and, if we will not be free from them after we have Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 41 humiliated and crushed the arrogance of Germany, we will only have avoided Scillae to go into Caribdi. Over sixty years ago America refused to concede Canada reciprocity, and Mr. McKenzie, in the Dominion Parliament, amid the deafening applause of his colleagues and of the pub- lic assembled in the galleries, declared that the United States acted so because they wanted to annex British North Amer- ica. A few years ago. President Taft made an effort to get reciprocity with Canada, and the Conservatives, who were fighting Canada's greatest statesman — Wilfred Laurier — de- clared that America wanted reciprocity as the first step to annex the Dominion ; and they won on that issue . The truth is that the detentors of wealth of over sixty years ago did not want reciprocity, because it was not to their interests, and for the very same reason the detentors of wealth in our time have repeated the unconfessable scheme. The first time the American Government was democratic; the sec- ond was democratic the government of Canada. We are and must be very patriotic. But real patriotism must convince us that our country is not only our territory, our history, and our flag; but that she is, above all, human flesh and human blood; and that the happiness of the people must be placed above the power of the state. Justice is greater than glory, and righteousness is immensely better than success. VIII. Of late, all belligerents have tried to enlist the sympathy of the United States, publishing books, not always impartial, buying the press, sending lecturers and missionaries all over the country. The Germans, who have spent more money than anybody else, gained the favor of big newspapers and maga- zines all over the country, and poisoned the minds of unsus- pecting people through persistent propaganda, headed by insti- tutions of learning and university professors, engaged in the most abominable panderage which dishonor men. Hugo Mun- sterberg, professor of Psychology in Harvard University, was the head and front of pro-German propaganda among intel- lectuals. Suspected, denounced, practically caught in the nefarious work, he offered his resignation to the trustees of the institution. But dignified Harvard, where the spirit of the supreme pacifist Channing still gently floats, and where the teachings of Professor Harnack of Berlin are con- sidered as the gospel of the generations to come, reaflfirmed its deep confidence in Munsterberg, and asked of him to re- main in his chair. That strange individual, George Sinister Viereck, who in that ultra German Fatherland abused every- thing American, and after war was declared went to the Roy- crofters in East Aurora to make profession of American- ism, and to insult with his venomous hypocrisy the very mem- 42 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi ory of my friend Elbert Hubbard, murdered in the Lusitania, needs no special mention here. A spiritual son of J. K. Stieber, he is the worthy co-worker of that poisonous group of false Americans, who, in order to cover their past infam- ous activities, claim patriotic distinction, because they bought with ill-gotten money hundreds of thousands of dollars of Liberty Bonds. Eternal confusion to the insidious asps of a pandering press, and praise and honor to that noble part of the American press which spurned all efforts of the enemy of mankind! And glory to the magnificent Providence Jour- nal, and to its heroic editor Rathom, who unmasked Teuti^n insidiousness, and pointed out to perplexed Washington the pending danger and the way of salvation ! Unicuique suum. Where enemies could not penetrate through American publications, they enlisted the cheap services of a foreign press, chiefly owned and edited by men absolutely ignorant ar.d cynical, who are unable to read anything but a check- book. Bolo Pasha made his biggest inroads through such an element. A number of years ago, I pointed out news- papers which were the official organs of criminal organiza- tions. They protested against me, frightened the American dailies who were publishing my articles, informed me that my life was not worth ten cents, took away business from me and bread from my children, and enlisted the sympathy and the services of big politicians. I preferred to lose the money I was making through my publications, and refused to retract one single word of what I had written. Later on, what I had predicted became true. Blackmail ran amuck. Black-hand- ers operated on a large scale from one end of the country to the other. Three years ago, at Washington, on Easter day, I read the ill-famed appeal to the American people, which was a German-Austrian ruse to paralyze all activities and enlist the sympathy of the world in the iniquitous cause of the Cen- tral Empires. When I perused the signatures of certain for- eign editors, who pretended to have contributed to the fund for the publication and diffusion of the appeal, I knew at once that something was wrong somewhere, because they were not the kind of people to give a penny for any honest cause, and that they were always ready to bargain anything for a consideration. The money for the nefarious under- taking had been furnished by Teutonic sources. It was the work typical of Stieber and his successors. I raised the cry of alarm. It required courage and disposition to suffer cal- umny, starvation, and moral and material murder. But I performed a duty. Many Italian editors published my de- nunciations, and, admitting I was absolutely right, protested that they had been in good faith. They contended that they had to accept anything a certain individual was bringing to them, because their newspapers would be compelled to cease Gigliotti — Cor Mwndi 43 publication if the advertisements coming from that source should cease. I said to them: "If you are honest, if you have a remnant of self-respect and human dignity, leave the pen and take the shovel." I am not personally acquainted with the publicity agent of the Central Empires, who has been the protegee of republican politicians and organiza- tions. I have never been and never had any intention to be- come a speculator in publicity. But I blamed and blame sin- cerely and unreservedly organizations, firms, and individuals who, in order to serve the enemies of this country, have made of men, who are as brazen as they are ignorant, the Judas Iscariot of the noble nation which gave them what they could never have had anywhere else. In Europe nerve alone will never make a man important: he must have manners, gentlemanship, ability, intelligence, education. In Europe a good barber and a good shoemaker will be respected in their trade; but they cannot write editorials or preach from the pulpit or from the platform, unless they are men of excep- tional good sense and intellect. Gamblers, pimps, and saloon keepers may sometimes help an unscrupulous but capable candidate for public office to win here and there; but they will never run for office or attempt to control political par- ties. America should learn the lesson. Democracy means honor, justice, and efficiency. Prostitution of public office is negation of the very essence of democracy, which is order and not perversion of the most elementary rules of decent government. After my discovery and denunciations, the most relent- less persecution against me started. Even travelling sales- men of Socialism, paid by the secret funds of Berlin and Vi- enna, thought it was expedient to take a hand in the new cru- sade of vituperation, which pleased very much some of my fellow citizens, who could not forget some political differ- ences we had had. German gold found its way even into unworthy representatives of the Italian Government, who were and are very frantic against me, because I unmasked them and condemned them to infamy in a poem which will not die, in spite of the efforts of the smooth crooks who enjoy the special protection of contemptible speculators of patriot- ism. Whatever I did, I did for a principle. Everything I have gained for years I have sacrificed to the cause of real democracy. I am perhaps dying now, but the light of the ideal makes happy even my last moments. And dictating this essay, or whatever the reader may call it, from my bed, I am positive I am performing a last duty. I know that the conditions of my health prevent me from ordering, group- ing properly, giving system and touch to my information. But I have no intention to publish a scholarly book. The way it has come to my mind and heart, I have dictated. The read- er will certainly excuse the shortcomings, and accept the in- 44 Gigliotti — Coi' Mundi formation, which is correct and conscientious, even if con- fused and clumsy. Of all foreign enemies of the United States, Germany- is certainly the worst. But other nations, who are now friendly, because they need our help, have been jealous, too. This country is too prosperous. In this vast continent, we have every climate, every product, every blessing. No mat- ter what people of the United States, who know well other countries, and who are extremely ignorant of their own, may say, we have everything except ancient history and the mon- uments and ruins of glorious countries gone by long since. If you want the Coliseum and the Pyramids, the walls of Nineveh and the Parthenon, Palmira and Persepolis, Pesto and Pompeii, you have to be satisfied with seeing them on the screen or depicting them in your imagination, if you don't like to undertake a very long journey. But if you love to admire the wonders of nature, you find Europe, Asia, and Africa right in this immense continent, Colorado is as beau- tiful as Switzerland. The snow-capped mountains of the West are as interesting and as imposing as the Alps, the Ap- ennines, and the Himalayas. If you like a sand-storm, you don't need to go to Sahara: in Arizona you can satisfy your curiosity to your heart's content. The bay of New York and the Golden Gate of San Francisco can save you the trouble of a visit to Naples, Constantinople, or Athens. Every na- tion in the world has certain things, and is dependent upon foreign importations for others. We have everything: wool and cotton, coal and iron, lead and copper, silver and gold, granite and marble, wheat and corn, cement and lumber, vegetables and fruits of all climates, immense prairies and magnificent forests, superb internal waterways and two oceans. Every nation in the world envies our wealth, our inexhaustible resources. Foreign nations have apparently let us alone; but they have been the parasites thriving on our very blood and flesh. We have fed them. Opening our shores to the over-population of other countries, we have saved them from revolutions. The money accumulated here and sent everywhere by immigrants has made poor nations rich, has saved from bankruptcy entire municipalities and provinces. We have generously helped other nations on earth with food, money, clothing, goods of all kinds, every time a public calamity has visited them. In our misfortunes we have done without foreign help. San Francisco, devastated by a frightful earthquake, by her own virtue, in a short time is rebuilt, and becomes more beautiful than before. Naturally, other nations would gladly rob us of our re- sources and wealth. Scions of impoverished noble families have flocked here to marry the daughters of merchants, traders, and miners made vain by showers of gold. Adven- turers have brought here all kinds of schemes in order to de- Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 45 part from the American shores with sacks of dollars. Un- scrupulous rascals have been and are harvesting wealth, rob- bing the unfortunate foreigners of their hard gained money, selling them watered stocks, worthless sick, accident and life insurance, and real estate at prices not only extortionate, but at conditions which mean that the poor buyer, sooner or later, will lose everything. Labor agents, generally of the nationality of the poor devils sacrificed, have, when supply was inferior to the demand, done things which should have brought them to the penitentiary several times and for long terms. Instead, they found the protection of very influential politicians ; and some of them were also appointed or elected to offices of honor and responsibility, in the municipalities, in the state, and in the nation. Very few foreigners, who be- came rich, got their money honestly. The labor agents took money from the unfortunate victims for brokerage, charged them with the price of transportation, which was offered in many instances free, took a percentage of their wages later on, and compelled them to buy from them food unfit for hu- man consumption. Some of the most unscrupulous of them were men employed by railroad companies. Many of the unfortunate victims of such a system of extortion and slavery have an idea the government is re- sponsible for the frightful treatment they receive; and if they go back to Europe before they become thoroughly ac- quainted with the real United States, they will inflame the souls of everybody they are able to approach against the savagery of a country of hypocrites and bandits, which has the effrontery to pose as the home of the brave and the land of the free. It is to a certain extent the case of Trotzky and of many of the Bolsheviki, who are denouncing in Rus- sia the United States just because, having been here in America, they met with frightful experiences. Every wrong done in this country through the perfidy of unscrupulous politicians or the rapacity of bandits is a liability for Amer- ica. In Germany, in Austria, and in Bulgaria unfriendly newspapers are illustrating as an answer to President Wil- son the horrible facts I have mentioned. And to the gener- ous words of ex-President Roosevelt and others, after the infamies perpetrated in Belgium, German newspapers were opposing the horrors of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Com- pany, the outrages of bossism, and the padrone system, the lynchings, and other similar pleasantries. A foreign news- paper, bringing to light the fact that President Roosevelt had appointed, while governor of New York, Mr. James E. March as port warden, admonished : "Medice, cura te ipsum." Foreign governments, responsible for the very conditions mentioned above, speculate on the ignorance and resentments of their subjects residing in America, doing everything in their power to keep them away from real American spirit 46 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi and institutions, and inflaming them in every possible way against the generous and hospitable country which gave them freedom, bread and opportunity. The conditions I observed in the beginning in New York, exist all over the United States, somewhere more, somewhere less, but everywhere a menace to our institutions and to the fu- ture of our country. Foreigners, living in settlements of their own, keep their customs, their prejudices, their language, their hatred for their neighbors and for the country which gave them food, shelter, and protection. They have their own societies, genu- ine nests of disloyalty to America ; their own language, which makes them strangers to everything we stand for ; their own newspapers; their own habits, often unclean and bothersome to the limit of endurance; their own churches, and their own flags. They worship their ovioi patron saints or gods, and have praise only for their own governments. The pictures of kings, emperors, statesmen, and generals, who made of them castaways, hang from their walls, and are worshipped by them. Once in a while you find among them revolution- ary groups — anarchistic or socialistic — but instead of im- proving conditions, they make them worse, because they de- nounce and curse the United States much more than they do the sinister rulers of the nations they came from. Had they, in their native countries, uttered some of the expres- sions they were allowed to shout at the top of their voices here, they would have been arrested, prosecuted, and sent to the penitentiary for high treason. Take Goldman, Berkman, and many others; they have had the impudence to preach publicly that the LFnited States is a worse country than Rus- sia under the czars. Fools, demagogues or agents of foreign enemies, they have been preparing the ruin of our country. If it is true that many of the revolutionary energumens are types of the most abominable parasitism; being enemies of work and virtue and honor, they tramp around, uttering abuse against law and order, inflaming ignorant and peace- ful workingmen against their toil, their employers, and our government, in order to extort from them shelter, food, cloth- ing, and money for their vices and dissipations. The state of moral perversion of some of the preachers of socialism and anarchism in the country is such that the government could prosecute them and send them justly to penitentiary, without making political martyrs of pimps, white slavers, blackmailers, and crooks. These strange states within the state — these little Italy, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Greece, etc. — are matters of great concern for whoever has eyes and ears, and thinks continu- ally of the safety and greatness of the country. The paid agents of foreign governments are busy among such settle- ments, encouraging them to do all they can to oppose every- Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 47 thing American. In order to carry on their nefarious work, they incite foreigners to apply for citizenship. American citizenship, they contend, does not signify that they have to renounce allegiance to the country of their birth, but is just a scheme to advance her interests. As American citizens, they enjoy all the rights of natives, can help to make laws favorable to their interests, remaining all the while in good standing of their mother countries. The doctrine of double citizenship, in the sinister light of fooling America in the interests of foreign countries, has been cynically and openly discussed in the newspapers printed in foreign languages I have mentioned, and in conventions held in European capi- tals. It has been done with the knowledge and consent of federal authorities, before Mr. Wilson became President of the -United States. Adventurers and crooks have used to advantage the traitors invested with the sacred rights of cit- izenship. Men elected to municipal, judicial, and legislative offices have taken orders from foreign governments. In some cities every elementary law of common decency has been violated by mayors, who have appointed to the bench men who had been busy preaching the doctrine of double citizenship, or who were the consular agents of foreign governments. And that they were able to serve those foreign governments much better than the United States is amply proved by the fact that they were knighted by kings and emperors. Do you suppose for a single instant that a foreign government would give a coronet to one of its former subjects who has be- come a faithful, conscientious, patriotic citizen of the United States? Generosity, gratefulness, homage to merit are qualities extraneous to the hearts of kings, who decorate only slaves or knaves or people willing to pay the price. Some- times, for political reasons, they decorate men of note or for- eign representativs who are part of special missions; but the men I refer to are not in this class. Now, such men could not be fair to both parties. They are betraying one or the other. I know positively of foreign consular agents closely allied to notorious agents of the Central Empires. They have betrayed not only the United States of America, but their own governments. And this is the best proof that a man, who is low enough to become a spy, is low enough to stop at nothing for money: a man who prostitutes his own conscience will prostitute his wife, his sisters, his daughters, his mother, his own country! Beware, free men of America! Beware of them! Beware of traitors, who go around displaying Amer- ican flags and delivering speeches on Americanization, in order to keep suspicion away from the very nature of their secret work, and to prevent the real, unselfish patriot from performmg his duty! I can spot many of them. But it is Stieber, Stieber, Stieber that I am exposing. It is the sys- tem which endangers the dear country of my adoption (the 48 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi country where my children and my children's children live, and where I hope to have rest, when my eyes shall see no more the beneficent light of the sun) that I wish to see under- stood by everybody, and destroyed so that it cannot come to life any more. My own brother is a good, upright American, and a professional man of courage and merit; and yet I did not stop an instant to denounce him, when he wrote and pub- lished things which seemed to me blasphemous. He wrote an ill-advised book against woman suffrage, and I was in- dignant, because you cannot be a firm believer in freedom, if you want that freedom only enjoyed by a part of mankind and denied to the other. At Sparta, Lycurgus gave women the very same education men were receiving; and Plato in his Ideal City advocated absolute equality between the two sexes. I have been for equal suffrage since I was 19 years of age, since I studied in the original Greek the works of the greatest seer of antiquity, who took pride in the fact that he had been a pupil of Socrates. To fight what we sincerely consider error is a duty, if we have character and deep con- victions. If we wish to have some day peace, we must wish peace among all people, among all our fellow beings The kind of peace the Germans and their allies are ad- vocating is not and cannot be of our liking; because we love mankind and want the greatest good for the greatest number in real Jeffersonian spirit. To the enemies of real democracy who misuse the word peace, we can apply the expression of Tacitus: "Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant." Only the other day I learned from a newspaper a friend was reading to me that one of the most abominable types of spies — a monster of ignorance and perversity — had been ap- pointed by the mayor of a certain city to a position of honor and responsibility! There are in that city Italians well read, well bred, able, sincere, honorable to a fault. But men of honor cannot be blindly used by politicians. Unscrupulous politicians, who climb high not by merit, but by the mal- odorous schemings of rascality and graft, need as tools the worse flowers of evil which bloom in the garden of human degradation. Men with brains and with conscience are a con- tinuous reproach and menace to them. Did not rightly ob- serve Victor Hugo that the highest peaks are reached only by the eagles or by the worms? Until civil service becomes a reality in the uncertainties of our political system, it is im- possible to expect honor and efficiency everywhere. With the exception of elective positions, where, even at the best, black sheep have a chance, no public office, no matter how low or exalted, should be exempt from civil service. The judicial power should be absolutely taken away from politics, and be subject to civil service, so that an able man could gradually grow from justice of the peace to coroner, from coroner to district attorney, from district attorney to com- Gigliotti — Co7' Mundi 49 mon pleas judge, and so forth. The system of electing judges is democratic only in appearance, but partisan in fact. In many respects it is a perversion of justice. Even the best man, in order to be elected, is compelled to be under obliga- tions to individuals, who are often stubborn, habitual, and cheerful violators of the law. The gentleman of ability and integrity is seldom in a position to influence voters. A lib- eral supply of liquor and coin has changed in the past and will change in the future many responses of ballot boxes. The very few words I have said in favor of civil service are not new. In the United States of America the civil ser- vice reform found great exponents — Theodore Roosevelt, above all; but even when civil service was adopted politics dominated it, and it often became a joke. Men very high in the councils of the nation often used civil service as a club against political enemies or as an excuse to prefer somebody else for a job to people they had made promises before the elections. Hypocrisy is not civil service : it is hypocrisy, pure and simple, the most comtemptible mask a man can put on his face, the worst blight to public life, the negation of char- acter and manhood. To the representatives of foreign governments, who are engaged in the nefarious work of undermining the founda- tions on which our institutions rest, must be added the mor- bid ambitions of the cunning individuals of foreign settle- ments. They build societies and fraternal orders not for the good of the members and the country, but for their selfish, tenebrous and unconfessable profit and advancement. Moral and material welfare of the members are only on the statute books, but find no room in their hearts : they wish to use the mob to sell them, to make political capital out of them, to keep them in line for the ends of the foreign governments, from which they expect money, favors, and titles of distinc- tion, and to barter them in order to go to the bench or to legislative halls. In other times they were the sponsors of the "Mafia" or of the "Black Hand" ; now they are the grand masters of organizations, where they admit freely the ig- norant and the low criminal, and keep away the honest and the able, because they are afraid that the latter may, sooner or later, cause their downfall. They make so much noise about their love for the United States of America. If sta- tistics are not deceptive, see how many of them are willing to serve our country, when the hour of need came. Many who had taken citizen papers for the reasons explained al- ready were furious when they found they were compelled to serve in the national army. Newspapers always make things worse — foreign newspapers, I mean. They know so little of American history and ideals— to be exact, they know very little of any history and of any ideals— that whatever they say on the subject creates disgust to the ones who know, 50 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi and confusion to the ignorant. Instead of making of their pages a school of education and of civic and domestic virtues, they abuse this country, magnify the glories of the countries of the birth of their editors and readers, follow with servil- ity the representatives of old country governments, and ad- dress appeals to the public sometimes to defend notorious criminals, some others to protest against legislators, judges, or police officials, who uncovered and sent where they be- longed gangs of gunners, counterfeiters, blackmailers, white slavers, murderers of their own nationality. If there are men of great moral worth in their midst, they are very care- ful to ignore them. Honorable men do not buy the praise of mud-slingers. But if there is any rascal who can give din- ners and buy drinks and lend money, which will never be re- turned, they say the most wonderful things of him. Such ignorance, sycophancy, and prostitution of the noble mission of the press — a mission which is at times betrayed even by American publications — is very dangerous. It increases the number of enemies and traitors among the inhabitants of the foreign settlements. If the war had done no other benefit to America than to put a muzzle on that venomous press, it would have accomplished quite a bit. The nefari- ous work cannot be stopped entirely; but the order to print nothing about the war, without giving a faithful translation of it to the Postmaster, will prevent reptiles from spreading harm. I am a firm believer in a free press. I agree with Thomas Jefferson, the father and the founder of American Democracy. But the press should educate and not prostitute minds. Honest criticism is often more useful than unstinted praise; but misrepresentation and vituperation should not be tolerated in a free country of men of honor. The methods of Stieber employed in Bohemia and in France should not be tolerated in America. What Berns- torf, Boy-Ed, Von Papen, Dumba, and their legion have been doing, has been done and is done by all foreign governments. Nobody knows it better than the Secretary of State. I have an idea that even the seraphic Mr. Bryan, who brought into the State Department at Washington the extreme pacifism of Leo Tolstoy, necessarily gained some knowledge of it. Foreign governments, in order to keep their former subjects as their own colonists for commercial and political purposes, have depended not only on the methods mentioned above, but on the supine complacency of our federal govern- ment, which has been very often rich in words, but extreme- ly poor in achievements. While every government in the world, no matter how humble, has been very emphatic in up- holding the rights of its citizens, the United States have often and willingly played into the hands of the representatives of European foreign offices. American citizenship did not ex- empt from military service in certain countries. A man, for Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 51 instance, coming here from Italy or from Russia, could not go for a visit to the country of his birth without being ar- rested as a slacker and compelled to serve in the army. His American passport was not a protection to him: authorities, insolent, arrogant, cynical, would humiliate, ridicule, offend him, as soon as he would shelter himself under the protection of his American citizenship. "For the present you will go to the devil, to jail, and to the barracks. In the meantime you can write your president to send here his navy and his army." More than once similar answers have been given. Similar instances have happened during Cleveland's, Mc-* Kinley's, Roosevelt's, Taft's, and Wilson's administrations. England, not having the conscription, never gave us the slightest trouble. France was the only country in continental Europe where American citizenship was held in high consid- eration. When Elihu Root— one of the foremost statesmen of modern times— was secretary of state, I tried to induce members of Congress to persuade him to have international agreements, which would guarantee the rights of naturalized citizens abroad, provided, of course, they had not been guilty of any crime. It seemed to me that foreign governments should be persuaded that to say "I am an American citizen" would be equivalent to the "Gives Romanus sum" of yore. I don't see why America should not be able to enforce the protection of her citizens as well as England does. No country in the world, before the present war at least, would have dared to disregard the rights of a British subject. If a foreign am- bassador, for instance, had been told by the secretary of state : "My dear sir, we have nothing but feelings of friend- ship for your government; but we intend to be treated with equal courtesy. If our naturalized citizens cannot go to your country without being taken forcibly into military service we will be compelled, much to our regret, to hand you your passports," foreign governments would have called off their u' ,^®"^6"iber, it is impossible to have faithful servants, when they know they cannot depend on your protection. We have been insulted by foreign governments every time we have tried to pass a law to protect our own interests, our own labor, our own industries, our own boundaries. Their own press in our very continent has poured abuse on Con- gress, on the cabinet, on the President. What have we done when they have treated with contempt the rights of our citi- zens? They are friendly and humble now, because they are on their knees, and need our money, our food, our blood. And yet, they come in our midst, and get everything they ask, A naturalized citizen may have social relations with any of the foreign diplomats, just as any native; but social intercourse has nothing to do with betraying one's country. Natural- ized citizens, who use the glorious country of their adoption only as a cow to milk, and for reasons of their own pay trib- 52 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi ute and take orders from representatives of foreign govern- ments, even if those representatives come from nations where they were born, have in their veins the blood of Judas Iscariot and lago. The foreign settlements in our big cities are all equally tainted. In the last municipal campaign in New York, the socialists elected to the bench, to the board of aldermen, to the legislature, were they imbued *with the American spirit? The action of the socialistic members of the Assembly at Albany — does that show that they were act- ing as men who love the country they are supposed to serve? Did Mr. Berger represent in Congress the American people? And is Mr. London not, more than the representative of a na- tional constituency at Washington, the spokesman of voters who are not in sympathy with American traditions and ideals ? Do the so-called socialists realize that their high priest, Marx, at the time of the Franco-Prussian war, forgot everything about the doctrines he had been preaching, and stated em- phatically that Germany must humiliate France, and annex Alsace and Lorraine, two rich provinces necessary to her needs and her expansion? In their indignation about the war, have they forgotten how deeply Marx appreciated and extolled the American Civil War? Have they forgotten that Ferdinand Lassalle, the most sincere and enlightened among the founders of socialism in Germany and Europe, stated as emphatically as it was possible for him, that it was absurd to talk of socialism and peace before the principle of nation- ality and the political independence of states had triumphed? But knowledge implies study, and study is work. The brand of socialists we are mentioning do not seem to be on very friendly terms with work. One of them was in need of every- thing, and yet he was young, enjoyed splendid health and great vigor, and everybody would have been pleased to give him work. A friend advised him to get a job, and pointed out the well-established truth that work ennobles man. "Why," he objected, "have you forgotten that I am a sincere opponent of nobility in every form? Work ennobles man. To hell with work." If we wish to save our free institutions, and start to walk on the path of justice and honor, we have to destroy the influences which are undermining our institu- tions. We must absolutely eliminate from our midst what- ever is a menace to our future greatness, be it the deleteri- ous influence of foreign governments and settlements, or the hypocritical and dictatorial tendencies of national govern- ments, which may have done things of which Abraham Lin- coln would have felt ashamed. Abraham Lincoln, the genius of America, the man Carducci compared to Garibaldi, and Victor Hugo to Lycurgus! Abraham Lincoln, who embodied all the virtues of all the seers and all the liberators in the history of mankind! Abraham Lincoln, who, in his work of emancipation, made America understand that after the abo- Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 53 lition of slavery, it was necessary to emancipate man from himself, to build character, which is the foundation of the greatness of a people, because it puts men above dollars, and honor above monopoly. According to the best conception of statesmanship and international law, great nations should become the unselfish protectors of the little ones. The giant who knocks down children, women, and old people, revolting as he is, is not as bad as the nation which assassinates, op- presses, and degrades small states. We have our faults, too. We have been unjust to small states in the islands of the Car- ribean sea and Central America. And diplomatic methods employed by us have not always been above reproach. I have no desire to criticize our government, which, especially in this moment, has accomplished wonders, and is entitled to all our love and our support. But we are longing for a Wash- ington which will be the beacon light of righteousness to the world, for the New Rome of promise, justice, honor, enlight- enment, civilization to mankind. We feel humiliated when foreign nations reproach us for what we find blamable in them. Our veracity should never be questioned. Like Caesar's wife, a great country like ours should be above sus- picion. IX. There are thousands of foreign organizations in the United States of America. Practically there is no hamlet in all the states and territories where there are no foreign settlements. In my many travels I have been surprised to find Italians, even in places where I never expected it would have been possible for them to go. I found Italians in the interior of Japan, Australia, China, India, Persia, Morocco. Even in Tobolsk, Siberia, while in a moment of just resentment, I was praying in my inimitable slang of Naples, in the cer- tainty that nobody could understand me and have me arrested for cursing the czar and his employees, who were the most unscrupulous and brazen thieves and scoundrels the world has ever produced, I was surprised to see a man coming to- ward me with outstretched hands, gleaming eyes, and smiling lips : "Why !" he said with real delight, "this is the first time I see a Neapolitan here. Forget your troubles. I know you will accept my hospitality and enjoy a dish of macaroni." He was an employee of the Russian government, and advised me to be very careful not to repeat the same words in any language the Russian police could understand, if I wished to reach in safety the end of my journey. Among the foreign organizations in America, many of them pretend to be loyal to the hospitable country where they are thriving. But none of them, in spite of the false pre- tenses of their constitutions and by-laws, is really sincere. The glowing words and declarations about citizenship and 54 Gigliotti — Coi- Mundi love and loyalty are shameful decoys in order to enjoy the protection of the law, to obtain incorporation, and to use and abuse each and every privilege. Take a list of foreign organ- izations, and find how many of them have names dear to American hearts. Even the bitterest enemies of America among the inhabitants of foreign settlements must love and respect some of the famous names in the history of this coun- try. Many of the great Americans have been benefactors of the world. Franklin, Fulton, Morse, Edison, with their in- ventions, have become citizens of the world. Emerson — one of the immortal trinity of the Universalists, the other two being Montaigne and Amiel — is a beacon light of transcen- dental philosophy. Edgar Allen Poe, the foremost writer in America and one of the masters of all nations and ages, is the founder of a great and original school. Daniel Webster was the peer of Demosthenes and Cicero. George Washing- thon, making this country independent from British rule, gave inspiration and hope to all the oppressed. Thomas Jef- ferson was the founder of the only sane Democracy. If the "Social Contract" of poor Rousseau was the gospel of the French Revolution, the writings and example of Thomas Jef- ferson became the gospel of that new religion of justice, honor, brotherhood, equality, and simplicity, which produced, later on, thousands of miles away, that immortal master* of freedom, Giuseppe Mazzini. Abraham Lincoln, the greatest of all Americans and one of the very few extraordinary men in the history of the world, belongs to mankind. Henry George in Progress and Poverty indicated to the nations the only logical way to solve the social problem. And — to name another good American, although his fame is not such as to defy the centuries — Longfellow, as a poet, is very dear to whoever likes elegance of diction and nobleness of thought. And yet, how many of the foreign societies and lodges are named after them? But every booby of Europe who happens to write things not always lofty and inspiring and worthy and lasting has been honored by the naming of some organization after him. Read, for instance, the names of all societies of people residing here and born in foreign lands. You will find the names of their kings, their emperors, their princes, their gen- erals, their statesmen, their scientists, their writers, their politicians ; but you are unable to discover a single name dear to the hearts of patriotic Americans. Yes, the Polish have several societies named after Kosciuszko; and the Italians of every state and of almost every city have organizations named after Christopher Columbus. But Polish and Italians, in honoring the memories of Kosciuszko and Columbus, have intended to celebrate the glories of their race, and have had no intention whatever to glorify America, which one dis- covered, and the other fought for. Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 55 The same thing must be said of others. The most abom- inable hypocrisy in all this is the fact that some of these or- ganizations have provisions in their constitutions to encour- age Americanization. In a certain convention of one of the organizations I refer to, held last year at Washington, one of the delegates, who had the virtue of frankness, proposed to be sincere and leave entirely out of the statute books the pro- visions about Americanization. "How can we serve at the same time two masters?" he exclaimed. "We know that the aims of our order are exclusively to keep kindled in the hearts of its members the flame of absolute devotion to the country of their birth and origin. Are we not unworthy of our self- respect when we deceive the country which is so generous in hospitality?" The presiding officer ruled him out of order with the following words, which are absolutely testual : "We all know our aims. We are with America only as far as we can go. But our hearts are with our country, no matter whether naturalizzed or not. Expediency requires just in this moment to have certain articles in our statute books, not to observe them, but to keep away from us suspicion on ac- count of the hyphen issue." I heard such words with my own ears. A delegate, who is a good American, protested against such an exhibition of hypocrisy, which amounts almost to treason; but everybody was on his feet, shouting abuse, and denouncing as infamous what was honest, manly, and praise- worthy. The riot ceased only when it was announced that the police were ready to clear the hall and to arrest the lead- ers; but it started again a few minutes afterward. Of the action and the ability of the newspapers I have already said all that could be said. To waste more time on them would be equivalent to take an Indian billiken for a work of art, and spend useless moments in stupid admiration. The truth is that the great majority of people who come to this country, with only the prospect of making money, are morally deficient: and the more intelligent and enterprising they are, the more dangerous they become to the immediate neigh- bors first, to the city after, and to the country finally and surely. The Irish saloonkeeper, the German brewer and gambler, the Hebrew pawnbroker and installment jeweller, the French keeper of bawdy houses, the Italian murderer, the Chinese opium seller, the Polish thief, the Russian incen- diary, the Austrian counterfeiter, the white slaver from all countries, the polished American crook, are by no means typi- cal representatives of their countries, because criminality has no country of its own. They are just illustrations of the truth that when money, and money alone, becomes the goal of man, he will fatally follow, without being able to philoso- phize on evil, the old theory of Frederick the Great, which has been quoted previously. Greed for money is responsible for the baseness of politics. In years gone by, I was unable 56 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi to explain why certain notorious criminals in New York could enjoy the friendship and the protection for themselves and their pals of the municipal and state authorities — police, legislative, and judiciary. But now I understand it perfectly. Philadelphia and Chicago, Cleveland and San Francisco, Cin- cinnati and Seattle, Baltimore and New Orleans, every city and every state, are no better and no worse than New York. No reform will bring any change unless voters are made bet- ter, and better voters will smash all political machines and elect honest men. Many laws tend always to hamper justice. Summum jus summa injuria. Take greed away from men's hearts, and you have taken away crookedness. When a man believes money is the supreme end in life, he will make money honestly, if he can; but he will become a counterfeiter, a crook, a pickpocket, a procurer, anything in the criminal scale, if it can be done without danger. Morally, there is no difference between a real estate dishonest deal and a bur- glary: if any, the burglar will be the more honorable of the two. But the real estate dealer helps to make the laws, and the burglar does not; hence the difference in the treatment through the administration of justice. People who come from foreign countries to make money and to enjoy the same pleasures, privileges, and power of the wealthy oppressors they left behind, will stop at nothing to succeed. As money is their only goal, they study how to make and keep it, without the annoyance of police and judicial inter- ference ; and so they spend freely to elect to office people who will take care of them, and give them a share of their illicit profits to compensate them for the risk they take in persecut- ing the small offenders, and leaving in peace the big. No man became exceptionally rich, except by mere freaks of for- tune. Almost always the measure of honesty of a man of ability is his pocketbook. Socrates gave as the best proof of his innocence to his judges his poverty. Look around. The worst thieves are not always in the penitentiary. Conditions arising from the present war have shown clearly how many real honest men we have in our midst. Do you have, if you are in good faith and perfectly impartial in your estimate, more respect for the highway robbers, or for the grocers and the bakers who bought cheap large amounts of goods which they are selling back to a long-suffering public at enormous profits ? I know of Italian grocers, who bought Roman cheese for 28 cents a pound and less, and are selling it at two dol- lars! Do you have an idea how many millions of dollars the makers of domestic macaroni have robbed in the last two years? Do you know how much stuff, poorly manufactured here, is sold as imported to an unsophisticated public, when importations of such goods have ceased long ago? Many of the people, who are engaged in selling life necessities, display American flags, have Red Cross buttons in the lapels of their Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 57 coats, extol the patriotism of the government and the hero^ ism of the soldiers, and rob unmercifully, unscrupulously, and in cold blood the American people; and the most abom- inable thieves are not Germans. Money! Always money! Does it give happiness? Does it make people better? Does it uplift the ones who possess it, and make of them a blessing to the community, and a source of inspiration to the luke- warm and indifferent among the wealthy? And yet, there is much more happiness in giving than in receiving, as can be testified by people who have received from nature and God the gift of good hearts and generous souls ! Nobody has an idea of the perfect happiness a man or a woman engaged in humanitarian work experiences after hours and hours spent rescuing, feeding, clothing, nursing, consoling, burying. Danger, discomfort, weariness, suffering, physical ex- haustion, lack of rest, food, and sleep, are not felt. When you seem near collapse, new strength, wonderful, unexpected, di- vine, comes to you. The more you do, the more you like to do. The smile of the wounded you have rescued, the bless- ings of the mothers whose children you have restored to them, the victory you have won over the elements of blind devastation and destruction, even the grumblings of ingrati- tude often you notice around, make you happy in the midst of so much unhappiness, give you the feeling of greatness among so much squalor, offer you the best proof that immortal is the soul of man, beautify and idealize the divine spark of your mortal and decaying clay! Only he who knows what it is understands me. Enjoy banquets and dances; take part m brilliant events; spend days and evenings and nights in social functions, celebrations of all kinds, dissipations; and next day you feel tired, dissatisfied, ashamed, weary, dis- gusted with yourself, with life, and with mankind. Men and women m the height of their social successes have commit- ted suicide. Only a few days ago, the famous Italian philos- opher Roberto Ardigo', the very old and worshiped profes- sor of the University of Padua, cut his throat with a razor leaving on his desk a sheet with the words: "Life*? Is life worth living?" Had he in mind to follow the example of Lato, who committed suicide when Rome lost her liberty? But work done for the sake of humanity — no matter how hard and even superior to physical endurance— makes you leel better next day; gives you a great peace of heart and mind while your material strength is collapsing. I have had some very good and some very miserable days in my stormy life. But the only memories which fill with de- light my heart are the days of strenuous intensity I spent performing my duty in locations visited by awful calami- ties: floods, pestilences, earthquakes! I had very little patience with kings, queens, and other pretentious and gilded human mud. But I worship the very footsteps of Helen of 58 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi France, Duchess of Aosta. Why? Her work in the service of humanity has made of her a divine being, and has given her style and her books that immortal spark of life w^hich fills you with enchantment. Versailles under that powerful master Louis XIV was, in spite of her brilliancy, "vanitas vanitatum." That real descendant of Louis XIV makes a Ver- sailles of any hamlet ; but a brilliant, useful, blessed Versailles — be it a hospital for the relief of the victims of the earthquake of Messina and Reggio, or a Red Cross ambulance in the Ital- ian battle front. "War is hell!" wrote Sherman. True. But blessed be the war, if it will restore human sentiments and understand- ings in our hearts. The people, who are accumulating wealth through war, need some good, powerful stimulus to cease be- ing hoarding animals, and return to men. If their homes would be visited with some calamities, as the heroic deaths of their children in the battle front, if their daughters would vol- unteer their services as war nurses and could, after a period of noble and useful service, come back home to relate their ex- periences, if the inevitable hardships would visit them with unusual severity, their hearts would be inevitably touched; and they would realize how empty it is to be rich and power- ful, and how inspiring to be human. The wild hunting for wealth is the greatest of our curses. In many countries of Europe — impoverished by the enor- mous expenses of big navies, large standing armies, huge sal- aries to kings, emperors and royal families — the enormous emigration to America has been for years and years the great- est of blessings and assets. The millions, who came to America, made political unrest less dangerous, bread riots almost impossible, and caused poverty to disappear. Foreign savings banks, belonging to European governments, were made the depositories of millions and millions of dollars. Very poor communities became affluent. Cities, provinces, and states, very near bankruptcy, were saved by the magical stream of gold coming incessantly from America. People, w-ho had hardly pennies, became the proud possessors of hun- dreds and thousands of dollars. Families of peasants and workingmen, who had known nothing but rags, corn or chest- nut bread, abjection, with the money received from America became at once well-to-do, influential, arrogant; because it is one of the bad traits of the humble to become intolerable as soon as money turns his head. We know how ridiculous, ar- rogant, and contemptible are the American upstarts, who mis- take snobbism for gentlemanship, and insolence for mark of distinction. High taxes, large expenses, unproductive lives, caste prejudice, stupid vanity, love of appearances, slowly but inexorably impoverished and brought to sheriff sale many of the most conspicuous families. Large estates, palaces, where the nobles had dwelt, castles, were sold for a song, at public Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 59 auction to the sons and the daughters of old tenants, servants, and slaves. Some scions of the nobility saved their fortunes from impending wreck by marrying the rich daughters of peasants, shop-keepers, people who had acquired wealth by brigandage, smuggling, blackmail, prostitution, and espion- age. Others, more enterprising, put their titles in the matri- monial markets of foreign agencies. Yet, a few of them, stunned by the suddenness of their extreme poverty, but still proud and self-respecting, emigrated to America and else- where, in order to expiate, forget, make an honest living, where nobody knew who they had been. Once in a while, among humble laborers, you find men who have seen better times: clean, reserved, dignified, well bred, and cultured, they live like hermits, spurned by their companions, alone with their spleen and regrets, misunderstood and often humiliated by the pretentious natives, who judge men not by their moral worth, but by the size of their pocketbooks. Foreign immigrants generally crowd the sections of cities called the slums, living in poor tenements, in half dilapidated houses, without air, without light, without water, near rail- road tracks, river beds, disreputable resorts of the lowest kind. More than human dwellings, they have often the appearance of beasts' dens. People live there in obscene promiscuity. In the same room, where man and wife sleep in one bed, there are several cots for boarders. Nine or ten beds in a room are not an unfrequent occurrence. For a small monthly sum men have bed, washing, and cooking; and sometimes they share the wife with the landlord. Honor? There is no sentiment of honor for people who worship only money, no matter who they are. Sometimes, jealousy blinds them and makes them com- mit murder. Jealousy, and not honor. Women, who had a remnant of self-respect, and refused to prostitute themselves, once in a while killed ; and juries in several parts of the United States acquitted them. Make it a misdemeanor to keep board- ers the way it is done in foreign settlements, and crimes of this kind will become a thing of the past. But the picture is not complete. Filthy diseases are often spread to the whole household. People living that way are a serious danger to the health of whole communities, and often ruin, on account of their horrible superstitions, many poor children. There is a hideous superstition common to the low classes of several countries, that sexual diseases and syphilis can be easily healed by communicating them to unfortunate small girls. And the list of such heinous crimes would seem appalling to the statis- tician, if he could get it. How many people are mistaken for insane for similar practices! Even my late friend Lombroso mistook them for unfortunate victims of a revolting form of insanity. People of such low standard of morals — at times more deserving of pity than wrath — must be redeemed in spite of themselves, and interference with the work of social better- 60 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi merit and epuration, should not be tolerated, no matter where it comes from. I have visited, studied, observed, investigat- ed, seven different settlements of seven different foreign na- tionalities. It is true that I have found some of the same re- volting features among natives addicted to drink, and coming from Anglo-Saxon, Irish, and Dutch parentage and ancestry. Unicuique suum. A prominent physician, who has indulged in studies on sociology and preventive medicine, stated in a pamphlet read in a foreign medical congress that the United States had a great responsibility, because many of the for- eigners who come here in excellent health, return to their na- tive countries with tuberculosis, dying of it, and communicat- ing it to communities previously free of the scourge. The phenomenon is true, but the conclusions and the comments are erroneous. The author of the pamphlet was praised and knighted by the government of his native country, on account of the defense of his unfortunate countrymen against a nation which sacrifices in cold blood and for greed numberless lives of poor immigrants. I have an idea — and I may be, so far as preventive medicine and sociology are concerned, a little more competent than the illustrious author of the pamphlet men- tioned — that the real responsibility belongs exactly to the gov- ernment of the mother country of the immigrant who con- tracted the tuberculosis. The United States is not responsible for the health of people who have no regard for themselves. Greed, inordinate thirst for saving money, miserly habits only are responsible for the phenomenon. Many of the men, who go back with tuberculosis, in order to accumulate money for the reasons given above, saved the nine-tenths of what they made living in filthy and crowded surroundings, buying spoiled food, practising inexpensive lewdness, menacing other people's health, without being in the least danger from outside contagion. And, if taken ill or becoming entangled in criminal prosecutions, they went back to the countries of their birth poor and in broken health, it is because the medical and legal sharks of their own nationalities cleaned their pockets. Pro- fessional parasitism is simply revolting in foreign settle- ments. Fakers, who advertise extensively, are a disgrace to our country and to the system of publicity of our press, which should not accept advertising unless absolutely honest and le- gitimate. And yet, I have found that there is not a faking ad- vertisement intended to rob foreigners which has not the criminal connivance of men of the very nationalities marked for exploit. But professional ethics very often covers a multi- tude of dreadful sins. A large percentage of tuberculosis is due to syphilitic contamination. Often, pathologists, who are hunting for the bacillus of Koch, should look for the spiro- choeta pallida. The majority of foreign women, who are treated and operated for gynecological and other diseases, have been ruined by men who married because their physicians assured them they were in perfect health. Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 61 By denouncing the traitors of foreign countries, I do not spare the rascals who were born in America, and who take special delight in defiling the flag of the United States. Wild hunting after money is unfortunately a peculiar American disease ; and Dr. Waite, who expiated his crime in the electric chair, symbolized that dreadful form of insanity of which can be said : Venenum in auro bibitur. Who is the high school boy who does not remember the very familiar verse of Virgil : Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, auri sacra fames? Lust for gold induces men to stop at nothing. X. In recent years a just and merciless campaign has been waged against the menace to our peace and our future and the disgrace of our body politic — the hyphenated citizenship. Men in politics and journalists of some reputation encouraged, when it was to their advantage, the monstrosity; but now have joined in the thunder of protestation; and it is to be hoped that they are sincere. Selfish politicians are seldom sincere; they take advantage of everything, and with the same light- ness of heart and acrobatism of mind, they extol to-day what they cursed yesterday, and may find ridiculous to-morrow what seems to-day very serious and of capital interest to the country. The hyphen is certainly a great menace: this coun- try is warming in her very bosom the venomous snake which will later put in jeopardy her precious life. The unfortunate specimens of mankind described above, revolting as they are, should be pitied, because they are the victims of an order of things for which they are not and cannot be responsible. Vic- tims of the infamy of governments of thieves, and scoundrels, who robbed them of what is the common property of all men — the land — they have fatally become corrupted and corrupters. May God stop our own government in the nefarious work of perpetuating in this country the robberies of land, which have created and are creating monopolies and slavery everywhere. America has produced the new gospel of land freedom — Pro- gress and Poverty of Henry George, the prophet of our civili- zation, the man who makes complete the doctrine of democ- racy, which Thomas Jefferson enunciated; and unless the message is received and the light accepted, we may go to per- dition, in spite of the fact that we carry in our hands our sal- vation. "When starvation," said Henry George, "is the al- ternative to the use of land, then does the ownership of men involved in the ownership of land become absolute. Private ownership of land is the nether millstone. Material progress is the upper millstone. Between them, with an increasing pressure, the working classes are being ground. Historically as ethically, private property in land is robbery. It has every- 62 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi where had its birth in war and conquest, and in the selfish use which the cunning have made of superstition and law." In the American commonwealth, no form of degradation and slavery should exist; the very shadow of treachery and espionage should be destroyed. There should be no German towns. Slavish settlements, Jewish communities, little Italies, Chinatowns, or any other aggregation of people of foreign race — united in tongue, heart, nationality, and traditions — in the big and small cities of the United States. And no representa- tives of foreign governments should be permitted to rule, un- der any excuse, any of the settlements, to meddle in our affairs or to speculate, in violation of our laws, and under protection of diplomatic privileges, which constitute the most dangerous and infamous of all smugglings. A foreign representative is a guest of honor; and a guest should be a perfect gentleman, polite, respectful, discreet, jealous of his rights, and scrupulous in the performance of his duties, but, above all, absolutely in- capable of minding other people's business, or of meddling in the management of his host's house. When a guest oversteps his privileges, and becomes inquisitive, cumbersome, untact- ful, and obnoxious, he is politely invited to depart. Now, how many of the foreign representatives are accustomed to keep within the bounds of gentlemanship and honor? Have we not been offered the unmistakable proofs that Germany, in order to subjugate, without any upheaval, Brazil, the Argentine Re- public, and other South American nations, has been busy for years in colonizing them according to a system unknown to the old Romans? Had the experiment not been disturbed by the complications of the present war, they would have slowly but surely undermined the power of the United States of America, and put us in a state of political and economical slavery, with- out us suspecting it. We have been sufficiently informed of the deeds of the Germans and the Austrians. Had conditions been reversed, we would have discovered that the representa- tives of other governments we now call allies have been less desperate, but no better. After all, you cannot make a bulldog out of a pointer, or a dove out of a hawk. Foreign settlements in our midst, with their organiza- tions, business, newspapers, government officials, look like states within states — San Marino in Italy, or Andorra in Spain. Remaining the way they are, they will never become good Americans, or be in sympathy with our country, which feeds them, as the body nourishes the malignant tumor, which will in time poison and kill it. Preventive medicine shows how to avoid diseases and epidemics. Political and so- cial hygiene should show how to preserve a state from dele- terious infiltrations, corruption, and disintegration. The average man cannot jump from slavery into freedom without losing his balance. A child must be watched and guided in his first steps. What Dixon says in "The Clansman" is in part Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 63 true, and applies to every race which has not known the bless- ing of a constitutional government. Russia is to-day a very eloquent example of it. A dog, so far as he remains a dog, cannot live without a master; and a slave, if good, is almost like a dog. You cannot expect much of him, if you have not restored him to the dignity of man. Education alone, as it is believed by good men, who are working under the delusion that evening schools will solve the problem, will be of little or no avail if the immigrant is not given a man's conscience. The unfortunate creatures who come from oppressed, downtrod- den, poverty-stricken countries, blessed by the system of land spoliations mentioned, are slaves, even if slavery does not exist in the statute books of the nations they come from. Take, for instance, the poor peasants of Russia, Austria, Poland, the Balkans, Greece, Spain, Italy, and, to some extent, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Holland! Everybody knows the conditions of the largest portion of Ireland, made worse by the nefarious interference of the Church, which is obdurate in forgetting that temporal and spiritual affairs cannot blend. And this applies to all religions and to all people. England, m spite of her wonderful political freedom, is she not a curse to civilization with her lords possessing everything, even the land on which London is built, and all the population practic- ally reduced to the condition of tenants? Perhaps, of all na- tions in the world, none has more crimes to expiate than Eng- land. From William of Orange down, thefts of land on a colossal scale have been perpetrated. There is nothing more monstrous than English oligarchy. The Acts of Enclosure of Commons are the most infamous form of parliamentary rob- bery. The origin and the history of the Bank of England are a moral monstrosity. Child slavery— infamous and bloody in all European manufactories— was so terrible in England that Sir Robert Peel had to introduce his famous bill, which was partly a reparation. No justice will come out of the present war if the British Lords will not make restitution of lands, or adopt the single tax system. May the Lord open the eyes of Amer- icans, so that they will cease once and forever from creating monopolies, and keep away from the frightful system of land robbery of their British ancestors ! We condemn the material- istic conception of history of the socialists of the so-called sci- entific school, and the reader knows what we think of the moral worth of Karl Marx; but his book, "Das Kapital/' should be studied by the student of social problems. Marxism IS by no means socialism. A man can be a Marxist and a par- tisan of any form of government — republican, constitutional or autocratic. I convinced Jaures of this truth nearly thirty years ago in spite of the protests of Jules Guesde. And in an address I had the honor to deliver a dozen years ago before the iLrie Press Club, I tried to point out what real socialism is, and 1 observed that if socialism, is a just and lofty aspiration to 64 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi better human conditions, every good hearted and sound mind- ed man is a socialist, no matter whether he is a Republican like ex-President Roosevelt or a Democrat like President Wil- son. No matter what our political affiliations, if we are famil- iar with history and economics, we can subscribe to the follow- ing words of Karl Marx : "If money," according to Marie Au- gier, 'comes into the world with a congenital bloodstain on one cheek,' capital comes dripping, from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." Switzerland is in a peculiar — and yet happy — predica- ment with her three parts : French, in love with France ; Ital- ian, in spiritual communion with Italy; and German, in sym- pathy with Germany, so much in sympathy with her that she has been helping the kaiser from the first day of the war, and keeps in Zurich, Basel, and Berne a regular general staff of followers of Stieber. France is the only country in Europe where the peasants and the workingmen are not entirely de- pendents ; and the magnificent heroism of her soldiers, and the sublime patriotism of her civil population — women, old folks, youngsters — show that she is one of the very few countries in the world with a civic and national conscience. Her traitors are the exception and not the rule — mostly socialists like Cail- laux — and when apprehended and convicted, she does not play with them, giving light sentences and pleasant promenades to Atlanta, Georgia, like America, but she delivers them to a fir- ing squad. No pity for the cobra-de-capello. If France would cease once and forever to be an aristocratic republic, and be really a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, what a glory to her, what a pride to mankind ! A republic with princes, dukes, and earls, intermingled with socialists, Orleansists, and Bonapartists, no matter how glori- ous and lofty, seems an absurdity. The cross of the Legion of Honor ought to be enough. It is the only decoration and the only nobility of which any man of principles and honor can be proud. It has been said already that the unfortunate men men- tioned above were slaves in fact, if not in name, in the coun- tries they came from. In order to buy their tickets to Amer- ica, they had to borrow money from vile speculators — the most vulgar types of uncircumcised Shylocks — who go to mass every morning, carry a rosary in their pockets, and cross themselves if they hear a profane word : in spite of the law, they charge interest at the rate of from two to five hundred per cent. So far as Italy is concerned, I have documents in my posses- sion. This is not an exaggeration. And they have to pay a fat tax on emigration to the government, too. Is there any surprise if they come here only to make money, in order to go back, and become in their turn oppres- sors? And they play into the hands of their governments in the hope that upon their return they will be treated with Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 65 marks of respect. Their resentment, hatred, accursed greed for gold, made of them the miserable human rags we see in the crowded boarding houses, in the tenements, in the foreign settlements of big and small cities. Their servile minds and hearts put them at the mercy of adventurers and wretches, who are mistaken by the superficial American observer for leaders. Moral lepers cannot lead in anything but cowardly criminality. While the poor creatures occasionally are caught and pay the penalty, they harvest the ripe and luscious fruits of white slavery, burglary, blackmail, counterfeiting, gamb- ling, conspiracies, plotting, spying. I know of an owner of a little jewelry store, which does not give him twenty dol- lars a week at the best, who has saved in less than two years seventeen thousand dollars in cold cash. Somebody, who is in a position to know, tells me that a man from Canada brings him every week large quantities of silver dust, for which he pays little and sells to a big Buffalo firm, realizing large pro- fits. A certain business man came a few years ago from Italy, starving and in rags. He has made a fortune. I knov/ that he is not only the confidential agent of counterfeiters and black banders, in whose interest he has enlisted the services of certain misfit representatives of the law; but he has been and is a notorious scamp in the service of the German spy sys- tem. His chief occupation has been that of plotting against the men who have spent noble and useful lives, preaching the gospel of freedom. And yet, men like these are very popular among the great and boisterous patriots, who worship no other flag than the American banknote. I have a list of them, properly indexed, for future reference. For patriotic reasons of the highest order, I have warned men in responsible posi- tions to keep away from them: but I have been looked upon as a crank. My insanity is my love for America, my firm and radiant belief in the wonderful mission of the United States in the history of the world. I sincerely love the poor creatures I am describing as they are. I have been among them, divid- ing with them my bread, and trying to show them the right path to follow. But the masses are often carried astray by false gods. If I desire with all my heart to see them good, in- telligent, bona fide citizens of this country, it is for their own welfare. This is the land promised by God : why should peo- ple try to go back into bondage and affliction? Somebody has suggested to me that people coming from other nations cannot live forever. Their children, being most- ly born in America, will be — he insists — good citizens. And this is a delusion and a blunder, a calamitous delusion, and the worst of all blunders. American schools — no matter what the pretenses of American educators — exercise the mind and develop the body; but unfortunately are no builders of char- acter. Children become very efficient in mental arithmetic, enjoy calisthenics, and learn to play football and basket-ball. 66 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi But they are not taught discipline, politeness, kindness, regard for others, respect for older people. In order to build charac- ter, the primary school and home must proceed hand in hand. No teacher — no matter how good and well-meaning and pains- taking — can accomplish much in this direction, if his or her efforts are not encouraged by a hearty cooperation of parents, and especially of mothers, who are the first and most useful builders of character. The first impressions are never for- gotten. My modest, but careful, impartial, and persistent ob- servations, have shown with mathematical certainty that the children of the immigrants mentioned seldom become useful citizens; with very few exceptions, they add to the vices of their parents, and of their environment, the vices of the na- tives of the country. The good qualities of both do not seem to impress them at all. A blending of stupendous vices, they grow into lives of mere bestiality, when they do not become a menace to society, and the object of public charge. The gun- ners, who left their exuberant youth in the electric chair for the murder of Rosenthal, the gambler, were an illustration of the children of foreign settlements ; and the law, instead of punishing itself, because it had been incapable of preventing their crimes, executed them. Schools, as they are conducted, do not improve things. The children of the Russians, the Germans, the Italians, the Hebrews, the Austrians, the Polish, the Greeks, etc., unless their parents are people of refinement or naturally and excep- tionally virtuous, become monstrous blendings of the bad traits of the different races among which they grow. I have observed, in a certain section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, inhabited mostly by Hebrews and Italians, Hebrew children with the worst characteristics of the Italian slums, and Italian children with the worst traits of the Jewish rabble. When, referring to a boy of a foreign settlement who has made good, news- papers and educators extol the race they came from and the environments where they grew, they utter one of the most typical conventional lies so genially illustrated by Max Nordau. The entrance of the United States into the war has proved the truth of my contention. Make careful researches in the settlements typically German. You find that the ones who have more bitterly denounced the American government and the more enthusiastically upheld the kaiser and his allies are not the old German residents, but their children, mostly born and grown up in the United States. I have investigated and studied the phenomenon directly, persistently, and patiently. Pointing out facts of this nature, I have not the slightest inten- tion to denounce, belittle, or offend anybody: my only aim is to show the right path out of wilderness and danger. First of all, no foreign settlements should be allowed ; second, the im- migrants should be rescued in spite of themselves; third, the Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 67 work of Americanization should be carefully planned and sys- tematically and skilfully carried out by men of great experi- ence and knowledge, who are, more than schoolmasters, psy- chologists, sociologists, philanthropists, absolutely familiar with the needs, the conditions, and the peculiarities of the races they have to reach. Incompetent men, ward heelers, unprincipled speculators of patriotism, ignoramuses full of false pretenses, do often irremediable harm. The late Jacob Riis, one of the purest souls God ever created, often, on his way to the New York Evening Sun, stopped to see me at the editorial rooms of "II Progresso Halo- Americano ," to talk over some of the splendid things he intended to do among the people of the settlements. Once I said to him that the most important and useful work would have been the destruction of the slums and the abolishment of the settlements, a real "sventramento," as they used to say in my native Naples. Richard Harding Davis, who happened to hear my remark, said that I was the most radical of all anarchists. And the nickname stuck for some time, and was perhaps the origin of a famous and very inaccurate article in the New York Herald, where I was described as the pontiff of anarchism. I was at the time sec- retary of "Federation of Thought and Action," which was working incessantly for an Italian Republic, and for a Repub- lican Federation of European States. As my colleagues in the stupendous task, the New York Herald was kind enough to give me, among others, Alexander Berkman, whom I had never seen, and Emma Goldman, who was once introduced to me by a New York civil engineer, Signor Caggiano. I kneeled before the pictures of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Henry George, Mazzini, and Garibaldi, asking of them if they had ever heard of myself betraying their immortal teachings. Every immigrant should be granted a temporary permit of residence, as it is customary in Switzerland, where laborers go during certain seasons to return to their homes as soon as their work is done. The ones who intend to settle in the coun- try and express an intention to become citizens, should be by the government judiciously and fatherly distributed in the various agricultural and industrial centers. I do not like to be misunderstood. I had and have no sympathy for the alien and sedition laws, which were adopted in America during the presidency of John Adams. Jeffersonian Republicanism, as typified by Abraham Lincoln, should be restored as the perma- nent policy of the country, and as a model to all nations lean- ing toward democracy. Give a family of peasants an extension of good, tillable land, irrigated, fertile, attractive ; make them cultivate it ; ex- tend them the blessings of appropriate rural schools ; free them from the parasitism and crookedness of their countrymen; give them the benefit of rural credit, so useful and wonderful in results in farming centers ; be their friends instead of their 68 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi aggravators ; and you will make of them good neighbors, good citizens, and good Americans. Doing so, you will build up the character of their children, who will be the citizens of to-mor- row ; and awake in their hearts the love for the farm, deserted and even cursed, on account of the exactions, aggravations, spoliations of fiscality, which seems to begin to Russianize even the free soil of America. Legislators, who are paying more attention to industrial than to rural centers, are blindly pre- paring the ruin of the country ! The greatness of a nation de- pends more on the austere virtue of the farmer than on the brilliant frivolity of the city dweller. Culture and agriculture are the pillars of a sound state. Rome prospered beyond the fondest hopes of her citizens, and produced Cincinnatus, while she remained a community of farmers. When she was lured by the artificial life and magnificently empty splendor of decadent Greek civilization and perversion, her ruin started. Julius Caesar paved the way for Romulus Augustulus. How true is the observation of Horace that enslaved Greece con- quered Rome! Semiramis and Cleopatra survived their and their country's ruin. Aspasia and Phryne, from prostrated Greece, passed into Rome. Lewdness and greed, which de- stroyed Hebrew civilization, will destroy any nation, no matter how powerful, if not banished. You may find sporadic vice in farming communities. Per- version is the rule in cities. New York is almost on the same level with Vienna — the most corrupted city in the world — Ber- lin, Petrograd, Brussels, London, and Paris, before the war. France has been purified since the war gave her such a bath of red blood of heroes. Sodom and Gomorrah have disap- peared. Sappho has returned to Greece. De Sade and Masoch have gone to Austria. Joan of Are is the pride of the country. Farms in many of the European countries have become a burden to the tillers of the soil. Taxations, government spoliations of all kinds, usury, calamities, poor years, have disgusted the farmers, who have emigrated to the cities or to foreign lands, in quest of better returns and more human treatment. What has happened in other countries will hap- pen to America, if our blind politicians do not open their eyes, and come to better counsel. In many farming communities the exodus has started already. Unless you make the soil at- tractive and productive and farming prosperous, famine and moral decay will be the result. By diverting foreign immigration to farms, you will ben- efit immensely the immigrant, and render a great service to the country. But you cannot do it, unless you use wisdom, and you have the courage, the determination and the patriotism to destroy the infamous monopolies, which are dishonoring the commonwealth. The system of lordism without coronets should come to an end. No man should be allowed to own more than a moderate extension of land. And all land which Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 69 is not improved and is kept just for parasitical speculation should be expropriated without any regard and without com- pensation. Remember the deep philosophy of the parable of Jesus, and of the punishment of the servant, who buried the money, and left it unproductive. All immense tracts of land, acquired for little or nothing, or obtained through robbery encouraged by political looseness and corruption, should be unmercifully expropriated, and given to the willing and to the industrious. Single tax will be the great remedy. By adopt- ing single tax — which must be modified in industrial and com- mercial centers in order to properly solve new problems which escaped the great mind of Henry George — the legislator will secure a great and glorious era of farming prosperity. Unless big industrial and commercial enterprises are nation- alized they must pay a convenient and proportionate share of government expenses in taxation, without enslaving the wage earners, or they will become worse monopolies than they have been and that the large and unscrupulous profits of war have a natural tendency to make. In a free, modern, progres- sive country, no man should be allowed to concentrate in his hands too much wealth and too much power. Accumulation of wealth in a few hands is worse than czarism. Big inter- ests are as dangerous to the security of nations as Prussian militarism and British control of the seas are to the peace of mankind. Socialism, as it is generally understood, is far from our minds, because we do not like to see civil life transformed into a machine, and we absolutely agree with many of the ar- guments of Yves Guyot used in his old but golden book, "So- cialistic Tyranny." One of the most disheartening spectacles in history is the communism of Sparta. Individualism, prop- erly understood and developed, shorn of selfishness and spurred by noble ambitions and emulations, is a blessing to mankind, because it is the motive power of progress. When man becomes an automaton, life will be no more worth living. Heart's bravery, which gives so magnificent examples to ad- mire and emulate, disappears. And heart's bravery does not reason, does not waver, but goes straight, blindly, as swiftly as lightning, where the cry of the dying comes from. Indi- vidualism has moved the generous people of the United States to send immediate help to communities visited by public ca- lamities. Collectivism has made Russia the horrible Bolsheviki marsh it is now. Individualism had sent our relief to Belgium and Serbia and ambulances and nurses and physicians galore to bleeding Europe long before we had any idea Teutonic in- famy would compel our peaceful nation to enter the war. While the rural immigrant must be directed to the farms, the industrial part of immigration should be distributed ju- diciously among manufacturing centers. The blind, selfish, and often ignorant exponents of a certain kind of organized labor — who are responsible for many blunders in immigration 70 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi legislation, like the stupid Burnett law — do not seem to real- ize that the unmerciful competition does not come from skilled labor, but from peasant invasion of factories and industrial plants. With the prevailing American industrial system, a man, who has only been familiar with pick, shovel, spade, fork, and plow, can become a machine operator in a very short time. Only a slow, intelligent, and persistent process of assimi- lation can make of the average foreign immigrant a good, faithful, useful citizen. Some of the most typical American families were, only one or two generations ago, British, Ger- man, Italian, Swede, French, Russian, or Austrian. But they went upon their arrival to live in strictly American communi- ties, where they acquired the habits, the manners, the tastes, the ways of thinking of the new environment. Many inter- married with Americans. Would you imagine that such a splendid example of American womanhood, Ida M. Tarbell, comes from Italian stock? Her ancestors were Italian, and settled on a farm in Erie County, and among their new rela- tions are people by name of McCullough. Tarabelli was their original name. I could mention names galore. The process of assimilation is an easy one, if properly understood and applied. Theodore Roosevelt, the greatest living exponent of Americanism, the man who symbolizes the race and its achievements, comes from genuine and typical Dutch and Ger- man ancestry, thoroughly Americanized. But General Sigel remained German, in spite of his gallant participation in the Civil War, as Italian through and through remained till he breathed his last that other famous Civil War veteran. General Luigi Palma di Cesnola, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. William Waldorf Astor, in spite of the immense obligations his ancestors owed to the United States, had in his blood a pronounced dislike for America and Amer- icanism, which had been very often shown by other members of his family, especially a departed lady, who introduced into a certain artificial set the exaggerated exclusivism of British nobility and the strange snobbism of the upstart. In years gone by, when I had time to indulge in studies on American society, I had many moments of real merriment at the expense of some of the so-called four hundred, and some of the people who had been entertained at Newport, and who had come from Europe on matrimonial expeditions, were among the more active in caricaturing them. Richard Croker, the former czar of Tammany Hall, remained Irish to the core, as British remained, in spite of the vastness of the fortune acquired in the United States, Andrew Carnegie. Why? Because they lived, no matter how active their participation in American life, as strangers among strangers. If assimilation is impossible in countries governed by tyrannical monarchies and empires, it is easy in free nations. Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 71 I don't know of better Britishers than the Rossettis of Eng- land. French, Germans, and Italians live happily together in Switzerland. Malta has been easily assimilated by the British government. Nice, Savoy, Corsica have cheerfully become French. But Alsace-Lorraine has never been satisfied under German rule, and the Italians of Trento, Trieste, Istria, Dal- mazia, will never rest while they remain uhder Austrian rule. Races and nationalities can be blended and transformed in America, because the pursuit of happiness is a task common to all in our country. But, of course, no assimilation is pos- sible, when the nuisance of foreign settlements is maintained. Take the Hebrews. Those among them who live scattered, away from their typical settlements, have become sincerely American, and no restoration of the Jewish nation in Pales- tine could induce them to leave the United States. The mis- sionary and prophetic activities of that modern Moses of Zion- ism, the late Theodore Herzl, author of "Der Judenstaat," will never impress or attract them. But those who remain in their own typical settlements, and speak, pray, and think in their own language, will never become good Americans, no matter how many representatives they may be able to send to city halls, county courts, legislatures, and Congress. Even a lofty man, like Judge Brandeis, becomes unconsciously par- tial, when he has to decide about that typical pair of anar- chistic disturbers, Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, who are Hebrews and Russians. Of all influences, which keep foreign to our institutions even naturalized inhabitants of foreign settlements, and make of them,, if the occasion arises, alien enemies, the Church is not the least ; the Church naturally which holds services in the language of the particular communities. Strange as it may seem to the simple minded American reader, foreign govern- ments consider churches, where the teaching and the preach- ing is done in their own languages, as a part of their "sphere of influence," which in diplomatic parlance means nationalistic propaganda, control, and benevolent, but not less dangerous, espionage. Everybody knows that missionaries were always employed by governments to prepare the way for peaceful or violent invasion of other people's lands. But how many know that foreign governments give financial help to churches, in order to maintain schools and services in their own languages ? And yet, priests and ministers of religion, who more persist- ently carry on this work of undermining our institutions, are loved, welcomed, honored by selfish politicians and blind public officials. Men should not be kept down on account of race or color ; but race or color should not entitle anybody to special treat- ment and privileges. Let all cults and schools and meetings employ the language of the country. A common language is the foundation of nationality. Quebec will never be an in- 72 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi tegral part of Canada while language and traditions keep alive the old conflict between French and British habits, interests, longings, and incompatibilities. Assimilation of the different races and peoples, which form the American Commonwealth, is a necessity, if our country has to live, lead the world, and shine in a firmament of glory. The conflicting nationalities must be blended in a very harmonious body, social and politic, which will be our own blessing, and the admiration and in- spiration of mankind. Education is necessary. Schools are indispensable. But education and schools will make things worse, if character is not properly built. A criminal, able to read and write, is much more dangerous than an illiterate one. The criminal of finished education is the most dangerous crea- ture in God's world. An illiterate Stieber would have been useless to Pangermanism and its prophets, Friedrich Wilhelm and Bismarck. Hindenburg, Mackensen, Ludendorf, Von Tir- pitz, Conrad, Enver Bey are brigands of education and refine- ment. If Pancho Villa had received half of their education and opportunities, he would have conquered the world. But I real- ize that by having called them brigands, I have offended the memory of Fra Diavolo. I apologize. Take good care of the immigrants. They may carry in their bosom the best hopes of the country. The most unfor- tunate of them all can become the father of a future President. Mr. Nannetti, son of Italian immigrants, was one of the best lord mayors the city of Dublin ever had. Benjamin Disraeli, the famous British statesman, vv^as the son of Venetian Jews, who would never had dreamed that their child was going to be Lord Beaconsfield. Signor Pellegrini, former president of the Argentine Republic, was the son of a poor Italian cobbler. The ancestry of the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and many of the foremost American families, was extremely humble. The New York City Directory for 1786 shows that Oliver Vander- fcilt had a shoe repairing shop at No. 4 Water Street, and that John Jacob Astor kept a second hand store close by. Who were the parents of Abraham Lincoln? By solving properly the problem of immigration, and by creating a citizenship loyal, honest, patriotic, unselfish, we only insure the success of our mission in the world. XI. Some of the men, who have become all of a sudden patri- otic for business reasons, were and perhaps still are members of the German-American Alliance, of the Patriotic League of America, another German organization formed to oppose Theodore Roosevelt and to prevent the re-election of President Wilson, and a purely advertising association, pompously styled "Foreign Newspaper Association." Recent disclosures have more than proved the truth of assertions I have been making for the last three years ; and are more than a vindication for the attitude I took in the la.st national campaign. I am out of Gigliotti — Co7' Mundi 73 politics now, and if I shall live, I may never enter it again. Will the lesson teach anything to politicians? Will they be fooled again by the enemies of the country ? Many of them are in perfect good faith ; and their only fault is that in their craving for victory at any cost, they become extremely gullible, and take for granted the claims of any devotee of that model of candor, sincerity, and unselfishness — Stieber. The revelations of the president of the Toledo Chamber of Commerce are a matter of old knowledge to me, as old knowledge are the truths I have revealed in the preceding pages. Not all truth can be proved in America, where a legislation, strange and often con- trary to reason, calls evidence what is stupendously deceitful, and rejects as non-admissible induction facts, which leap from the sifting of the most stringent logic, as virgin mountain streams spring from rocks. And for this reason, unworthy of the most specious cavils of the lowest sophistries, men caught with the goods are sent for short periods to the penitentiary for the capital crime of espionage, and people only guilty of differing in minor details from the war lords of the country, and even of not believing them equal to the task of leading the country to a successful termination of the conflict, are brand- ed as enemies. The fact remains that all foreign nationalistic organiza- tions — no matter what the nationality, the language, the pre- text, and the specious claims — are antagonistic to the best in- terests of the United States, and even a menace to its future. Not only the hyphen should be suppressed, but everything w^hich makes it possible. Patriotism is a farce and a hypoc- risy, if it is not deeply rooted in the heart. People who believe that material welfare alone makes the country, are worse than foreign spies: that Latin motto: Uhi bene, ibi patria — where it is well with me, there is my country — gives me the chills. It is the argument of venality, chicanery, and moral perversion. It makes people display the flag, sing the songs of the father- land, and sell her to the enemy. It induces merchants to deco- rate their stores, and hang on their doors signs and mottoes of the foremost patriotic effusion, and rob the soldiers who are on their way to sacrifice their blooming youth on the altar of the country. Immense is my faith in the cause of freedom. But freedom is a power for good and not for evil. Hospitality does not mean the permission to the guest to dishonor, rob, and poison us. Brigandage is a crime, and to allow foreigners to come here to practice brigandage in our cities means on the part of our legislative and judicial authorities to be abettors, "particeps criminis." The state has a right to protect itself. No foreign paper should be permitted to circulate, through the mails or in any other way, unless a special permit has been granted by the proper authorities for highly commendable and patriotic rea- sons. Ten anarchistic newspapers will not do as much harm 74 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi as a publication with Americanism on the lips and treason in the heart. Honest criticism is always a blessing. Flattery is never sincere. Smoothness and treachery walk always hand in hand : a psychologist who knew his business rightly remarked that a woman is never so affectionate and full of attentions to her husband as when she is planning to deceive him. No charter should be granted to foreign organizations, and all given already should be repealed. Constitutions and by-laws should be in English, and all business should be trans- acted in the language of the country. Protests from politicians and naturalized citizens against any action of the kind should be considered as high treason, and as such punished. Legal advice to the poor should be given by lawyers of the highest merit and integrity employed by the government ; and private labor agents should be forbidden by state and federal laws. The government should maintain everywhere labor agencies and employment bureaus free, scrupulous, fair to the wage earner, and absolutely divorced from politics. No interfer- ence of foreign representatives, foreign agitators, or ministers of religion should be tolerated. Interest of foreign representatives in laborers' misfortunes is very often as selfish as it is dishonest. Consular agents of foreign countries have made a business to grow rich on the misfortunes of their countrymen, and the biggest share of what should have gone to the families of those who lost their lives in labor tragedies, went to unscrupulous lawyers, to dis- honest and ignorant interpreters and meddlers, and to the sharks who were appointed by their government to carry on such a deceitful, rapacious, and bloodstained task. The gov- ernment alone, through its competent special representatives, free of prejudices and full of human sympathy, should look after the interests of the victims of accidents. It is true that they may be sometimes influenced by politics, or turned from the right path by graft. But how many times foreign repre- sentatives have sold the rights of the unfortunates they were supposed to protect to unscrupulous contractors and inhuman corporations? An inquest conducted by the government without fear and favor, would give surprising results. All private and parochial schools, where other languages than English are the channel of conveying instruction, must be suppressed. They are at freedom to teach their own language, as schools and colleges are free to teach any language and any branch of human knowledge; but only as a part of the curri- culum, and not as its scope. Preaching in foreign languages should not be tolerated. Only by special permission it could be allowed in cases urgent, advisable, and considered opportune and favorable to our ideal by the government, state and national. We must invite co- operation, but should absolutely prevent conspiracy. The Lib- Gigliotti — Coi' Mundi 75 erty League buttons of the Teuton agents cannot deceive the lover of America and Americanism. We despise both Catilina and Julius Caesar. The reason why this country is drifting fast toward the prohibition vagary is not because the people have all of a sudden become opposed to beer, wine or whiskey, but because the interference of liquor dealers in politics has become disgusting and unbearable. The chief debauchers of the foreign element, the most dangerous allies of Stieber, are people engaged in the manufacturing and dispensing of intoxi- cants, who have delighted us with strange hyphenated alliances, liberty leagues, and ignorant, unscrupulous, and cunning in- dividuals sent to city, state, and national oifices to make and unmake laws for their own benefit. Somebody will observe that in this appeal, I am denying the very principles of liberty, which have been the ideal of my life, and which have made me misunderstood, persecuted, and unhappy, all over the world. If liberty is anarchy, they are right; but if liberty is order, justice, and brotherhood, they are deadly wrong. I am against coercion in any form. But the coercion of the mob is often much more violent than that of the minorities, guided by reason and constrained by system; and I perform a duty in advising my countrymen to keep their eyes open and to prevent surprises, which might be a serious menace to the future of America and civilization. One ounce of prevention, say the common people, is worth a pound of cure. People, who, in their quest for freedom, go into extremes are always wrong. Truth and justice are never found in extremes. In Medio Virtus. You will not in the name of freedom let peo- ple commit arson, rape, murder, or even suicide; neither will you allow the patient of a contagious disease to go free and scatter infection all around. Foreign settlements, which I have truly representated, are a hot-bed of contamination. We have pestilence enough among the natives, which requires the un- usual efforts of experts in preventive social medicine, to wish any more. Unless we are disposed to attend to a prodigious and colossal work of social hygiene, we will be compelled, later on, to depend only on the aid of extreme surgery, which kills many more than it cures. Justice and revenge are mortal en- emies ; and yet we see continually justice taking her delight in revenge. The criminal is often the victim of bodily or social disease, which should make of him the subject of pity rather than of harsh punishment. It is the duty of the legislator to be the real doctor of social disease. And it iS exactly a social disease which I have examined in these pages ! The extreme materialism, to which our glorious country has been sacrificing for many years, deviating from the right path indicated by the signers of the Declaration of Independ- ence, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, the thousands who sacrificed their lives in the Civil War so 76 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi that the country could live, had made of the United States a kind of shrine to the god of gold. But the war has awakened the dormant virtues, and a rejuvenated America, strong, good, trusting God and her mission in the world, will wave to man- kind the flag of real freedom, of true democracy, which means the crumbling of sectarianism, divisions, and oppression, and the establishment of the radiant kingdom of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. XII. When the present war broke out superficial observers thought little of it. They had an idea that in a few months everything would be over. Whether Germany or France was going to be victorious, it was of little concern to the most. Teutonic propaganda had so poisoned the minds of most of the Americans that they publicly, insistently, and forcefully expressed the hope to see Germany and Austria ruling Europe. Even in public schools some American teachers were not ashamed to champion the cause of Teutonism. Newspapers, magazines, colleges, had been influenced to a very large ex- tent by German propaganda. The interchange of professors had helped Germany considerably. Many universities had been so deeply transformed and influenced that they were un- able to think except in German; and I refer to the leading ones. Publishing houses, in giving out collections of the best thought and literature in the world, had favored principally Germany and almost completely set aside Latin thought and literature, from which the best the Teutons possess has been ransacked. Bacon is worth all the German philosophy, and there is nothing in German literature, ancient or modern, de- spite the wild claims of the clumsy Grimm, which can even distantly compare with Dante and Shakespeare. You see that I have refrained from mentioning Latin models, in order to show to Alfred Harmsworth that his own country, which he and his countrymen did not fully appreciate till the supreme trial and test came, in spite of the accusations of utilitarian- ism by the Teutons, had been far ahead of Germany in the cen- turies. I was reading, a few days ago, certain books of a Chicago professor of criticism, a strange criticism, without broadness, without insight, without deepness, without knowledge of the people he was judging and of the times in which they lived. He forgot to add to the titles of his books, "Made in Germany." In judging Rome, he followed the jealous comments origin- ated in Germany, distrustful of everything and everybody not German. Caesar was one of the few men of antiquity who im- pressed and conquered the German mind, because Caesar is the hero after German conception. The professor from Chi- cago, of course, in order to show that he had some originality. Gigliotti — Coi' Mundi 77 said the most amusing things against Caesar, hypocritically commenting that, after all, there was some excuse for Caesar, because he lived in a pagan world, and Christianity had not been born yet. Right, professor, right. Germans and their allies are so civilized now because they are following the teachings of Jesus! Haeckel, the enemy of all religions and the author of scientific material plundered from Darwin, could not reason any better! How many enemies have I made only because I warned my American friends, as I had warned my Italian and French brothers, about the dangerous path they 'were following! It is true that at the time I came to America, being much younger, I was more radical ; and in my missionary work I put more fire than charity; as it is true that, having been all my life an outspoken advocate of fair play and sincerity, I hurt many, because I called and do call things by their own names, and if words sometimes do not ex- press entirely my ideas, it is only because my limited knowl- edge of English prevents me from using the very expressions which would faithfully photograph my thought and its pecu- liar shadings. When the war broke out — I was saying — the superficial observers thought very little of it. But everybody with a sufficient knowledge of history, of modern means of de- struction, of mad militaristic preparations, of growing social unrest, of economic conditions, of the uncontrollable greed of that trinity of evil — Germany, England, and Japan — of a Teutonic net of intrigue and espionage, which was becom- ing for mankind more unbearable than the mythological gar- ment of Nessus, of problems of nationality, which, in spite of the powerful narcotics of 1848 and following years, did not ebb away in slumber and had been menacingly awaking, every- one of them knew it had to come fatally as the day of judg- ment. People, who were working under the delusion that the frightful discoveries of appalling means of destruction would make future wars impossible, forgot the warning of Bacon, justly called to mind by Jean Bloch: "In the vanity of the world a greater field of action is opened for folly than for rea- son, and frivolity always enjoys more influence than judg- ment." John Bloch, a poor Polish Jew, became enormously rich building Russian railroads; and in the last years of his life spent his time and a great amount of money, studying conditions and possibilities of modern warfare. From 1890 to 1898 he gathered in six volumes the fruit of his observations, meditations, conclusions, which were published by Ginn and Company of Boston, under the title "The Future War." Mr. Bloch died in 1902, and has not lived to see the fallacy of his views that, on account of the new, povv^erful means of destruc- tion, future wars, which would mean the destruction of all armies — of invasion and defense — would be a physical impos- sibility. But he was perhaps right when he claimed that a 78 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi European conflagration would end in a draw. In the times of Mr. Bloch nobody had yet an idea that wars could be fought from the sky and from the bottom of the sea. The modern submarine and the flying machine were a matter of conjecture and experiment. The first man who pointed out to the unsus- pecting Britishers the dangers of a submarine warfare was not Mr. Wells, as many people who insist on making a prophet of the great English novelist are stating, but Dr. A. Conan Doyle, whose articles, which I read in Collier's Weekly a little while before the war was declared, created a deep impression on me. That the war will end in a draw is the opinion of many clear-minded and foresighted students of human occurrences. In my humble capacity, delivering in October, 1890, a po- litical speech to a constituency assembled in the Tempio di Serapide at Pozzuoli, Naples, I foresaw the terrible conflagra- tion. At the hospitable house of a Pozzuoli antiquarian and archeologist — Abbate Criscio, a Catholic priest — I was arguing about the future of wars and mankind with the German his- torian, Theodore Mommsen. Both Professor Mommsen and Reverend Criscio were amused at my observations that a great, appalling war would fatally come, which would inexor- ably make a far country — the United States of America — the guardian of democracy and civilization. Some time later. Professor Mommsen, speaking of me with Reverend Criscio, called me in a jocular way "the American prophet ;" and the man who gave me the information was Signor Pollio, a Poz- zuoli gentleman of high standing, whose sons had been my college chums, and who was the owner of a magnificent bed of Fusaro oysters — the most delicious in the world — and of lands very rich in Roman antiquities. When the observation was made, I was far away, in Russia. In spite of the suspicion that an immense European conflagration, which has become the world's war, would end in a draw, I kept inciting the Ital- ians against the Austrians all my life. National aspirations, family blood spilt for the cause, Austrian and German op- pression of centuries, Garibaldian aflfiliations, knowledge of history, made of me one of the most ardent missionaries of Irredentism. And my sincere Americanism strengthens my conviction that the worst blunder of President Wilson would be even a distant encouragement to leave Austria as she is. No status quo in a country which is not united by ties of na- tionality, mutual respect, love, common aspirations, spiritual unity. Austria is not a nation : she is a gilded shop of nation- alities, languages, tendencies, civilizations, opposite, conflict- ing, unmixable, which may perhaps become good neighbors, but can never dwell under the same roof. I dream a huge vic- tory. I wish it. I want it. But, so far as the United States is concerned, the ending of the war in a draw will be a ruin only in appearance. All European nations will find them- selves in such a state of poverty, abjection, collapse, that Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 79 whether willing or not they have to come to their senses, and grant gladly what they were refusing in the madness of devas- tation and carnage. Germany has to restore Belgium, to give back Alsace-Lorraine to heroic France, to relinquish Poland, to say good-bye to imperial dreams. Serbia will be restored. Italy will have Trento, Trieste, Pola, Fiume, and rule supreme in the Adriatic. Bulgaria will cease to be a nation of vultures. Austria and Turkey shall disappear from the geographic map. The Balkans shall be readjusted in conformity with justice, and not to suit selfish Britain or infamous Germany. We all hope and wish that the termination of the war will be determined by a decisive victory of the allies ; and no effort should be spared to reach such a glorious end. Our magnifi- cent national administration will add new achievements to the wonders already accomplished. But a decisive victory over the Central Empires can be anticipated and expected only if the allies will once and forever understand the necessity of unity of purpose and of command. All fronts should obey the orders of one master mind. Italy was the key to a final, decis- ive, crushing, obstreperous victory. Napoleon knew his busi- ness more than all of his modern imitators combined. And he admonished that Berlin should be reached through Vienna. Ca- dorna was accomplishing wonders. The unexpected happened not only through treason, and Bolsheviki, pacifist, and religious propaganda, but principally through want of war material, and through lack of understanding and cooperation of the allies. I have been tempted to use the word "jealousy." With the unity of command the disaster would have been impossible. Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia was the best allied general, with Foch of France a close second. Now that through the Russian revolt and mess Nicholas has been eliminated forever, would the allies come to their senses, the supreme command should be given to General Ferdinand Foch, whom Marshal Joffre rightly called the greatest strategist in Europe. But be as it may, the United States of America will be anyhow the moral and material winner of the conflict. Should the war end in a draw, America would become the dominant factor, politic and economic, in the world, as sure as day will follow night. We are far from the theatre of the frightful conflict, where thousands of volcanoes seem to spread ruin and death all around. Our territory will be spared. Our indus- trial and agricultural activities will continue, and need will improve them wonderfully. The merchant marine, which is one of the most impellent needs of this country, will have be- come a reality, a national pride, a source of blessing to Amer- ica. Our increased and improved productiveness will supply our wants and help other countries. I say help other coun- tries, and not conquer other markets, because our mission will not be that of commercial expansion, but of bringing to every country in the world the blessings of democracy. 80 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi The greatest ascendancy of the United States of America in the affairs of the world should not be mercenary. We have everything we need. We must not be anxious for wealth ; first, because we have everything we want; second, because happi- ness and glory do not come from mountains of gold, but from broadness of mind and stoutness of heart. Monarchies and empires are despicable. But a republic of merchants, who think only of wealth and power, will be as unjust, tyrannical, and undemocratic as the Republic of San Marco (Venice), which was the worst negation of justice and freedom in the history of the Italians. But we must demand that the peace of the world be for- ever assured, recognizing the principle of nationality, which is one of the first fundamentals of civilization, eliminating obsolete forms of government, which, depending on large armies and navies, will be the impending sword of Damocles on peaceful countries, securing the blessings of democracy to all nations. Even a democratic republic would be a blessing to England — the England of the people and not of the lords — no matter what the laudatores temporis acti will say. If the monarchies of England, Italy, Belgium, and Spain are prac- tically free democracies, and if the republic of Venice was a kind of aristocratic oligarchy, where the will of the people was absolutely unknown, the fact remains that kings if decorative are a useless and very expensive luxury, and if invested with power they are a constant menace. The House of Lords in England and the Senate in Italy are a prerogative and a de- fense of the crown, an institution, in other words, radically op- posed to every principle of democracy. When the king is com- mander-in-chief of the army and navy, has the power to de- clare war and to conclude treaties, can dissolve parliament, if the laws enacted displease him, when his person is sacred and inviolable, who is the fool who has the nerve to make a com- parison between republics and monarchies, and declare em- phatically that the only difference is in the name? We call real republics only those democracies which are masters of their destinies, and make and unmake their own governments, from president down. It is true that we, citizens of the United States,' have too much respect for the will and freedom of other peoples, and we have no desire to dictate to them what kind of government they should have. But as missionaries of real democracy, we have a right to express our wishes and our views. Washington has to become the New Rome, not the New Rome dreamt by the two German gentlemen I have awakened from the long silence of the grave, but the real holy city, gov- erned by the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. With the teachings of Thomas Jefferson and with Pro- gress and Pover'ty of Henry George, we can correct our politi- cal and economical mistakes. In order to teach freedom to Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 81 other people, we should free ourselves. Duties of Men, by Giuseppe Mazzini, should be the civil catechism of the genera- tions. Rome of old, situated in the center of the world of yore, was its natural head. Roma, Caput Mundi. She converted the world into a huge suburb of the metropolis, centralizing, controlling, keeping in absolute subjection to the national sys- tem. She had no heart, no human sympathy, no mercy to the servants, the enemies, the rebels; and governed only with head and arm, the law and the legions. Noblemen and ple- bians, masters and slaves, Romans and Barbarians. Art, lit- erature, and science, were in their beginning, and remained for a very long time the occupations of the low, the oppressed, the slave ; and even later on, when Rome became the center of culture and refinement, her really great, with very few excep- tions, were not properly Romans, but people from, the pro- vinces: Horace from Venosa, Virgil from Mantua, Ovid from Sulmo, Sallust from Amiternum, Cicero from Arpinum, Livy from Patavium, Tacitus. The founders of Latin Literature had been slaves and "liberti" — Andronicus, Ennius, Plautus, Terence, Naevius. In years gone by, Rome had been a great and austere nation, powerful, feared, wonderfully expanding; but she despised as unworthy of a virile race what she consid- ered the corrupting influence of arts and letters. But after she conquered Greece, the slaves made captive their masters through their letters and vices. Horace rightly observed in his A7's Poetica: "Captive Greece took captive her rude con- queror." Decadence in literature always is a twin sister of effeminacy. Great natural vigor and strength of character modified by the influences just named produced monstrosities like Catilina and Julius Caesar, both Romans from Rome, both patricians, both in different ways a strange mixture of altru- ism and selfishness, generosity and cruelty. Roman vigor had been emasculated by Greek perversion. When genius and folly appear in the same individual, be positive that something is wrong somewhere; generally the one who makes victims has been a victim before. If you allow your daughters and sons to go and drink and dance with everybody in cabarets, you have no right to complain of the inevitable harvesting ! The Roman — the typical Roman genius — in the intellec- tual history of the capital of the world of yore is Lucretius. De Rerum Natm^a is the masterpiece of an age. If not corrupted by Greek decadence, Rome would have had masterpieces galore, with the national trade-mark; and we would not be compelled to shudder only at the idea that our children might read the shocking obscenities of Ovid, garbed in verses of rapturing beauty. Admirable is certainly Virgil ; but we cannot separate him from Homer; while Dante, who calls Virgil "his master and his author," is always Dante, per- haps the greatest poet and artist of all ages, as Thomas Carlyle practically declares in his lectures on Hero Worship. For Ugo 82 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi Foscolo the three masters of all divine geniuses were Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. Amen. The New Rome, Washington, situated in the center of the modern world, must be its natural heart. Washington, Cor Mundi. The idea of conquest is extraneous to our conception of greatness, and socialism, as preached by the followers of Marx, is not a product of the American soil. We advocate human brotherhood, without communism ; true altruism, with- out suppressing the greatest incentive of progress and happi- ness — well-directed individualism. We want everybody at his place, in order to work effectively and efficiently for the common good, for the advance of the race and of humanity. A man, no matter how clever and great, cannot accomplish everything. Mazzini was a great thinker, the greatest of all philosophers of freedom, the educator and apostle of an age of giants. But he was absolutely unfit to have a position which re- quired executive ability. He ruined the Roman Republic, he made a mess of many of the revolts which preceded the unifi- cation of Italy. And the resentment of Garibaldi was more than justified. Who can read the famous letter of Garibaldi, without going with the mind to the miserable conditions created in Russia by theorists lacking executive ability? Disgusted with the uncertainties of Mazzini and the other triumvirs, on June 2nd, 1849, the great liberator wrote to the great master of lib- erty: "Mazzini : Here I cannot avail anything for the good of the Republic, save in two ways: as a dicta- tor with unlimited plenary powers, or as a simple soldier. Choose! — Giuseppe Garibaldi." I have related the incident, in order to show that to criti- cise inefficient officials in Washington does not mean to be poor patriots. Nobody loves Mazzini more than I do ; but I do not believe I am guilty of any lack of respect to his memory, if I state that he had no executive ability. I have, in order to avoid misunderstandings, taken examples from Italy, picking up exactly the men whose memories I worship most. It is absolutely necessary to avoid and eliminate all strange dualisms of good and evil. If we have to offer the world, with much good, some evil, it is better to give up the task. America cannot be but good. Like many of the ancient — all religions show the same dualism — the old Russians had two gods — Belibodg, the genius of good; and Tschernobog, the genius of evil : they were worshiping the former for grat- itude, and the later for fear. If our country has to be a god- dess for all nations on earth, she must be worshiped for grati- tude, and not for fear. We can have in this country but one great mission — that of spreading all over the world private, social, and political virtue. Gigliotti — Cor Mundi 83 More fortunate than any other people, ancient or mod- ern, also in this respect we had, combined in the same man, the theoretical and executive ability. Abraham Lincoln, who was our immortal teacher of freedom, was also the greatest President this country ever had; or, if you please, the most wonderful chief executive in the history of the world. The ancients would have made a god of him. Great was George Washington, but his greatness is essentially American. That erratic rag peddler of swill barrel erudition and gossip unworthy even of the Merry Wives of Windsor, Pro- fessor Beard, in order to appear a man of great ability, tried to belittle Washington and the other immortal fathers of the country, picking up the piquant traits of human weakness. The greater the man, the more human he is. The weakness of our clay, contrasting stupendously with the marvels of the spirit, gives a more bold and impressive projection to genius. Bacon enunciated the greatest of all philosophical truths, when he sentenced: Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto — I am a man, nothing of what is human do I count foreign to myself. Even Jesus was tempted by Satan. Hypocrisy and greatness cannot blend. A great man without faults, big or small, is an absurdity, a conventional lie, a mon- strosity. Jesus spoke to mankind in the incident of the adul- teress. Abraham Lincoln spoke to mankind when he answered his "holier than thou" adviser : "I am sorry I don't know what brand of whiskey General Grant drinks, or I would send him a barrel." If George Washington belongs to America, Abra- ham Lincoln belongs to mankind. After Lincoln we had great Presidents. Who can ever forget, if he is honest, the commanding figure of Grover Cleve- land? He was a giant, surrounded by pygmies, who wanted to reduce him to their size, or by political opponents blinded by passion. President Roosevelt astonished the world with his ability, foresight, culture, directness, and character. His faults, big as they may seem,, give wonderful relief to the im- mensity of his figure. Even as a private citizen, in spite and because of his outbursts, he is an extraordinarily inspiring influence to our country and to the civilized world. And now that political passion is not blinding us any more, we have to admit that President Taft was as peaceful and lofty as head of this country as peaceful and lofty he is as a private citizen. President Wilson is to-day the greatest leader in the Arma- geddon for democracy and justice. May the Lord keep him and bless him. I wrote against him, when I judged him from his history of the American people. I have nothing but ad- miration for him, now that his work as a statesman makes of him the most commanding public figure in the world. May the Lord convince the Americans, whose prejudice against a third term is founded on sentiment rather than reason, of the •wiseness and of the necessity of making Mr. Wilson President 84 Gigliotti — Cor Mundi for the third time. If the war is not at an end by 1920, the country needs absolutely his services; and if peace has been restored, he is the man who can, on account of the ex- perience and the knowledge of the last trying years, success- fully face the arduous task of readjustment and reconstruc- tion. Had Lincoln not been assassinated by Booth, the country should have forced a third term on him. He could have done in two years what his successors were unable to do in a quar- ter of a century. The elevation of Johnson to the presidency was a public calamity. This is the verdict of history, and his- tory has not been shaped by any of us, author or readers. I hasten to the conclusion. Foreign settlements must be wiped off from big and small cities. Unless you cut the abominable tree of disloyalty, treachery and corruption, and dig up the roots, and burn them, scattering the ashes to the winds, the same deleterious influences, which came from Greece and ruined Rome, will disrupt inexorably this land of promise. The deleterious work had started already. The world's war came in time to take us from the brink of the abyss, and re- store to us the virtues, the ideals, and the faith of the founders of this great Republic. In order to become worthy citizens of the New Rome, "we must (these are the words of Abraham Lincoln) lay aside any prejudices and march, shoulder to shoulder, in the great army of Freedom. We must make of this a land of liberty in fact, as it is in name." May official Washington hear and accept the warning and the pleading of this Vox clamantis in deserto, of this hum- ble citizen who loves this country more than anything on earth — more than his own life. God bless our country! God bless our soldiers, making of them, more than unconquerable fighters and heroes, the noble champions of justice, democracy, and love. Providence has made of Washington the heart of the world. WASHINGTON, COR MUNDI. The End. ERRATA On page i^, tenth line of third paragraph should read "stiletto." On page 68, closing line of second paragraph should read "Joan of Arc." THE FOLLOWING WORKS OF NICOLA GIGLIOTTI WILL BE PUBUSHED IN ENGUSH : "History of Political Thought" {Storia del Pensiero Politico) 4 8-TO. Volume* Human Tragedies'' ** Letters from Heaven and from Hell" H 19 894 "^^^i^Ji^J^. <) ^*V *^^i^! ^vPC,V iECKMAN ilNDERY INC. ^v DEC 88 W^ N. MANCHESTER; G^ ^5