e loyalty which animates a hastily gathered
football team, which plays not for its honour but for the profit of its
manager? Who shall say? One thing only is certain: the Patriotism of the
cosmopolites, if it be doubtful in origin, is by no means doubtful in
expression. On every Fourth of July the Americans are free to display
the love of their Country, and they use this freedom without restraint.
From the Atlantic to the Pacific Coast, from Vermont to Mexico, the
Eagle screams aloud. She screams from early morn to dewy eve. And there
is nothing to silence her screaming save the explosion of innumerable
crackers, the firing of countless pistols.

For this day the youth of America is given full licence to shoot his
inoffensive neighbours, and, if he will, to commit the happy despatch
upon him-self. The next morning the newspapers chronicle the injuries
which have been inflicted on and by the boys of New York, for the most
part distinguished by foreign names, with the cold accuracy bred of long
habit. And while the boys prove their patriotism by the explosion of
crackers, their fathers, with equal enthusiasm, devote themselves to
the waving of flags. They hold flags in their hands, they carry them in
their buttonholes, they stick them in their hats, they wear them behind
their ears. Wherever your eye is cast, there are flags to dazzle it,
flags large and flags small, an unbroken orgie of stars and stripes.
It is, in fact, the Guy Fawkes Day of America. And who is the Guy? None
other than George III. of blessed memory. For the Fourth of July has
its duties as well as its pleasures, and the chief of its duties is the
public reading of the Declaration of Independence. In every town
and hamlet Jefferson's burning words are proclaimed in the ears of
enthusiastic citizens. It is pointed out to a motley crowd of newly
arrived immigrants that George, our king, of whom they had not heard
yesterday, was unfit to be the ruler of a free people. And lest the
inestimable benefit of Jefferson's eloquence should be lost to one
single suddenly imported American, his declaration is translated into
Yiddish for the benefit of those to whom English is still an unknown
tongue. In a voice trembling with emotion, the orator assures the
starving ill-clad Pole and the emaciated Bohemian that all men are
free and equal; and so fine is the air of the Great Republic that this
proposition, which refutes itself, is firmly believed for the moment by
the