FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1928. NOTES AND COMMENTS THE PUGNACIOUS AMERICAN

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume XLV, Issue 3190, 3 February 1928, Page 4

The Guardian Printed at Leeston, Canterbury, New Zealand, on Tuesday and Friday afternoons. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1928. NOTES AND COMMENTS

THE PUGNACIOUS AMERICAN

''One hundred per cent. American patriotism, like the other fundamentalisms, is feeling the effect of a growing inattention on the part of the public," says the New Republic. "It cannot live without presenting its protagonists with an enemy whom they can hate." For a while Germany served its purpose and the next enemy was, of course, Bolshevism. '< Anti-Bolshevism is also becoming shop-worn and the pugnacious American is gravely in need of some tangible stone on which to whet his patriotic sword. The American patriotic tradition is accustomed to be more anti-English than anti-any-thing else. At a time like the present, when it is hard to find a political warcry with any popular appeal, it is probably inevitable that politicians here and there will try to capitalise the considerable fund of anti-English prejudice which still lingers somewhere in the minds of so many ordinary Americans. It provides demagogues in the larger cities with a cheap and easy way of profiting by the unpopularity in the tenement districts of the exclusive upper classes. In all such American cities there is a climbing population of foreign birth or descent which is condemned to a position of social inferiority by the older inhabitants and is extremely sensitive about it. These people provide an audience for the demagogues who cannot rise to power except by exploiting class prejudices. They relish violent attacks on the well-to-do minority, usually of older British stock. When they applaud denunciations of King George, they are not, in many cases, expressing suspicion and hatred of the English. They are satisfying their grudge against the older established Americans, who are socially and intellectually much more intimate with the upper classes in England than they are with the lower classes in America.''