AN AMERICAN LEGION.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11685, 29 April 1916, Page 8

AN AMERICAN LEGION.

SERVING CANADA. (.By DR ,T. A. MACDONALD.) The tables are turned. A half-cen-tury ago, in the awful tragedy of the Civil War in the United States, many thousands of Canadians crossed the lines, enlisted in American regiments, and fought for freedom, and humanity on all the great battlefields of the. .Republic." To-day a new battalion is being organised in the Dominion, tho Ninety-seventh of Canada, composed wholly, throughout all its ranks, of men born within the- United States. These men—more than eleven hundred officers and men—are enlisting for overseas service in the army of Canada on battlefields of Europe. They will be known as "The American Legion." And they also, in their turn, will fight for the eyer-sacred right of . freedom and humanity.

Back of all this, alike in Canada and in the United States, there is something of the profound est significance to the democracy of North America. The ether day there died in Toronto a Canadian veteran of the Civil War who fought, under Genera! Meade at the decisive battle of Gettysburg. Several years-ago he was one of a dozen members of the Toronto post of the Grand Army of the Republic, who met one diiy in the Toronto " Globe'' office. They were representatives of contingents of Canadians who fought in Lincoln's armies.

They had their story, each man his bit, told after the way of the soldier whose memory is undimmed through fifty years. And they had stories of their Canadian comrades in arms. Some of those Canadians fought with Grant at Vicksburg, some with Thomas at Chickamauga, some with Custer in the West, some with Meade at Gettysburg, some with Sheridan in the Shenandoah, some with Sherman on his march to the sea. HONOUR AT STAKE. The military archives at Washington record some forty-eight thousand Canadian enlistments during the years of the Civil War, and tell'of more than eighteen thousand Canadian casualties in defence of American citizenship and for the integrity of the American Union. Some of these Canadians languished in the Lib by Prison or suffered the horrors of the Andersonville Camp. They fought for Lincoln and the cause of liberty under the Stars and Stripes; but, in death as in life, the flag of those Canadian hearts was the Union Jack. In that day, and through that Civil War in the United States, Canada as a nation was neutral, and thousands of law-abiding Southern citizens found homes and peaceful protection under the Canadian flag; but the mind of the Canadian people was not neutral, nor, when the controversy ceased to be over States' Rights against Federal Sovereignty, and became a struggle for human rights and civilisation, were the sympathies of Canadians held i;i suspense. It could not bo. The honour of humanity and ihc institutions of civilisation in North America were in peril and at stake. NO NEUTRALITY. To-day, and fronting the world-war in Europe, tho United States as a. nation is neutral—is still neutral—hut the mind of the great body of American people, as it comes up against the uncovered facts and estimates the supreme issues, is not neutral, cannot, much longer oven pretend to be neutral. In the judgment-hall of the American irrind there can be no neutrality except for moral' indifference. It is for or it is against. As never before in the world's history, the honour of humanity, all the noble liberties, and all the rights of the innocent and tho defenceless, for which the name of Washington stands and for which Lincoln agonised, are today trembling in the balance of the world's war.

With Belgium in the assassin's grip, wi'tii Poland under the oppressor's heel, with Serbia crucified, and slaughtered Armenia bleeding at every pore, and "with democracy the world over menaced by despotism, is it any wonder that the sons of Americans who died tliat the slave might be free are crossing the border to join Canadians under the Union Jack, as Canadians once crossed to join Americans under the Stars and Stripes! The American Legion in Canada's army will be a pledge of North America to the world s democracy.