A Political Factor 59 



other among the many causes which, in our Ameri 

 can life, tell for religious toleration is due the im 

 possibility of persecution of a particular creed. 

 When in their earliest and most impressionable 

 years Protestants, Catholics, and Jews go to the 

 same schools, learn the same lessons, play the same 

 games, and are forced, in the rough-and-ready 

 democracy of boy life, to take each at his true worth, 

 it is impossible later to make the disciples of one 

 creed persecute those of another. From the evils of 

 religious persecution America is safe. 



From the evils of sectional hostility we are, at 

 any rate, far safer than we were. The war with 

 Spain was the most absolutely righteous foreign 

 war in which any nation has engaged during the 

 nineteenth century, and not the least of its many 

 good features was the unity it brought about be 

 tween the sons of the men who wore the blue and of 

 those who wore the gtay. This necessarily meant 

 the dying out of the old antipathy. Of course em 

 bers smoulder here and there; but the country at 

 large is growing more and more to take pride in the 

 valor, the self-devotion, the loyalty to an ideal, dis 

 played alike by the soldiers of both sides in the Civil 

 War. We are all united now. We are all glad that 

 the Union was restored, and are one in our loyalty 

 to it ; and hand in hand with this general recognition 

 of the all-importance of preserving the Union has 



