4,000,000 men who were in the military and naval service of the United States in the late war, it will have possibilities of power that must be reckoned with.  But if, in the long life before it, the American Legion shall have no more to its discredit than is summed up in the history of the G.A.R. whose ranks are now so pathetically thin, it will have been a worthy follower of its fathers.

Paterson (N.J.) Evening News, May 7, 1919.—...  The new organization starts its career deserving and receiving the good wishes of the entire country.  The character of the men of the American army who are promoting it and the high ideals which it professes and proposes to maintain are a guaranty that it will be a power for helpful service in the common family of the nation.

Duluth (Minn.) Herald, May 24, 1919.—­There is a great field for the American Legion, the organization of American veterans of the World War, and judging by the spirit of the recent convention and by the expressions of the returning delegates as reported in the press of the country, it is going to fill that field.

    And the field that awaits it, and that it seems to intend to
    fill, is a field of a vigorous and aggressive effort to demand
    and enforce a strong and coherent and consistent Americanism.

Not the swashbuckling kind of Americanism—­the chip-on-the-shoulder kind—­the we-can-lick-the-world kind.  These lads of ours are the last in the world to preach that fool kind of Americanism.  For they—­or at least those of them who crossed the seas and fought for liberty and peace on the other side—­have seen in the case of Germany what that kind of nationalism comes to, and they are against it.

But there is a type of Americanism which is utterly free from the taint of militarism and jingoism, but that yet is even more dangerous to anybody at home or abroad who flaunts the spirit of America and defies its power.  And unless the signs fail, the American Legion is going to express and embody and inculcate that type of Americanism.

Anaconda (Mont.) Standard, May 24, 1919.—...  At St. Louis the members voted down all proposals for obtaining from Congress increases of pay for the soldiers and rejected all efforts to obtain canvasses of the members to ascertain their preference as to parties and as to presidential candidates.  Everything was excluded which would tend to committ the organization to any particular party or any particular candidate.  Young Colonel Roosevelt, son of the former republican president, and Colonel Bennett Clark, son of Champ Clark, former democratic speaker of the house, joined hands in the endeavor to keep partisanship and politics out of the organization.

Collier’s Weekly, May 31, 1919.—­A national convention of American soldiers and sailors in which no grievances were aired,