Read "The Pentecost of Calamity" by Owen Wister online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
And what of ourselves in this well-nigh world-wide cloud-burst?
Every man has walked at night through gloom where objects were dim and hard to see, when suddenly a flash of lightning has struck the landscape livid. Trees close by, fences far off, houses, fields, animals and the faces of people -- all things stand transfixed by a piercing distinctness. So now, in this thunderstorm of war, each nation and every man and woman is searchingly revealed by the perpetual lightnings. Whatever this American nation is, whatever aspect, noble or ignoble, our Democracy shows in the glare of this cataclysm, is even already engraved on the page of History, will be the portrait of the United States in 1914-15 for all time.