Word: defenceless
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Just at present few can see any great danger of a Red invasion, and the overthrow of government by radicals of extreme doctrines. Much more urgent a matter is the policy of the opposite party, which, under the guise of protecting defenceless America from pernicious Reds, wields a powerful weapon of reaction. The same group of Bolshevik-bailers that backs the closing of Ford Hall Forum lists such names as Dean Pound, Professor Bliss Perry, and the presidents of Smith and Mt. Holyoke as dangerous, and closes to them lecture platforms in towns and clubs where the black list...
...become permissible in good usage, purists and scholars may indeed mourn the loss of a great battle in their age long fight against popular ignorance and carelessness. And America, often belittled by foreigners as a land of little culture and less scholarship, will be quite defenceless against the jibes of its European detractors...
...show how deeply this fatal restriction of the chief incentive of American business was resented, and how widespread was the resultant depression. None, when faced with such evidence, can deny the probability that this psychological catastrophe may have broken the spirit of an emotional people, and left them defenceless against material disaster; but much hard work remains to be done after the manner of these brilliant discoveries before all the mists of the past are blown away, and the aboriginal American is seen and understood by the modern world as realistically as he is portrayed in his daily journals...
America, long considered the most defenceless great nation in the world, has just swallowed two bitter doses of jingoism without blinking. European countries, where a vigorous military class has long been the tradition, finds its war-like ideals trampled upon by their former defenders. Perhaps this reversed balance of trade in military illusions may mean a reversal of military strength, as Bertrand Russell insists, the United States may become the only great military nation in the world. The unsophisticated ear of American public opinion is still fascinated by the blare of warlike demonstration, and the jingo is still the herald...
...They seem to be straining every nerve to convince you that they are done with flippant irrelevancies, that this time they are in deadly earnest, writing a sure-enough mystery story. But after they have you almost convinced, their deft fingers begin poking around into the defenceless ribs of the plot, and it all ends in roaring farce?a glorious melange of wisdom, wit, suspense, absurdity...