The American Legion, in session for its second annual convention at Cleveland, is wholly a forward-looking body. Its past goes no farther back than the dark days of 1917; its future embraces the whole existence of the American Republic, for it has chosen to be formative and constructive rather than reminiscent.

Of military origin, founded upon the history of battles, the Legion is nevertheless essentially civic in its purpose. It takes questions of citizenship, of ready and unflagging loyalty, of steady and watchful Americanism, as the leading objects of its attention. It supplies a unique example of a body of soldiers whose chief interest lies in the maintenance of the civic as opposed to the martial idea. The soldiership which it exemplifies is the citizen soldiership, which stands for the patriotism of the school and the ballot box as well as the patriotism of the tented field.

At its annual convention the American Legion will find much work cut out for it in defending and strengthening American citizenship. There is no lack of things to do. The American Expeditionary Force, when it put into khaki, in a great cause, literal millions to whom the American Republic was but a name, blocked out the vast work of patriotic fusion which the Legion now has to do. The Legion's function is to make the sentiment of American militant citizenship real, and real forever, in American lives. Evidently it does not shirk that task in the least. It will be greeted, in its Cleveland convention, on the thresh-hold of a wonderful career of public service. --Boston Transcript.