Neutrality -- Belgium; Peace; United States -- Defenses; World War, 1914-1918
The folly preached by some of these individuals is somewhat startling,
and if it were translated from words into deeds it would constitute a
crime against the nation. One professed teacher of morality made the
plea in so many words that we ought to follow the example of China and
deprive ourselves of all power to repel foreign attack. Surely this
writer must have possessed the exceedingly small amount of information
necessary in order to know that nearly half of China was under foreign
dominion and that while he was writing the Germans and Japanese were
battling on Chinese territory and domineering as conquerors over the
Chinese in that territory. Think of the abject soul of a man capable
of holding up to the admiration of free-born American citizens such a
condition of serfage under alien rule!
Nor is the folly confined only to the male sex. A number of women
teachers in Chicago are credited with having proposed, in view of the
war, hereafter to prohibit in the teaching of history any reference
to war and battles. Intellectually, of course, such persons show
themselves unfit to be retained as teachers a single day, and indeed
unfit to be pupils in any school more advanced than a kindergarten. But
it is not their intellectual, it is also their moral shortcomings which
are striking. The suppression of the truth is, of course, as grave an
offense against morals as is the suggestion of the false or even the
lie direct; and these teachers actually propose to teach untruths to
their pupils.
True teachers of history must tell the facts of history; and if they
do not tell the facts both about the wars that were righteous and the
wars that were unrighteous, and about the causes that led to these wars
and to success or defeat in them, they show themselves morally unfit to
train the minds of boys and girls. If in addition to telling the facts
they draw the lessons that should be drawn from the facts, they will
give their pupils a horror of all wars that are entered into wantonly
or with levity or in a spirit of mere brutal aggression or save under
dire necessity. But they will also teach that among the noblest deeds
of mankind are those that have been done in great wars for liberty, in
wars of self-defense, in wars for the relief of oppressed peoples, in
wars for putting an end to wrong-doing in the dark places of the globe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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