Any teachers, in school or college, who occupied the position that these foolish, foolish teachers have sought to take, would be forever estopped from so much as mentioning Washington and Lincoln; because their lives are forever associated with great wars for righteousness. These teachers would be forever estopped from so much as mentioning the shining names of Marathon and Salamis. They would seek to blind their pupils’ eyes to the glory held in the deeds and deaths of Joan of Arc, of Andreas Hofer, of Alfred the Great, of Arnold von Winkelried, of Kosciusko and Rákóczy. They would be obliged to warn their pupils against ever reading Schiller’s “William Tell” or the poetry of Koerner. Such men are deaf to the lament running: “Oh, why, Patrick Sarsfield, did we let your ships sail, Across the dark waters from green Innisfail?” To them Holmes’s ballad of Bunker Hill and Whittier’s “Laus Deo,” MacMaster’s “Ode to the Old Continentals” and O’Hara’s “Bivouac of the Dead” are meaningless. Their cold and timid hearts are not stirred by the surge of the tremendous “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” On them lessons of careers like those of Timoleon and John Hampden are lost; in their eyes the lofty self-abnegation of Robert Lee and Stonewall Jackson was folly; their dull senses do not thrill to the deathless deaths of the men who died at Thermopylæ and at the Alamo--the fight of those grim Texans of which it was truthfully said that Thermopylæ had its messengers of death but the Alamo had none. It has actually been proposed by some of these shivering apostles of the gospel of national abjectness that, in view of the destruction that has fallen on certain peaceful powers of Europe, we should abandon all efforts at self-defense, should stop building battle-ships, and cease to take any measures to defend ourselves if attacked. It is difficult seriously to consider such a proposition. It is precisely and exactly as if the inhabitants of a village in whose neighborhood highway robberies had occurred should propose to meet the crisis by depriving the local policeman of his revolver and club.