I would go further than my friend Anderson. I would have _all_ civilized countries adopt this plan with one another as well as with Germany. The trouble with civilization, as seen in this war, is that no people understands or truly sympathizes with any foreign nation--not even among the Allies. They are strangers because they have been kept strangers. This creates suspicion, envy, enmity, for they have not in any noticeable degree lived together. They do not know one another's customs, habits, perspectives. As a result, armies, navies, tariffs, treaties backed by force, are necessary to hold civilization precariously in shape--and at what colossal effort, anxiety, expense? The different languages, literatures, arts, educations, religions, should become familiar to large numbers in each race and be the open, peaceful highways back and forth instead of, as now, barriers. * * * * * _Flanders, another Mudhole, February, 1915._ ... I see the woeful, tragic need for this international co-education all around us here at the front. The Canadians, Australians, English, French, all quarreling back and forth and pulling against one another as unfriendly strangers. Germany is giving--has given--one great lesson to them all and to us Americans at home. And that is, IN UNION THERE IS STRENGTH. After this war the tremendous question before the world will be: _How are we going to live with the Germans?--how get on with them?_ The only true and gracious solution I can see is--_To associate and study together when young_! Would not you--would not everyone--agree that this interchange in education, which would not be very troublesome or expensive, is a true manner in which to remove from the German make-up its savage, destructive animus toward mankind? In order really to change a race, the work must be done from the inside outward. And this means _some_ form of education, not merely victories, edicts, Leagues. Let or make the Teutons be associated with gentler cultures than their own. What if it does take a hundred, two hundred, years! What is that compared with having the German problem and menace unsolved in the future as in the past? Such young German missionaries year after year, as I have indicated, would be bringing back something of sweetness and light to their stubborn, irascible folk. The powerful and exacerbated bias of this folk toward the _echt Deutsch_ would be neutralized and mollified under the contact of its youths with dispositions making for kindliness and courtesy. Confessedly the stoutest race prejudices lie with those who have never stepped outside their own boundaries.