Democracy and the great war ...

Front matter

STATE OF MICHIGAN

department of public SnsJtruction

LANSING

Preface

The Great War may be studied from many angles. In 1915 under the direction of President G. Stanley Hall, of Clark University, one of his students sent out a circular to cities in eight states to discover how many schools were teaching the war, and if so, why. Replies were received from eighty-seven cities, and these reasons President Hall has summed up roughly as follows :

First. — It is a great vitalizer of geography. To bring and show maps of the positions of the armies and of the countries involved, with places that come to a focus of interest from day to day, is capable of impressing a very wide vital interest in Geography.

Second. — ^We have a chance to see history in the making. Historic tendencies from many centuries are focusing to, and will diverge from, this momentous epoch in which history is made day by day more rapidly than ever before.

Third. — In the higher school grades innumerable questions of economic trade, markets, effects on various industries, social^ civic and political organization of the countries involved can be given a high degree of vitalization.

Fourth. — It is the greatest opportunity ever afforded to impress upon the minds of young people the barbarity, destructiveness and brutality of war and the blessings of peace.

Fifth. — It gives a large surface of contact between the school and life, which tend so strongly to be isolated from each other. Considering the interest of every live boy in conflict the war is a dynamo of educational energy which should make the entire school system vastly more effective while it lasts and perhaps for some time after.

Sixth. — It makes of young Americans citizens of the world, not only of the country, and teaches them the right appreciation of the relations of other lands to theirs.

Seventh. — It teaches the great lesson of Americanism and toleration. It teaches the young to agree to differ, and cultivates a judicial as above a partisan attitude, which is perhaps the very palladium of the strength of this country in the world, because here citizenship means outgrowing and rising above the old world prejudices and racial animosities that have come down from centuries since the old religious wars and which have made nations suspect and hate their neighbors. It gives us a wholesome realization that we have none of these old dangerous European chimneys in our political structure liable at any moment to set fire to the whole.

To these President Hall himself adds others, related principally to the lines of study in which he has a special interest. This was before America entered the war.

As the war progressed we began to see things from another angle. As a nation we had mourned for the victims of the Lusitania. We had heard with surprise and sorrow of the drowning of women and children of other neutral nations on the high seas, the bombing of hospitals and schoolhouses, the tearing of families apart and the scientific enslavement of men, women and children to work at forced labor against their kindred, and of the pursuit by Germany of a/general policy of "terrorism," both in the method of conducting military offensives and afterwards against the helpless inhabitants of

Preface 7

conquered lands. These things were more than a surprise, we were enlightened.

When President Wilson declared that "the world must be made safe for domocracy/' we began to ask, Is the Imperial German Government the enemy of democracy, and, therefore, the enemy of America?

We did not lose our poise as a judge, but we began to reach a judgment. We began to understand the character of the forces behind the Imperial German Government, and with this understanding there was added another reason for studying the Great War, namely, to find out why the great democracies of the world were lining up against Germany, and why there were no democracies at all in alliance with Germany. We began to ask, Why do the German people, whose kindred among us are zealous lovers of liberty, tolerate such a government? Then we began to remember that from 1848 onward many of these Germans came to America, as they said, to escape the yoke of "Prussian autocracy" and "Prussian militarism."

We began, in fact, to see that there were two Germanics, — the Germany of other days, with its glorious musicians, its thinkers, its poets, its idealists, which w^e loved to recall, and the Germany of today, the Germany of sordid materialism, the cold hard nation of the mailed fist at the heart of which is Prussia. We saw in action the Prussian theory of war, that Might makes Eight, — that war, and not peace, is the natural relation between nations. We came to see that the triumph of that nation would mean that the world must become an armed camp, and live under the shadow of war. And as this conviction was borne in upon us the study of the War took on a new meaning.

To the boys and girls of Michigan for whom this little sketch is prepared let me commend these words written by an eminent countryman of one of our Allies but which apply as well to the boys and girls of America :

"In all your study of the War, make this your first and foremost thought, that the War is for you. It is you who will enjoy the new order of things when the War is done. Your countrymen are giving their lives for their country; it is your country, and in it you will pass your life. Our dead have died for you. . . . It is you who will find this world better than they found it. You will live in peace, because they died in war; you will go safe and free, because they went under discipline and into danger up to the moment of their death. You will have a good time, because they suffered. To you, who gain by their loss, and whose life is made comfortable by their lives laid down, comes the question, from countless little wooden crosses over graves in France and Belgium and Gallipoli, and from all the unmarked graves of the sea — Is it nothing to you? Why, the War is your War. You will enter into all that it achieves, and inherit all that it earns; and the miseries of it will be the making of your happiness. There are many good reasons why a man should fight for his country, but they come to this one reason, that he is fighting for the future of his country. And you are the future. We older people so soon will be gone; you will stay here, you for whom your countrymen today are in the toils of this War. You are the future, we are the past. We have lived in a world which you never saw, and you will live in a world which we shall never see."

This little brochure is frankly a war appeal. It recognizes the character of the enemy at the outset. The enemy is

Preface 9

Autocracy, as embodied in the Imperial German Government. Its antagonist is Democracy. The Great War is a conflict of these principles. As between nations, it is a world crisis in morals. This is your war, and my war. We are fighting for all that America has stood for, all that our fathers have died for. We must grasp the significance of this. This war is a fight to a finish, for either Democracy must win, or it will perish from the. earth as a form of government. There is a duty for each of us. ''In union there is strength." A study of the Great War at this time should appeal not only to the intellect, but to the heart and the will.

GEORGE N. FULLER.

Lansing, April 6, 1918.

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