The flag of the old Revolution, Swear firmly to serve and uphold, That no treasonous breath of pollution Shall tarnish one star on its fold, Swear! And, hark, the deep voices replying In this moment who hesitates, barters The rights which his forefathers won, And swear on your sword and your gun; As huge and as strong as Stonehenge, And, hark, the deep voices replying By the tombs of your sires and brothers, By the sob of her orphans' despair, And, hark, the deep voices replying On mounds which are wet with the weeping, By the blood of our murdered McCook, And, hark, the deep voices replying The following we take from the Literary Digest: Two complaints of the distortion of history as taught in schools of the United States. have been recently made, one by Samuel Smith, a member of the British Parliament, the other by the New York Sun. The former blames the histories for being the cause of much of the hostile feeling entertained in this country against Great Britain; the latter criticizes the movement in the old Confederate States to exclude all text-books on American history except those written by Southern authors. Mr. Smith's strictures occur in a magazine article entitled "America Revisited," which has been published in pamphlet form. He discovered on the part of a great many Americans a true affection for the old country, but he found also unfriendly Irish and German elements and inflammable mixed nationalities, and he does not underestimate the sensitiveness of Americans regarding the "Monroe doctrine." He says: "There is, unfortunately, one cause which underlies much of this irritation. The history books taught in the public schools too often give the children of America the impression. that the main events in human history are the American War of Independence, concluded in 1783, and the war with Great Britain of 181214. It need not be added that Great Britain appears in those histories always in the wrong, and the Americans always right. There is not pains taken to show that the best men in England protested against the policy of George III, and Lord North, and that the British nation to-day esteems George Washington as much as do the people of America. It is not explained that the England of last century was governed by the aristocracy, and that the England of to-day repudiates the fatal policy of the eighteenth century as much as do the citizens of the United States. These truths gradually become clear to all educated Americans, especially to those who visit Eu eral Americans, who felt the force of it, and I think the time has come when this subject might be approached by the best men and women of the United States as they approached the subject of arbitration. It must be apparent to all right-thinking people that it is unchristian to sow seeds of enmity in the minds of the young against other nations, especially when closely allied in blood and religion. And I am in hopes that the churches in America will before long take this view themselves." The Sun, January 25th, devotes about two columns to "American History Distorted for Southern Use," from which we quote in part: "For several years past there has been a significant movement in the old confederate states to inculcate in their schools a spirit of sectional hostility to the states which saved the Union from disruption. "This movement has been in charge of the Confederate Veterans' Associations more especially, and the means by which its purpose is to be accomplished is the exclusion from the schools of all text-books of American history written by northern authors, and the substitution of histories by southern authors only. About two years ago the United Confederate Veterans' Historical Committee unanimously adopted a report which described the use of our standard school histories to be an evil, ‘active steps for the correction' of which should be taken. It accordingly prepared a list of eleven histories, and recommended them 'without hesitation' as 'suitable for present if not permanent use' in southern schools and families, to replace the 'objectionable books.' Others of the same character were announced as in preparation. ion. "We have taken the pains to procure and examine carefully these southern histories of our common country, written for the avowed purpose of giving a peculiar mold to the sentiment of the children of the states which tried unsuccessfully to break up the American UnOur first observation is that they treat the history of the Republic by states rather than as a whole. Next, they all distinguish Next, they all distinguish sharply between 'southerners' and 'northerners,' as if they were two distinct peoples, attributing the Civil War to the aggressions of the northerners' on the 'southerners.' The march of the union troops to enforce federal authority and rescue federal property from would-be secessionists is spoken of as an 'invasion.' "Here are a few examples of this bitter southern sentiment taken at random from the different books: "That the people of the north should so soon become horrified at an institution [slavery] which they themselves once countenanced, and allow their opposition to it to assume the character of a fanatical hatred, would indeed be a very problematical question of itself alone; but when one remembers the innate intolerance of the people-narrow and lacking in breadth of judgment and liberality of opinion, together with the old nature nurtured in the mother country and transplanted to American soil, and which did not change nor alter itself with its changed surroundings and conditions-then the question is no longer a problem. This American Puritan could not appreciate that broad liberal, free civilization that was developing the south, for it seemed to be rich where his was poor. Its prosperity was a marvel and a wonder to him; the very gladness of its life contrasted sharply with his own, which a narrow creed had settled into such hard places.' "The natural and necessary product of a noble civilization is a noble and a princely manhood. Consequently the slaveholding states, by sheer force of a superior intellectuality, dominated the national government and affected the character of all legislation by the impress of their masterly minds. The inevitable effect of this upon the north was to create and to foster that feeling of jealousy that naturally existed, to add fuel to the fires of slavery agitation, and to widen sectional lines.''' "'Consequently the southern people would have indeed been traitors to all history had they done otherwise under the circumstances' "' [in trying to secede]. "'After a while the politicians [northern] thought it wise and prudent to take advantage of the abolitionist doctrine of "the sin of slavery," and engrafted it into the r creeds and platforms as a popular catchword to increase the opposition to the South, which was aggravated by a growing jealousy of her civilization and prosperity.' "It was bitter [for the northerners] to confess that the southern leaders were better generals, and the confederate armies, tho so much smaller and badly equipped, better soldiers than the hosts they so often defeated." "Thus ended the long and arduous struggle which the south made for the rights which she had under the Constitution, and in this struggle those who wore the gray and stepped in the inspiring strains of "Dixie," under the banner of the southern cross decked with its stars, have made their uniform a symbol of the sublimest courage of the soldier and the truest devotion of the patriot.' "We have given enough of these quotations to show the purpose of these so-called American histories. It is to justify the 'lost cause;' and to that end indisputable facts and records are perverted and falsified. This partizan bias is made manifest from the very beginning, and it continues throughout. Instead of being simple narratives of facts, as such text-books should be, they are partizan pleas in defense of the secession movement, whose animus is betrayed in the frequent expression of mere opinions and prejudices. They are written to make out a case, not to instruct American children in the actual history of their country. Thus they are wholly unlike the text-books of American history in general use in our schools, from which all mere partizanship, unless it be purely American, is carefully excluded. The offenses against historical truth and the historical spirit are so constant and so flagrant that it would be a waste of words to point them out particularly, and correct the obvious misstatements. . "We shall not undertake to follow these southern accounts of the Civil War. They are all written from the southern point of view peculiarly, and frequently are colored with bitter southern prejudice, sometimes with feminine. spitefulness. The Union armies are described as 'ruthless' in their devastating progress, and the usual and necessary course of war as pursued by them is pictured in a way to provoke a revengeful spirit in southern youth. "Naturally this spirit of resentment lingers among the generation in the south which was engaged in the long and fierce conflict, but, of course, it is wholly incompatible with the judicial and impartial temper which should control the historian. Its manifestation in these books is only important as indicating a desire to perpetuate feelings of animosity which are important, except so far as they may bring injury to the old confederate states by segregating them in sentiment from the rest of the Union, and thus hindering their progress in prosperity and civilization. Reasonable men in those states cannot regard such an attempt to isolate the south with other feelings than disapproval." AGAINST THE TEACHING OF WAR IN HISTORY TEXTBOOKS. Prin. James Currie of the Church of Scotland Training School, Edinburgh, in his book "The Principles and Practice of Common School Education," (1884) says: School history has hitherto been little more than a record of wars and of the genealogy and personal peculiarities of sovereigns. In giving prominence to wars, teachers have only followed the examples of historians themselves, who have confined their narrative too exclusively to those; whilst the personal history of sovereigns has been studied under the idea of their representing the state which they governed, and also because from its being biography rather than history, it admits of being made more interesting and easily intelligible to the pupil. The first reform in the teaching, as in the writing of school history should be to assign to these wars of a nation their true position and character, instead of measuring national prosperity or greatness exclusively by its warlike achievements. We should regard war in general as a divergence from the true course in a nation's history, both on moral and on social grounds. . The arts of peace, which have been almost overlooked, should be raised to the position of prominence hitherto assigned to those of war." "Particularly by the study of the ancient poets and historians," it was justly remarked by William Ellery Channing, "the sentiments of early and barbarous ages on the subject of war are kept alive in the mind; and tho Christian by profession, some of the earliest and deepest impressions are received in the school of uncivilized antiquity." On the same theme the eminent essayist, John Foster, wrote: Who can tell how much that passion for war, which, from the universality of its prevalence, might seem inseparable from the nature of man, may, in the civilized world, have been reinforced by the enthusiastic admiration with which young men have read Homer and similar poets, whose genius transforms what is, and ought always to appear, purely horrid into an aspect of grandeur." It was, hence, a sufficiently frank admission that was lately made in a leading religious journal by an apologist for the Boys' Brigade scheme, that "all healthy boys have a love of soldiery born in them," leaving as not a fair inference the corollary that the youth who did not resent an attack upon his rights or strike back when assaulted must be weak and unhealthy.. It is a lamentable but natural sequence of this emulation of the false heroic models found so largely in pagan classics, as contra-distinguished from those molded upon the pure Christian type, which heretofore have been kept too much in the background, that the school history text-books of our day are so largely what they are, a compend of the battles of one's country, with a very pronounced bias under the label of patriotism for "my country, right or wrong. That was, therefore, a much needed testimony penned by Rector Alex. Mackay-Smith in responding to an invitation to be present at the conference on international arbitration in Independence Hall on last Washington's birthday, in which he said, "Our children are nurtured on stories of British cruelty in the Revolutionary war; the devil, to them, has a red coat, and carries a Queen Anne musket. My great-grandfather was an officer in that war, but I wish we could forget the whole conflict. My own children. are growing up to dislike England because of that old war as told in their school books. It is time to stop it. Patriotism is the noblest virtue, but it must not be nourished in hate. A little common sense as well as Christian charity on both sides is needed." At the meeting here referred to, Prof. W. Hudson Shaw of Oxford, England, deprecated the undemocratic policy and some of the language of the Premier, believing that they did not fairly represent English public sentiment, which he said was largely in sympathy with American institutions and for lasting peace between the two countries. He found fault, in a mild way, however, with the text-books used in American schools, which inculcate enmity toward the mother country in the minds of our youth. Felix Adler of New York indorsed Professor Shaw's mild protest against uncalledfor anti-British sentiment in American textbooks and said he felt at liberty as an Ameriican to make the protest in stronger language. The audience, the newspaper report says, heartily applauded reference to the subject. It was to help counteract this most pernicious method of acquainting our young people with the history of their country, that I brot out in 1877 my United States History and, some years later, my smaller history more especially for the use of schools. (Several editions of each of these were issued, but as there are none now for sale, I shall not be charged with advertising the books.) In the prefatory note to the first issue, the following avowal from my personal experience of the pernicious pedagogic battle-drilling referred to, is thus stated: "This persistent indoctrination of warlike ideas resulted in producing an intensely partisan feeling, so that the very name of 'British' or 'Mexican' became a hateful sound to our patriotic appprehensions. Indeed our principal concern appeared to be to learn how much greater was the battle loss in killed and wounded on the part of the British, than was that of the Americans. It is not using too forcible an expression to say that there was begotten in our youthful minds something of the malignant sentiment of murderers. Of the moral loss occasioned by a state of warfare, together with its exceeding expensiveness, we had no conception. To supply, in a measure, this lack of information, and to promote the knowledge of those things in the past and present history of our country which tend to its peace, prosperity and true renown, are the purposes of this work. The rule of political action recommended may be concisely expressed by that vigorous Anglo-Saxon word-straightforward We have lately had some very striking exemplifications of this teaching of international antagonism, on the part of the lads and young men in some of the public schools, colleges and universities of Spain and the United States respectively. The Philadelphia Record tells of a small boy who made a quantity of crayoncolored paper flags of Spain, which, in an explosion of patriotism, he threw one by one into the kitchen fire and then solemnly loaded his Fourth of July pistol with caps and fired a salute in honor of the event." For a number of years Herman Molkenboer of Bonn, Germany, has been corresponding with editors, essayists and teachers in various countries of Europe and America for the purpose of propagating information upon this matter, and seeking, by representations to governments and school boards, to effect a change in the usual harmful way of presenting patriotism in the history text-books. In an address last year to schoolmasters and teachers in Stockholm, Sweden, by M. F. Rasmussen, the "The mischievous effect of the present almost universal pollution of schoolbooks and popular histories with the war spirit and eulogies of the battle-field, was vigorously presented. was declared to be a national curse. war spirit is the evil spirit of schools; and the war spirit is the evil spirit of the community.' In Denmark a handy manual of history has been lately issued, in which the author, N. L. Hojberg, has forborne to give the warrior a place of honored prominence in comparison with the useful citizen, the philanthropist, the artist, the inventor, the engineer. In Glasgow, Scotland, since the first of this year, the local school board having been memorialized upon the subject of the presentation of peace and against the teaching of unfriendliness toward foreign nations, acceded to a request that a lecture, illustrated by limelight views of scenes described on the battle-field of eastern France, be given the scholars, and that copies of the anti-war essay of M. Seve, a government schoolmaster of France, which obtained the prize offered by the International Arbitration and Peace Association, be distributed to the teachers. In the year 1883, I laid before the then United States commissioner of education, John Eaton, the desirability (as it seemed to me) of issuing a bulletin of the bureau of education, supplying data upon this matter for the information and right stimulation of our teachers, proffering some material if such was desired. The commissioner, in reply, said that while he could not promise to use such material as a bulletin, he would be greatly obliged for any statement of facts I might be able to send him. The present commissioner of education, W. T. Harris, having also been written to on the foregoing subject, has replied that he thinks the presentation of the matter is "timely," and will do good in the way of developing a feeling in favor of international arbitration." The commissioner surely occupies a position wherein he can greatly advance this very important reform, and I think it is not hoping too much to believe that he will be found actively interesting himself in so furthering it. In a late number of the "Herald of Peace" of London is a stirring editorial on "The Education of the Young in Pacific Sentiments," wherein cheering recognition is given to the fact that "at peace congresses and meetings there is being manifested an increasing sense of the importance of taking definite and systematic measures to educate the young in pacific sentiments and to indoctrinate the minds both of school children and college students, with sound and humane principles in relation to the evils of war and the blessings of international concord." Allusion is made to the recent agitation of the subject in some of the European States, as well as in England, while occasion is taken to specially point out how our text-books in America in treating of the Revolutionary war have sedulously fostered the bad feeling in omitting to point out how it was that the obstinacy and folly of George the Third and of Lord North did not rightly reflect the prevalent opinion of the British people generally upon the matters then at issue with the colonies. Green's History of the English People is cited as a historic work of the better, unprejudiced class. The "Arbitrator," likewise of London, has also a valuable editorial which refers to the visit to the United States, this summer, of Samuel Plimsoll, favorably known for his successful efforts in connection with the amelioration of the international steerage passenger service. The distinct purpose of his visit was to make examination of a large number of our school histories, with the object of obtaining data upon the genesis and perpetuation of an alleged very antagonistic feeling in the United States toward the mother country. "Before he left this country [England] he searched thirty-four of the histories used in our Board Schools without finding any unkind allusion to the United States, but he asserts that the opposite is the case in America. As a practical result of his inquiries, it is reported that he has persuaded the federal commissioner of education to deal with the subject in his next report. To a New York reporter Mr. Plimsoll sensibly commented upon the sort of history he found in American school books. 'It seems strange to me that you should allow the ill-feeling caused by a war of one hundred and twenty years ago to still exist. You must remember that nine-tenths of the English people were opposed to the war at the time, and that the remaining one-tenth, the governing class, was divided within itself on the subject. Why let the acts of a daft old king, who was in retirement for insanity two or three times, cause an everlasting animosity toward the England of to-day, which has no more to do with that time than the United States of to-day has?'" This matter of the great folly of King George in his treatment of the claims and grievances of the American colonies, was well enlarged upon by Edwin D. Mead, editor of the New England Magazine, in an address on "The True Historic Relations of England and America," delivered not long ago at Lake Mohonk. "This then," he concludes his theme, "is what we want to make our people know, that in the American Revolution England did not hate us, but that the best men in England were our friends from that time to this, the men of the Revolution and fathers of our Constitution finding their greatest eulogists in English statesmen like Brougham and Gladstone. The English historians Green, Gardiner and the rest, tell the story of the American Revolution precisely as we desire to have it told; and, above all, the boys and girls in the district schools are taught this history from their textbooks in the right way, in the way which makes them love and admire us and our fathers instead of hating us." In our own country, John Bach MacMaster has given us a history modeled somewhat after that of Green, in making more prominent the social and industrial conditions of the people. Arthur Gilman, author of "A History of the American People," wrote me (1885) about the time that that work was published, relative to his non-use of battle pictures: "I avoided the class of cuts upon which you animadvert, because they are usually not true (being simply imaginative) as well as because I think them. improper to be placed before children. I have written more or less on historical subjects, and find myself constantly drawn away from strife toward the contemplation of the peaceful progress of civilization. Wars must doubtless be recorded, but let us not emphasize their details." Nearly seventy years ago (in 1828) that conscientious educator, Emma H. Willard of Troy, N. Y., deprecating the large space usually given to the wars, made the effort to supply a text-book of United States history of a more beneficent character than those ordinarily in use. Some time before the civil war, a Friend of New York city (Ruth Murray, I think), made an essay in the same direction. About 1880, appeared the compendious class book of Dr. Edward Taylor, and two or three years ago, the one compiled by Prof. A. C. Thomas of Haverford college. This, I understand, is being revised for a new edition. It will not suffice that the history compiler's standpoint be that of forbearance and amity between the United States and Great Britain, or between the Anglo-Saxon peoples the world over. The conscience of professing Christendom appears to be slowly coming up to the apprehension that the settlement of the misunderstandings and grievances of its component nations by resort to fighting, is not only expensive and barbarous, but that it is morally wrong. When that deeply inquisitive disciple |