suppose that the school histories
of every nation are partly bad. I imagine that most of them implant the
germ of international hatred in the boys and girls who have to study
them. Nations do not like each other, never have liked each other;
and it may very well be that school textbooks help this inclination to
dislike. Certainly we know what contempt and hatred for other nations
the Germans have been sedulously taught in their schools, and how
utterly they believed their teaching. How much better and wiser for the
whole world if all the boys and girls in all the schools everywhere
were henceforth to be started in life with a just and true notion of all
flags and the peoples over whom they fly! The League of Nations might
not then rest upon the quicksand of distrust and antagonism which it
rests upon today. But it is our own school histories that are my present
concern, and I repeat my opinion--or rather my conviction--that the way
in which they have concealed the truth from us is worse than silly,
it is harmful. I am not going to take up the whole list of their
misrepresentations, I will put but one or two questions to you.

When you finished school, what idea had you about the War of 1812?
I will tell you what mine was. I thought we had gone to war because
England was stopping American ships and taking American sailors out of
them for her own service. I could refer to Perry's victory on Lake Erie
and Jackson's smashing of the British at New Orleans; the name of the
frigate Constitution sent thrills through me. And we had pounded old
John Bull and sent him to the right about a second time! Such was my
glorious idea, and there it stopped. Did you know much more than that
about it when your schooling was done? Did you know that our reasons for
declaring war against Great Britain in 1812 were not so strong as they
had been three and four years earlier? That during those years England
had moderated her arrogance, was ready to moderate further, had placated
us for her brutal performance concerning the Chesapeake, wanted peace;
while we, who had been nearly unanimous for war, and with a fuller
purse in 1808, were now, by our own congressional fuddling and messing,
without any adequate army, and so divided in counsel that only one
northern state was wholly in favor of war? Did you know that our General
Hull began by invading Canada from Detroit and surrendered his whole
army without firing a shot? That the British overran Mic