An American literary man of great eminence, Dr. Edward Everett Hale, thus rebuked the poisoners of school children:
“But even now, think how much more care you give to the study of the histories of war than to the histories of peace. There are ten times as many people who know who commanded at the Battle of New Orleans as there are who could tell me the name of the great apostle who made freedom the law for Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Michigan. This man died leaving no memorial.”[[249]]
(6) The working class should speedily get control of public libraries and throw out and keep out books written especially to exalt war and puff the brilliant butchers who have guided millions of working men to death on blood-soaked battlefields,—throw out and burn all books designed to praise the Christian or pagan cannibalism, or the civilized savagery called war. Labor unions and all other working class bodies should make formal and vigorous protest against having anything said in the public schools in praise of war and in praise of distinguished butchers. Let them reflect too that military drills, given as such, with martial songs and war tales, cultivate blood lust in the children, blind them to the true meaning of war, make them an easy prey, later, to the crafty cowards who will seek to use them in future savage contests, and are thus an outrage on the children. For a dozen reasons the working class should get control of local school boards.[[250]]
(7) The following lines from a poem written by an elegant coward, are often used in the primary grades of the public schools:
“Form! Form! Riflemen, form!
Ready! be ready to meet the storm!
Riflemen! Riflemen! Riflemen, form!”
A school teacher can make a fool and a murderer of a boy of eight or ten years with such lines. Remember that poets and teachers who furnish the war-song chloroform for school children usually “side-step” when the storm breaks—no rifle business for them—they let others “meet the storm” which their poetry and teaching helped stir up. The war-song poet and the war-song school teacher, if you please, are too “cultivated and respectable” to be patriotically butchered.
Under no circumstances should a working class father and mother keep silent while a public school teacher or a Sunday-school teacher thrills the children’s blood and blasts the glorious sentiments of human brotherhood with recitals of war-tales and fulsome praise of men whose “glory” is red with the blood of tens of thousands of working class men. Such stories and such praise scar and brutalize the social natures of the children as distinctly as a hot branding iron would disfigure their tender faces.
(8) The little lovers, the children, who are conceived in love, born in love, and live on love, who hunger for love, long to love, glorify the home with love and make the sad world hope for—almost mad for—love, one generation of these sweet little lovers, these prattling sweethearts of mankind, would, when grown up, fill the world with an international love, if they were not bitten by the viper of petty, local patriotism.