The mother who will think about this matter somewhat will promptly realize that there is something disastrously wrong with the education which stings her little lovers with a murderer’s aspiration. There is something wrong when the gracious neighborliness and charming sociability of children give way to swaggering insolence and savage blood-lust.
Let the mother think of it: Even their playthings, their toys, are craftily used to sting, to debauch the imagination of the children, to write the hopes of brutes in the hearts of gentle children. Lately there has been enormous increase in the business of manufacturing toy soldiers, toy cavalry horses, toy cannon and toy Gatling guns, also khaki soldier clothing for children. “120,000 bales of scrap tin from the Puget Sound canneries were sent recently to Hamburg, Germany, to be made into toy soldiers.”[[251]] There can be no doubt about the results of using such garb and playthings. That the child is thus scarred is revealed when the tiny boy assumes the attitudes and the strut and swagger of the professional man-slaughterer. His very conversation with his military toys shows he is marked—ready.[[252]]
William Lloyd Garrison wrote:
“My country is the world, my countrymen are all mankind.”
But the stung child can not learn the meaning of Garrison’s noble words.
(9) Boy, kill one human being, and you will be called a murderer—despised and hanged. But kill a thousand human beings in war—and you become “great”! Deluded women smile upon you, little children gape at you, preachers praise you, politicians pet you, orators glorify you, capitalists grin at you, universities honor you, and the Government medals and pensions you;—but lonely, war-orphaned children and war-robbed widows, these despise you exactly in proportion as they understand you.
Remember, boy, the soldier’s sword reaches through the slaughtered father to others—reaches the hearts of helpless women and helpless children.
Which would you rather be, boy, a dead and useless slaughterer of men, or a live and useful man of peace?—a dead butcher or a live brother?
(10) Here, of course, the thought of patriotism occurs.
A great American, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote: