THE MEXICAN PLOT[ToC]
It is true that Germany does not know the meaning of honesty and fair play. Most Americans, in everything, want "a square deal." They demand it for themselves, and a true American feels that the harshest thing that can be said of him is that he is not fair and square in his dealings. In any American school, a pupil who is deceitful is at once shunned by all the other boys and girls as a "cheat" and a "sneak." He has no place among them, least of all in their games and sports, for not to play according to the rules of the game is to upset and spoil the sport entirely.
In playing some of our great national games, like baseball and football, where the players are divided into teams, one player, by cheating, does not suffer for it himself alone, but his whole team has to pay the penalty. Indeed, if he persisted in being unfair, he would soon lose his place in the team for all time.
The Germans would not understand this, and they would not understand that the last half of the ninth inning in a ball game is seldom played because the winners do not wish to "rub in" the defeat of their opponents. Some think that it is because German children have had few sports and games that the German nation has so little sense of honesty and fair play.
In German schools, the pupils at one time were allowed to engage in certain sports, but later these were officially forbidden.
The rulers of Germany have for years forbidden anything taught in their schools which did not praise Germany and make the children believe their Emperor to be a god. The pupils are taught in history, geography, and even in reading, only those facts about other countries which show how much inferior they are to Germany.
So the pupils have never learned the true and the interesting things about other countries in the great wide world. German history tells only about Germany's great war victories. The pupils never learn of Germany's defeats in war. The teacher makes the history class the liveliest of the day, often seeming to be more of a Fourth of July orator than a school teacher. The children are taught that Germany is the one civilized country in the world; that there was never anything good that did not come from Germany; that even the victory of the North, in the Civil War in America, was due to there being such a large majority of German-born men on the Northern side.
Their geography tells only about Germany's political divisions, its civilization, and its commerce. Their readers contain stories of German military "heroes." The two great school holidays are the Emperor's Birthday and Sedan Day, the anniversary of the great defeat of the French in the Franco-Prussian War.
The walls of the schoolrooms are covered with pictures of the Emperor, the Empress, and of battle scenes, especially those showing German soldiers bringing in French prisoners. The singing of "Deutschland über Alles" occurs several times a day.
A German boy is trained into a soldier, hard-hearted and deceitful. The pupils in school are made to spy on one another, and the teachers, too, spy on one another. An American boy was expelled from a German gymnasium in Berlin, because he refused to "tattle-tale" on the pupils in his class.