These conditions have, of course, passed, and it is for those of us who would guard jealously our rights, and honestly fulfil our obligations, as American citizens to see to it that they do not recur. The Alliance announced its voluntary dissolution some time before its charter was annulled, but the testimony before the King committee, which the government has published, will be an important source of material for the historian of the war. German propaganda and activity in the Middle West did little for the Kaiser but to make the word “German” an odious term. “German” in business titles and in club names has disappeared and German language newspapers have in many instances changed their names or gone out of business. I question whether the end of the war will witness any manifestations of magnanimity that will make possible a restoration of the teaching of German in primary and high schools.
We of the Middle West, who had thought ourselves the especial guardians of American democracy, found with dismay that the mailed fist of Berlin was clutching our public schools. In Chicago, where so much time, money, and thought are expended in the attempt to Americanize the foreign accretions, the spelling-book used in the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades consisted wholly of word-lists, with the exception of two exercises—one of ten lines, describing the aptness of the natives of Central Australia in identifying the tracks of birds and animals, and another which is here reproduced:
THE KAISER IN THE MAKING
In the gymnasium at Cassel the German Kaiser spent three years of his boyhood, a diligent but not a brilliant pupil, ranking tenth among seventeen candidates for the university.
Many tales are told of this period of his life, and one of them, at least, is illuminating.
A professor, it is said, wishing to curry favor with his royal pupil, informed him overnight of the chapter in Greek that was to be made the subject of the next day’s lesson.
The young prince did what many boys would not have done. As soon as the classroom was opened on the following morning, he entered and wrote conspicuously on the blackboard the information that had been given him.
One may say unhesitatingly that a boy capable of such an action has the root of a fine character in him, possesses that chivalrous sense of fair play which is the nearest thing to a religion that may be looked for at that age, hates meanness and favoritism, and will, wherever possible, expose them. There is in him a fundamental bent toward what is clean, manly, and aboveboard.
The copy of the book before me bears the imprint, “Board of Education, City of Chicago, 1914.” The Kaiser’s “chivalrous sense of fair play” has, of course, ceased to be a matter of public instruction in the Western metropolis.
“Im Vaterland,” a German reading-book used in a number of Western schools, states frankly in its preface that it was “made in Germany,” and that “after the manuscript had been completed it was manifolded and copies were criticised by teachers in Prussia, Saxony, and Bavaria.”