PREFACE THE lectures of this book were delivered to audi ences of university students having a nucleus of school teachers and school superintendents, and were designed primarily to afford access to that reservoir of fact upon which every teacher must draw who would present adequately and convincingly the subject of patriotism. At the outset such teaching must be aimed at correcting error and dispelling the illusions which have been maliciously foisted upon a people so absorbed in making a fortune as not to have noted either the source of these doctrines or their pernicious character. The world war, whose prodigious bulk dwarfs every other consideration, was, as regards its origins, veiled at first and obscure to all save the more discerning; but the evidence has now been unloaded upon us in such overwhelming volume that we are submerged; and, though convinced, we are some of us unable out of the welter of facts to reconstruct a clear picture. It is this which the lectures of the present volume have attempted to supply. They have been but little modified since they were delivered, and the direct personal manner of presentation has generally been retained. The lecture upon "Our Debt to France," was delivered as a Bastille Day address before a mass meeting of citizens as well as to the class in patriotism, and it therefore assumed more the form of an oration. With the war has come a veritable library of material covering the wide range from official documents, through hundreds of special works and thousands of tracts and pamphlets, to tens of thousands of newspaper articles, many of them of the greatest value. The briefer articles which under other circumstances might be regarded as fugitive, have been given such wide circulation as to be within the reach of all, and in the bibliographies at the conclusion of each lecture I have included some of the more important of them. It has appeared to me to be my duty to speak with the utmost candor concerning those tendencies which carry a menace to our national life; and I have not hesitated to use the names of individuals who from positions of influence or responsibility, either unwittingly or from design, have misled the people in this crisis. Some have now become aware of their error, though comparatively few have made any serious attempt to retrieve the consequences of their acts, and there is a far larger number who have merely adopted a disguise now that the open hawking of their wares has become unprofitable or even dangerous. I am indebted to my friend, Professor Claude H. Van Tyne, for reading the manuscript to correct possible historical errors. W. H. H. UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, ANN ARBOR, September 28, 1918. |