A Straight Deal; Or, The Ancient Grudge

Germany remains German; but when next she springs, she will make no blunders.

Chapter V: The Ancient Grudge

It was in Broad Street, Philadelphia, before we went to war, that I overheard the foolish—or propagandist—slur upon England in front of the bulletin board. After we were fighting by England’s side for our existence, you might have supposed such talk would cease. It did not. And after the Armistice, it continued. On the day we celebrated as “British Day,” a man went through the crowd in Wanamaker’s shop, asking, What had England done in the War, anyhow? Was he a German, or an Irishman, or an American in pay of Berlin? I do not know. But this I know: perfectly good Americans still talk like that. Cowboys in camp do it. Men and women in Eastern cities, persons with at least the external trappings of educated intelligence, play into the hands of the Germany of to-morrow, do their unconscious little bit of harm to the future of freedom and civilization, by repeating that England “has always been our enemy.” Then they mention the Revolution, the War of 1812, and England’s attitude during our Civil War, just as they invariably mentioned these things in 1917 and 1918, when England was our ally in a struggle (or life, and as they will be mentioning them in 1940, I presume, if they are still alive at that time).

Now, the Civil War ended fifty-five years ago, the War of 1812 one hundred and five, and the Revolution one hundred and thirty-seven. Suppose, while the Kaiser was butchering Belgium because she barred his way to that dinner he was going to eat in Paris in October, 1914, that France had said, “England is my hereditary enemy. Henry the Fifth and the Duke of Wellington and sundry Plantagenets fought me”; and suppose England had said, “I don’t care much for France. Joan of Arc and Napoleon and sundry other French fought me”—suppose they had sat nursing their ancient grudges like that? Well, the Kaiser would have dined in Paris according to his plan. And next, according to his plan, with the Channel ports taken he would have dined in London. And finally, according to his plan, and with the help of his “army of spies” overseas, he would have dined in New York and the White House. For German madness could not have defeated Germany’s plan of World dominion, if various nations had not got together and assisted. Other Americans there are, who do not resort to the Revolution for their grudge, but are in a commercial rage over this or that: wool, for instance. Let such Americans reflect that commercial grievances against England can be more readily adjusted than an absorption of all commerce by Germany can be adjusted. Wool and everything else will belong to Mathias Erzberger and his breed, if they carry out their intention. And the way to insure their carrying it out is to let them split us and England and all their competitors asunder by their ceaseless and ingenious propaganda, which plays upon every international prejudice, historic, commercial, or other, which is available. After August, 1914, England barred the Kaiser’s way to New York, and in 1917, we found it useful to forget about George the Third and the Alabama. In 1853 Prussia possessed one ship of war—her first.

In 1918 her submarines were prowling along our coast. For the moment they are no longer there. For a while they may not be. But do you think Germany intends that scraps of paper shall be abolished by any Treaty, even though it contain 80,000 words and a League of Nations? She will make of that Treaty a whole basket of scraps, if she can, and as soon as she can. She has said so. Her workingmen are at work, industrious and content with a quarter the pay for a longer day than anywhere else. Let those persons who cannot get over George the Third and the Alabama ponder upon this for a minute or two.

Chapter VI: Who Is Without Sin?

Much else is there that it were well they should ponder, and I am coming to it presently; but first, one suggestion. Most of us, if we dig back only fifty or sixty or seventy years, can disinter various relatives over whose doings we should prefer to glide lightly and in silence.

Do you mean to say that you have none? Nobody stained with any shade of dishonor? No grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-etc. grandfather or grandmother who ever made a scandal, broke a heart, or betrayed a trust? Every man Jack and woman Jill of the lot right back to Adam and Eve wholly good, honorable, and courageous? How fortunate to be sprung exclusively from the loins of centuries of angels—and to know all about them! Consider the hoard of virtue to which you have fallen heir!

But you know very well that this is not so; that every one of us has every kind of person for an ancestor; that all sorts of virtue and vice, of heroism and disgrace, are mingled in our blood; that inevitably amidst the huge herd of our grandsires black sheep as well as white are to be found.

As it is with men, so it is with nations. Do you imagine that any nation has a spotless history? Do you think that you can peer into our past, turn over the back pages of our record, and never come upon a single blot? Indeed you cannot. And it is better—a great deal better—that you should be aware of these blots. Such knowledge may enlighten you, may make you a better American. What we need is to be critics of ourselves, and this is exactly what we have been taught not to be.

We are quite good enough to look straight at ourselves. Owing to one thing and another we are cleaner, honester, humaner, and whiter than any people on the continent of Europe. If any nation on the continent of Europe has ever behaved with the generosity and magnanimity that we have shown to Cuba, I have yet to learn of it. They jeered at us about Cuba, did the Europeans of the continent. Their papers stuck their tongues in their cheeks. Of course our fine sentiments were all sham, they said. Of course we intended to swallow Cuba, and never had intended anything else. And when General Leonard Wood came away from Cuba, having made Havana healthy, having brought order out of chaos on the island, and we left Cuba independent, Europe jeered on. That dear old Europe!

Again, in 1909, it was not any European nation that returned to China their share of the indemnity exacted in consequence of the Boxer troubles; we alone returned our share to China—sixteen millions. It was we who prevented levying a punitive indemnity on China. Read the whole story; there is much more. We played the gentleman, Europe played the bully. But Europe calls us “dollar chasers.” That dear old Europe! Again, if any conquering General on the continent of Europe ever behaved as Grant did to Lee at Appomattox, his name has escaped me.

Again, and lastly—though I am not attempting to tell you here the whole tale of our decencies: Whose hands came away cleanest from that Peace Conference in Paris lately? What did we ask for ourselves? Everything we asked, save some repairs of damage, was for other people. Oh, yes! we are quite good enough to keep quiet about these things. No need whatever to brag. Bragging, moreover, inclines the listener to suspect you’re not so remarkable as you sound.

But all this virtue doesn’t in the least alter the fact that we’re like everybody else in having some dirty pages in our History. These pages it is a foolish mistake to conceal. I suppose that the school histories of every nation are partly bad. I imagine that most of them implant the germ of international hatred in the boys and girls who have to study them. Nations do not like each other, never have liked each other; and it may very well be that school textbooks help this inclination to dislike. Certainly we know what contempt and hatred for other nations the Germans have been sedulously taught in their schools, and how utterly they believed their teaching. How much better and wiser for the whole world if all the boys and girls in all the schools everywhere were henceforth to be started in life with a just and true notion of all flags and the peoples over whom they fly! The League of Nations might not then rest upon the quicksand of distrust and antagonism which it rests upon today. But it is our own school histories that are my present concern, and I repeat my opinion—or rather my conviction—that the way in which they have concealed the truth from us is worse than silly, it is harmful. I am not going to take up the whole list of their misrepresentations, I will put but one or two questions to you.

When you finished school, what idea had you about the War of 1812? I will tell you what mine was. I thought we had gone to war because England was stopping American ships and taking American sailors out of them for her own service. I could refer to Perry’s victory on Lake Erie and Jackson’s smashing of the British at New Orleans; the name of the frigate Constitution sent thrills through me. And we had pounded old John Bull and sent him to the right about a second time! Such was my glorious idea, and there it stopped. Did you know much more than that about it when your schooling was done? Did you know that our reasons for declaring war against Great Britain in 1812 were not so strong as they had been three and four years earlier? That during those years England had moderated her arrogance, was ready to moderate further, had placated us for her brutal performance concerning the Chesapeake, wanted peace; while we, who had been nearly unanimous for war, and with a fuller purse in 1808, were now, by our own congressional fuddling and messing, without any adequate army, and so divided in counsel that only one northern state was wholly in favor of war? Did you know that our General Hull began by invading Canada from Detroit and surrendered his whole army without firing a shot? That the British overran Michigan and parts of Ohio, and western New York, while we retreated disgracefully? That though we shone in victories of single combat on the sea and showed the English that we too knew how to sail and fight on the waves as hardily as Britannia (we won eleven out of thirteen of the frigate and sloop actions), nevertheless she caught us or blocked us up, and rioted unchecked along our coasts? You probably did know that the British burned Washington, and you accordingly hated them for this barbarous vandalism—but did you know that we had burned Toronto a year earlier?

I left school knowing none of this—it wasn’t in my school book, and I learned it in mature years with amazement. I then learned also that England, while she was fighting with us, had her hands full fighting Bonaparte, that her war with us was a sideshow, and that this was uncommonly lucky for us—as lucky quite as those ships from France under Admiral de Grasse, without whose help Washington could never have caught Cornwallis and compelled his surrender at Yorktown, October 19, 1781. Did you know that there were more French soldiers and sailors than Americans at Yorktown? Is it well to keep these things from the young? I have not done with the War of 1812. There is a political aspect of it that I shall later touch upon—something that my school books never mentioned.

My next question is, what did you know about the Mexican War of 1846-1847, when you came out of school? The names of our victories, I presume, and of Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott; and possibly the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, whereby Mexico ceded to us the whole of Texas, New Mexico, and Upper California, and we paid her fifteen millions. No doubt you know that Santa Anna, the Mexican General, had a wooden leg. Well, there is more to know than that, and I found it out much later. I found out that General Grant, who had fought with credit as a lieutenant in the Mexican War, briefly summarized it as “iniquitous.” I gradually, through my reading as a man, learned the truth about the Mexican War which had not been taught me as a boy—that in that war we bullied a weaker power, that we made her our victim, that the whole discreditable business had the extension of slavery at the bottom of it, and that more Americans were against it than had been against the War of 1812. But how many Americans ever learn these things? Do not most of them, upon leaving school, leave history also behind them, and become farmers, or merchants, or plumbers, or firemen, or carpenters, or whatever, and read little but the morning paper for the rest of their lives?

The blackest page in our history would take a long while to read. Not a word of it did I ever see in my school textbooks. They were written on the plan that America could do no wrong. I repeat that, just as we love our friends in spite of their faults, and all the more intelligently because we know these faults, so our love of our country would be just as strong, and far more intelligent, were we honestly and wisely taught in our early years those acts and policies of hers wherein she fell below her lofty and humane ideals. Her character and her record on the whole from the beginning are fine enough to allow the shadows to throw the sunlight into relief. To have produced at three stages of our growth three such men as Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, is quite sufficient justification for our existence

Chapter VII: Tarred with the Same Stick

The blackest page in our history is our treatment of the Indian. To speak of it is a thankless task—thankless, and necessary.

This land was the Indian’s house, not ours. He was here first, nobody knows how many centuries first. We arrived, and we shoved him, and shoved him, and shoved him, back, and back, and back. Treaty after treaty we made with him, and broke. We drew circles round his freedom, smaller and smaller. We allowed him such and such territory, then took it away and gave him less and worse in exchange. Throughout a century our promises to him were a whole basket of scraps of paper. The other day I saw some Indians in California. It had once been their place. All over that region they had hunted and fished and lived according to their desires, enjoying life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We came. To-day the hunting and fishing are restricted by our laws—not the Indian’s—because we wasted and almost exterminated in a very short while what had amply provided the Indian with sport and food for a very long while.

In that region we have taken, as usual, the fertile land and the running water, and have allotted land to the Indian where neither wood nor water exist, no crops will grow, no human life can be supported. I have seen the land. I have seen the Indian begging at the back door. Oh, yes, they were an “inferior race.” Oh, yes, they didn’t and couldn’t use the land to the best advantage, couldn’t build Broadway and the Union Pacific Railroad, couldn’t improve real estate. If you choose to call the whole thing “manifest destiny,” I am with you. I’ll not dispute that what we have made this continent is of greater service to mankind than the wilderness of the Indian ever could possibly have been—once conceding, as you have to concede, the inevitableness of civilization. Neither you, nor I, nor any man, can remold the sorry scheme of things entire. But we could have behaved better to the Indian. That was in our power. And we gave him a raw deal instead, not once, but again and again. We did it because we could do it without risk, because he was weaker and we could always beat him in the end. And all the while we were doing it, there was our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, founded on a new thing in the world, proclaiming to mankind the fairest hope yet born, that “All men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” and that these were now to be protected by law. Ah, no, look at it as you will, it is a black page, a raw deal. The officers of our frontier army know all about it, because they saw it happen. They saw the treaties broken, the thieving agents, the trespassing settlers, the outrages that goaded the deceived Indian to despair and violence, and when they were ordered out to kill him, they knew that he had struck in self-defense and was the real victim.

It is too late to do much about it now. The good people of the Indian Rights Association try to do something; but in spite of them, what little harm can still be done is being done through dishonest Indian agents and the mean machinery of politics. If you care to know more of the long, bad story, there is a book by Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor; it is not new. It assembles and sets forth what had been perpetrated up to the time when it was written. A second volume could be added now.

I have dwelt upon this matter here for a very definite reason, closely connected with my main purpose. It’s a favorite trick of our anti-British friends to call England a “land-grabber.” The way in which England has grabbed land right along, all over the world, is monstrous, they say. England has stolen what belonged to whites, and blacks, and bronzes, and yellows, wherever she could lay her hands upon it, they say. England is a criminal. They repeat this with great satisfaction, this land-grabbing indictment. Most of them know little or nothing of the facts, couldn’t tell you the history of a single case. But what are the facts to the man who asks, “What has England done in this war, anyway?” The word “land-grabber” has been passed to him by German and Sinn Fein propaganda, and he merely parrots it forth. He couldn’t discuss it at all. “Look at the Boers,” he may know enough to reply, if you remind him that England’s land-grabbing was done a good while ago. Well, we shall certainly look at the Boers in due time, but just now we must look at ourselves. I suppose that the American who denounces England for her land-grabbing has forgotten, or else has never known, how we grabbed Florida from Spain. The pittance that we paid Spain in one of the Florida transactions never went to her. The story is a plain tale of land-grabbing; and there are several other plain tales that show us to have been land-grabbers, if you will read the facts with an honest mind. I shall not tell them here. The case of the Indian is enough in the way of an instance. Our own hands are by no means clean. It is not for us to denounce England as a land-grabber.

You cannot hate statistics more than I do. But at times there is no dodging them, and this is one of the times. In 1803 we paid Napoleon Bonaparte fifteen millions for what was then called Louisiana. Napoleon had his title to this land from Spain. Spain had it from France. France had it—how? She had it because La Salle, a Frenchman, sailed down the Mississippi River. This gave him title to the land. There were people on the bank already, long before La Salle came by.

It would have surprised them to be told that the land was no longer theirs because a man had come by on the water. But nobody did tell them. They were Indians. They had wives and children and wigwams and other possessions in the land where they had always lived; but they were red, and the man in the boat was white, and therefore they were turned into trespassers because he had sailed by in a boat. That was the title to Louisiana which we bought from Napoleon Bonaparte.

The Louisiana Purchase was a piece of land running up the Mississippi, up the Missouri, over the Divide, and down the Columbia to the Pacific. Before we acquired it, our area was over a quarter, but not half, a million square miles. This added nearly a million square miles more. But what had we really bought? Nothing but stolen goods. The Indians were there before La Salle, from whose boat-sailing the title we bought was derived. “But,” you may object, “when whites rob reds or blacks, we call it Discovery; land-grabbing is when whites rob whites—and that is where I blame England.” For the sake of argument I concede this, and refer you to our acquisition of Texas. This operation followed some years after the Florida operation. “By request” we “annexed” most of present Texas—in 1845. That was a trick of our slaveholders. They sent people into Texas and these people swung the deal. It was virtually a theft from Mexico. A little while later, in 1848, we “paid” Mexico for California, Arizona, and Nevada. But if you read the true story of Fremont in California, and of the American plots there before the Mexican War, to undermine the government of a friendly nation, plots connived at in Washington with a view to getting California for ourselves, upon my word you will find it hard to talk of England being a land-grabber and keep a straight face. And, were a certain book to fall into your hands, the narrative of the Alcalde of Monterey, wherein he sets down what of Fremont’s doings in California went on before his eyes, you would learn a story of treachery, brutality, and greed. All this acquisition of territory, together with the Gadsden Purchase a few years later, brought our continent to its present area—not counting Alaska or some islands later acquired—2,970,230 square miles.

Please understand me very clearly: I am not saying that it has not been far better for the world and for civilization that we should have become the rulers of all this land, instead of its being ruled by the Indians or by Spain, or by Mexico. That is not at all the point. I am merely reminding you of the means whereby we got the land. We got it mostly by force and fraud, by driving out of it through firearms and plots people who certainly were there first and who were weaker than ourselves. Our reason was simply that we wanted it and intended to have it. That is precisely what England has done. She has by various means not one whit better or worse than ours, acquired her possessions in various parts of the world because they were necessary to her safety and welfare, just as this continent was necessary to our safety and welfare. Moreover, the pressure upon her, her necessity for self-preservation, was far more urgent than was the pressure upon us. To make you see this, I must once again resort to some statistics.

England’s area—herself and adjacent islands—is 120,832 square miles. Her population in 1811 was eighteen and one half millions. At that same time our area was 408,895 square miles, not counting the recent Louisiana Purchase. And our population was 7,239,881. With an area less than one third of ours (excluding the huge Louisiana) England had a population more than twice as great. Therefore she was more crowded than we were—how much more I leave you to figure out for yourself. I appeal to the fair-minded American reader who only “wants to be shown,” and I say to him, when some German or anti-British American talks to him about what a land-grabber England has been in her time to think of these things and to remember that our own past is tarred with the same stick. Let every one of us bear in mind that little sentence of the Kaiser’s, “Even now I rule supreme in the United States;” let us remember that the Armistice and the Peace Treaty do not seem to have altered German nature or German plans very noticeably, and don’t let us muddle our brains over the question of the land grabbed by the great-grandfathers of present England.

Any American who is anti-British to-day is by just so much pro-German, is helping the trouble of the world, is keeping discord alight, is doing his bit against human peace and human happiness.

There are some other little sentences of the Kaiser and his Huns of which I shall speak before I finish: we must now take up the controversy of those men in front of the bulletin board; we must investigate what lies behind that controversy. Those two men are types. One had learned nothing since he left school, the other had.

Chapter VIII: History Astigmatic

So far as I know, it was Mr. Sydney Gent Fisher, an American, who was the first to go back to the original documents, and to write from study of these documents the complete truth about England and ourselves during the Revolution. His admirable book tore off the cloak which our school histories had wrapped round the fables. He lays bare the political state of Britain at that time. What did you learn at your school of that political state? Did you ever wonder able General Howe and his manner of fighting us? Did it ever strike you that, although we were more often defeated than victorious in those engagements with him (and sometimes he even seemed to avoid pitched battles with us when the odds were all in his favor), yet somehow England did seem to reap the advantage she should be reaped from those contests, didn’t follow them, let us get away, didn’t in short make any progress to speak of in really conquering us? Perhaps you attributed this to our brave troops and our great Washington. Well, our troops were brave and Washington was great; but there was more behind—more than your school teaching ever led you to suspect, if your schooling was like mine. I imagined England as being just one whole unit of fury and tyranny directed against us and determined to stamp out the spark of liberty we had kindled. No such thing! England was violently divided in sentiment about us. Two parties, almost as opposed as our North and South have been—only it was not sectional in England—held very different views about liberty and the rights of Englishmen. The King’s party, George the Third and his upholders, were fighting to saddle autocracy upon England; the other party, that of Pitt and Burke, were resisting this, and their sentiments and political beliefs led them to sympathize with our revolt against George III. “I rejoice,” writes Horace Walpole, Dec. 5, 1777, to the Countess of Upper Ossory, “that the Americans are to be free, as they had a right to be, and as I am sure they have shown they deserve to be.... I own there are very able Englishmen left, but they happen to be on t’other side of the Atlantic.” It was through Whig influence that General Howe did not follow up his victories over us, because they didn’t wish us to be conquered, they wished us to be able to vindicate the rights to which they held all Englishmen were entitled. These men considered us the champions of that British liberty which George III was attempting to crush. They disputed the rightfulness of the Stamp Act. When we refused to submit to the Stamp Tax in 1766, it was then that Pitt exclaimed in Parliament: “I rejoice that America has resisted.... If ever this nation should have a tyrant for a King, six millions of freemen, so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would be fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.” But they were not willing. When the hour struck and the war came, so many Englishmen were on our side that they would not enlist against us, refused to fight us, and George III had to go to Germany and obtain Hessians to help him out. His war against us was lost at home, on English soil, through English disapproval of his course, almost as much as it was lost here through the indomitable Washington and the help of France. That is the actual state of the case, there is the truth. Did you hear much about this at school? Did you ever learn there that George III had a fake Parliament, largely elected by fake votes, which did not represent the English people; that this fake Parliament was autocracy’s last ditch in England; that it choked for a time the English democracy which, after the setback given it by the excesses of the French Revolution, went forward again until to-day the King of England has less power than the President of the United States? I suppose everybody in the world who knows the important steps of history knows this—except the average American. From him it has been concealed by his school histories; and generally he never learns anything about it at all, because once out of school, he seldom studies any history again. But why, you may possibly wonder, have our school histories done this? I think their various authors may consciously or unconsciously have felt that our case against England was not in truth very strong, that in fact she had been very easy with us, far easier than any other country was being with its colonies at that time. The King of France taxed his colonies, the King of Spain filled his purse, unhampered, from the pockets of Mexico and Peru and Cuba and Porto Rico—from whatever pocket into which he could put his hand, and the Dutch were doing the same without the slightest question of their right to do it. Our quarrel with the mother country and our breaking away from her in spite of the extremely light rein she was driving us with, rested in reality upon very slender justification. If ever our authors read of the meeting between Franklin, Rutledge, and Adams with General Howe, after the Battle of Long Island, I think they may have felt that we had almost no grievance at all. The plain truth of it was, we had been allowed for so long to be so nearly free that we determined to be free entirely, no matter what England conceded. Therefore these authors of our school textbooks felt that they needed to bolster our cause up for the benefit of the young. Accordingly our boys’ and girls’ sense of independence and patriotism must be nourished by making England out a far greater oppressor than ever she really had been. These historians dwelt as heavily as they could upon George III and his un-English autocracy, and as lightly as they could upon the English Pitt and upon all the English sympathy we had. Indeed, about this most of them didn’t say a word.

Now that policy may possibly have been desirable once—if it can ever be desirable to suppress historic truth from a whole nation. But to-day, when we have long stood on our own powerful legs and need no bolstering up of such a kind, that policy is not only silly, it is pernicious. It is pernicious because the world is heaving with frightful menaces to all the good that man knows. They would strip life of every resource gathered through centuries of struggle. Mad mobs, whole races of people who have never thought at all, or who have now hurled away all pretense of thought, aim at mere destruction of everything that is. They don’t attempt to offer any substitute. Down with religion, down with education, down with marriage, down with law, down with property: Such is their cry. Wipe the slate blank, they say, and then we’ll see what we’ll write on it. Amid this stands Germany with her unchanged purpose to own the earth; and Japan is doing some thinking. Amid this also is the Anglo-Saxon race, the race that has brought our law, our order, our safety, our freedom into the modern world. That any school histories should hinder the members of this race from understanding each other truly and being friends, should not be tolerated.

Many years later than Mr. Sydney George Fisher’s analysis of England under George III, Mr. Charles Altschul has made an examination and given an analysis of a great number of those school textbooks wherein our boys and girls have been and are still being taught a history of our Revolution in the distorted form that I have briefly summarized. His book was published in 1917, by the George H. Doran Company, New York, and is entitled The American Revolution in our School Textbooks. Here following are some of his discoveries:

Of forty school histories used twenty years ago in sixty-eight cities, and in many more unreported, four tell the truth about King George’s pocket Parliament, and thirty-two suppress it. To-day our books are not quite so bad, but it is not very much better; and-to-day, be it added, any reforming of these textbooks by Boards of Education is likely to be prevented, wherever obstruction is possible, by every influence visible and invisible that pro-German and pro-Irish propaganda can exert. Thousands of our American school children all over our country are still being given a version of our Revolution and the political state of England then, which is as faulty as was George III’s government, with its fake parliament, its “rotten boroughs,” its Little Sarum. Meanwhile that “army of spies” through which the Kaiser boasted that he ruled “supreme” here, and which, though he is gone, is by no means a demobilized army, but a very busy and well-drilled and well-conducted army, is very glad that our boys and girls should be taught false history, and will do its best to see that they are not taught true history.

Mr. Charles Altschul, in his admirable enterprise, addressed himself to those who preside over our school world all over the country; he received answers from every state in the Union, and he examined ninety-three history textbooks in those passages and pages which they devoted to our Revolution. These books he grouped according to the amount of information they gave about Pitt and Burke and English sympathy with us in our quarrel with George III. These groups are five in number, and dwindle down from group one, “Textbooks which deal fully with the grievances of the colonists, give an account of general political conditions in England prior to the American Revolution, and give credit to prominent Englishmen for the services they rendered the Americans,” to group five, “Textbooks which deal fully with the grievances of the colonists, make no reference to general political conditions in England prior to the American Revolution, nor to any prominent Englishmen who devoted themselves to the cause of the Americans.” Of course, what dwindles is the amount said about our English sympathizers. In groups three and four this is so scanty as to distort the truth and send any boy or girl who studied books of these groups out of school into life with a very imperfect idea indeed of the size and importance of English opposition to the policy of George III; in group five nothing is said about this at all. The boys and girls who studied books in group five would grow up believing that England was undividedly autocratic, tyrannical, and hostile to our liberty. In his careful and conscientious classification, Mr. Altschul gives us the books in use twenty years ago (and hence responsible for the opinion of Americans now between thirty and forty years old) and books in use to-day, and hence responsible for the opinion of those American men and women who will presently be grown up and will prolong for another generation the school-taught ignorance and prejudice of their fathers and mothers. I select from Mr. Altschul’s catalogue only those books in use in 1917, when he published his volume, and of these only group five, where the facts about English sympathy with us are totally suppressed. Barnes’ School History of the United States, by Steele. Chandler and Chitword’s Makers of American History. Chambers’ (Hansell’s) A School History of the United States. Eggleston’s A First Book in American History. Eggleston’s History of the United States and Its People. Eg-gleston’s New Century History of the United States. Evans’ First Lessons in Georgia History. Evans’ The Essential Facts of American History. Estill’s Beginner’s History of Our Country. Forman’s History of the United States. Montgomery’s An Elementary American History. Montgomery’s The Beginner’s American History. White’s Beginner’s History of the United States.

If the reader has followed me from the beginning, he will recollect a letter, parts of which I quoted, from a correspondent who spoke of Montgomery’s history, giving passages in which a fair and adequate recognition of Pitt and our English sympathizers and their opposition to George III is made. This would seem to indicate a revision of the work since Mr. Altschul published his lists, and to substantiate the hope I expressed in my original article, and which I here repeat. Surely the publishers of these books will revise them! Surely any patriotic American publisher and any patriotic board of education, school principal, or educator, will watch and resist all propaganda and other sinister influence tending to perpetuate this error of these school histories! Whatever excuse they once had, be it the explanation I have offered above, or some other, there is no excuse to-day. These books have laid the foundation from which has sprung the popular prejudice against England. It has descended from father to son. It has been further solidified by many tales for boys and girls, written by men and women who acquired their inaccurate knowledge at our schools. And it plays straight into the hands of our enemies.

Chapter IX: Concerning a Complex

All of these books, history and fiction, drop into the American mind during its early springtime the seed of antagonism, establish in fact an anti-English “complex.” It is as pretty a case of complex on the wholesale as could well be found by either historian or psychologist. It is not so violent as the complex which has been planted in the German people by forty years of very adroitly and carefully planned training: they were taught to distrust and hate everybody and to consider themselves so superior to anybody that their sacred duty as they saw it in 1914 was to enslave the world in order to force upon the world the priceless benefits of their Kultur. Under the shock of war that complex dilated into a form of real hysteria or insanity. Our anti-English com-plex is fortunately milder than that; but none the less does it savor slightly, as any nerve specialist or psychological doctor would tell you—-it savors slightly of hysteria, that hundreds of thousands of American men and women of every grade of education and ignorance should automatically exclaim whenever the right button is pressed, “England is a land-grabber,” and “What has England done in the War?”

The word complex has been in our dictionary for a long while. This familiar adjective has been made by certain scientific people into a noun, and for brevity and convenience employed to denote something that almost all of us harbor in some form or other. These complexes, these lumps of ideas or impressions that match each other, that are of the same pattern, and that are also invariably tinctured with either a pleasurable or painful emotion, lie buried in our minds, unthought-of but alive, and lurk always ready to set up a ferment, whenever some new thing from outside that matches them enters the mind and hence starts them off. The “suppressed complex” I need not describe, as our English complex is by no means suppressed. Known to us all, probably, is the political complex. Year after year we have been excited about elections and candidates and policies, preferring one party to the other. If this preference has been very marked, or even violent, you know how disinclined we are to give credit to the other party for any act or policy, no matter how excellent in itself, which, had our own party been its sponsor, we should have been heart and soul for. You know how easily we forget the good deeds of the opposite party and how easily we remember its bad deeds. That’s a good simple ordinary example of a complex. Its workings can be discerned in the experience of us all. In our present discussion it is very much to the point.

Established in the soft young minds of our school boys and girls by a series of reiterated statements about the tyranny and hostility of England towards us in the Revolution, statements which they have to remember and master by study from day to day, tinctured by the anxiety about the examination ahead, when the students must know them or fail, these incidents of school work being also tinctured by another emotion, that of patriotism, enthusiasm for Washington, for the Declaration of Independence, for Valley Forge—thus established in the regular way of all complexes, this anti-English complex is fed and watered by what we learn of the War of 1812, by what we learn of the Civil War of 1861, and by many lesser events in our history thus far. And just as a Republican will admit nothing good of a Democrat and a Democrat nothing good of a Republican because of the political complex, so does the great—the vast—majority of Americans automatically and easily remember everything against England and forget everything in her favor. Just try it any day you like. Ask any average American you are sitting next to in a train what he knows about England; and if he does remember anything and can tell it to you, it will be unfavorable nine times in ten. The mere word “England” starts his complex off, and out comes every fact it has seized that matches his school-implanted prejudice, just as it has rejected every fact that does not match it. There is absolutely no other way to explain the American habit of speaking ill of England and well of France. Several times in the past, France has been flagrantly hostile to us. But there was Lafayette, there was Rochambeau, and the great service France did us then against England. Hence from our school histories we have a pro-French complex. Under its workings we automatically remember every good turn France has done us and automatically forget the evil turns. Again try the experiment yourself. How many Americans do you think that you will find who can recall, or who even know when you recall to them the insolent and meddlesome Citizen Genet, envoy of the French Republic, and how Washington requested his recall? Or the French privateers that a little later, about 1797-98, preyed upon our commerce? And the hatred of France which many Americans felt and expressed at that time? How many remember that the King of France, directly our Revolution was over, was more hostile to us than England?

Chapter X: Jackstraws

Jackstraws is a game which most of us have played in our youth. You empty on a table a box of miniature toy rakes, shovels, picks, axes, all sorts of tools and implements. These lie under each other and above each other in intricate confusion, not unlike cross timber in a western forest, only instead of being logs, they are about two inches long and very light. The players sit round the table and with little hooks try in turn to lift one jackstraw out of the heap, without moving any of the others. You go on until you do move one of the others, and this loses you your turn. European diplomacy at any moment of any year reminds you, if you inspect it closely, of a game of jackstraws. Every sort and shape of intrigue is in the general heap and tangle, and the jealous nations sit round, each trying to lift out its own jackstraw. Luckily for us, we have not often been involved in these games of jackstraw hitherto; unluckily for us, we must be henceforth involved. If we kept out, our luck would be still worse.

Immediately after our Revolution, there was one of these heaps of intrigue, in which we were concerned. This was at the time of the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Paris, to which I made reference at the close of the last section. This was in 1783. Twenty years later, in 1803, occurred the heap of jackstraws that led to the Louisiana Purchase. Twenty years later, in 1823, occurred the heap of jackstraws from which emerged the Monroe Doctrine. Each of these dates, dotted along through our early decades, marks a very important crisis in our history. It is well that they should be grouped together, because together they disclose, so to speak, a coherent pattern. This coherent pattern is England’s attitude towards ourselves. It is to be perceived, faintly yet distinctly, in 1783, and it grows clearer and ever more clear until in 1898, in the game of jackstraws played when we declared war upon Spain, the pattern is so clear that it could not be mistaken by any one who was not willfully blinded by an anti-English complex. This pattern represents a preference on England’s part for ourselves to other nations. I do not ask you to think England’s reason for this preference is that she has loved us so much; that she has loved others so much less—there is her reason. She has loved herself better than anybody. So must every nation. So does every nation.

Let me briefly speak of the first game of jackstraws, played at Paris in 1783. Our Revolution was over. The terms of peace had to be drawn. Franklin, Jay, Adams, and Laurens were our negotiators. The various important points were acknowledgment of our independence, settlement of boundaries, freedom of fishing in the neighborhood of the Canadian coast. We had agreed to reach no settlement with England separately from France and Spain. They were our recent friends. England, our recent enemy, sent Richard Oswald as her peace commissioner. This private gentleman had placed his fortune at our disposal during the war, and was Franklin’s friend. Lord Shelburne wrote Franklin that if this was not satisfactory, to say so, and name any one he preferred. But Oswald was satisfactory; and David Hartley, another friend of Franklin’s and also a sympathizer with our Revolution, was added; and in these circumstances and by these men the Treaty was made. To France we broke our promise to reach no separate agreement with England. We negotiated directly with the British, and the Articles were signed without consultation with the French Government. When Vergennes, the French Minister, saw the terms, he remarked in disgust that England would seem to have bought a peace rather than made one. By the treaty we got the Northwest Territory and the basin of the Ohio River to the Mississippi. Our recent friend, the French King, was much opposed to our having so much territory. It was our recent enemy, England, who agreed that we should have it. This was the result of that game of jackstraws.

Let us remember several things: in our Revolution, France had befriended us, not because she loved us so much, but because she loved England so little. In the Treaty of Paris, England stood with us, not because she loved us so much, but because she loved France so little. We must cherish no illusions. Every nation must love itself more than it loves its neighbor. Nevertheless, in this pattern of England’s policy in 1783, where she takes her stand with us and against other nations, there is a deep significance. Our notions of law, our notions of life, our notions of religion, our notions of liberty, our notions of what a man should be and what a woman should be, are so much more akin to her notions than to those of any other nation, that they draw her toward us rather than toward any other nation. That is the lesson of the first game of jackstraws.

Next comes 1803. Upon the Louisiana Purchase, I have already touched; but not upon its diplomatic side. In those years the European game of diplomacy was truly portentous. Bonaparte had appeared, and Bonaparte was the storm centre. From the heap of jackstraws I shall lift out only that which directly concerns us and our acquisition of that enormous territory, then called Louisiana. Bonaparte had dreamed and planned an empire over here. Certain vicissitudes disenchanted him. A plan to invade England also helped to deflect his mind from establishing an outpost of his empire upon our continent. For us he had no love. Our principles were democratic, he was a colossal autocrat. He called us “the reign of chatter,” and he would have liked dearly to put out our light. Addington was then the British Prime Minister. Robert R. Livingston was our minister in Paris. In the history of Henry Adams, in Volume II at pages 52 and 53, you may find more concerning Bonaparte’s dislike of the United States. You may also find that Talleyrand expressed the view that socially and economically England and America were one and indivisible. In Volume I of the same history, at page 439, you will see the mention which Pichon made to Talleyrand of the overtures which England was incessantly making to us. At some time during all this, rumor got abroad of Bonaparte’s projects regarding Louisiana. In the second volume of Henry Adams, at pages 23 and 24, you will find Addington remarking to our minister to Great Britain, Rufus King, that it would not do to let Bonaparte establish himself in Louisiana. Addington very plainly hints that Great Britain would back us in any such event. This backing of us by Great Britain found very cordial acceptance in the mind of Thomas Jefferson. A year before the Louisiana Purchase was consummated, and when the threat of Bonaparte was in the air, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Livingston, on April 18, 1802, that “the day France takes possession of New Orleans, we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” In one of his many memoranda to Talleyrand, Livingston alludes to the British fleet. He also points out that France may by taking a certain course estrange the United States for ever and bind it closely to France’s great enemy. This particular address to Talleyrand is dated February 1, 1803, and may be found in the Annals of Congress, 1802-1803, at pages 1078 to 1083. I quote a sentence: “The critical moment has arrived which rivets the connexion of the United States to France, or binds a young and growing people for ages hereafter to her mortal and inveterate enemy.” After this, hints follow concerning the relative maritime power of France and Great Britain. Livingston suggests that if Great Britain invade Louisiana, who can oppose her? Once more he refers to Great Britain’s superior fleet. This interesting address concludes with the following exordium to France: “She will cheaply purchase the esteem of men and the favor of Heaven by the surrender of a distant wilderness, which can neither add to her wealth nor to her strength.” This, as you will perceive, is quite a pointed remark. Throughout the Louisiana diplomacy, and negotiations to which this diplomacy led, Livingston’s would seem to be the master American mind and prophetic vision. But I must keep to my jackstraws. On April 17, 1803, Bonaparte’s brother, Lucien, reports a conversation held with him by Bonaparte. What purposes, what oscillations, may have been going on deep in Bonaparte’s secret mind, no one can tell. We may guess that he did not relinquish his plan about Louisiana definitely for some time after the thought had dawned upon him that it would be better if he did relinquish it. But unless he was lying to his brother Lucien on April 17, 1803, we get no mere glimpse, but a perfectly clear sight of what he had come finally to think. It was certainly worth while, he said to Lucien, to sell when you could what you were certain to lose; “for the English... are aching for a chance to capture it.... Our navy, so inferior to our neighbor’s across the Channel, will always cause our colonies to be exposed to great risks.... As to the sea, my dear fellow, you must know that there we have to lower the flag.... The English navy is, and long will be, too dominant.”

That was on April 17. On May 2, the Treaty of Cession was signed by the exultant Livingston. Bonaparte, instead of establishing an outpost of autocracy at New Orleans, sold to us not only the small piece of land which we had originally in mind, but the huge piece of land whose dimensions I have given above. We paid him fifteen millions for nearly a million square miles. The formal transfer was made on December 17 of that same year, 1803. There is my second jackstraw.

Thus, twenty years after the first time in 1783, Great Britain stood between us and the designs of another nation. To that other nation her fleet was the deciding obstacle. England did not love us so much, but she loved France so much less. For the same reasons which I have suggested before, self-interest, behind which lay her democratic kinship with our ideals, ranged her with us.

To place my third jackstraw, which follows twenty years after the second, uninterruptedly in this group, I pass over for the moment our War of 1812. To that I will return after I have dealt with the third jackstraw, namely, the Monroe Doctrine. It was England that suggested the Monroe Doctrine to us. From the origin of this in the mind of Canning to its public announcement upon our side of the water, the pattern to which I have alluded is for the third time very clearly to be seen.

How much did your school histories tell you about the Monroe Doctrine? I confess that my notion of it came to this: President Monroe informed the kings of Europe that they must keep away from this hemisphere. Whereupon the kings obeyed him and have remained obedient ever since. Of George Canning I knew nothing. Another large game of jackstraws was being played in Europe in 1823. Certain people there had formed the Holy Alliance. Among these, Prince Metternich the Austrian was undoubtedly the master mind. He saw that by England’s victory at Waterloo a threat to all monarchical and dynastic systems of government had been created. He also saw that our steady growth was a part of the same threat. With this in mind, in 1822, he brought about the Holy Alliance. The first Article of the Holy Alliance reads: “The high contracting Powers, being convinced that the system of representative government is as equally incompatible with the monarchical principle as the maxim of sovereignty of the people with the Divine right, engage mutually, in the most solemn manner, to use all their efforts to put an end to the system of representative governments, in whatever country it may exist in Europe, and to prevent its being introduced in those countries where it is not yet known.”

Behind these words lay a design, hardly veiled, not only against South America, but against ourselves. In a volume entitled With the Fathers, by John Bach McMaster, and also in the fifth volume of Mr. McMaster’s history, chapter 41, you will find more amply what I abbreviate here. Canning understood the threat to us contained in the Holy Alliance. He made a suggestion to Richard Rush, our minister to England. The suggestion was of such moment, and the ultimate danger to us from the Holy Alliance was of such moment, that Rush made haste to put the matter into the hands of President Monroe. President Monroe likewise found the matter very grave, and he therefore consulted Thomas Jefferson. At that time Jefferson had retired from public life and was living quietly at his place in Virginia. That President Monroe’s communication deeply stirred him is to be seen in his reply, written October 24, 1823. Jefferson says in part: “The question presented by the letters you have sent me is the most momentous which has ever been offered to my contemplation since that of independence.... One nation most of all could disturb us.... She now offers to lead, aid and accompany us.... With her on our side we need not fear the whole world. With her, then, we should most seriously cherish a cordial friendship, and nothing would tend more to unite our affections than to be fighting once more, side by side, in the same cause.”

Thus for the second time, Thomas Jefferson advises a friendship with Great Britain. He realizes as fully as did Bonaparte the power of her navy, and its value to us. It is striking and strange to find Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, writing in 1823 about uniting our affections and about fighting once more side by side with England.

It was the revolt of the Spanish Colonies from Spain in South America, and Canning’s fear that France might obtain dominion in America, which led him to make his suggestion to Rush. The gist of the suggestion was, that we should join with Great Britain in saying that both countries were opposed to any intervention by Europe in the western hemisphere. Over our announcement there was much delight in England. In the London Courier occurs a sentence, “The South American Republics—protected by the two nations that possess the institutions and speak the language of freedom.” In this fragment from the London Courier, the kinship at which I have hinted as being felt by England in 1783, and in 1803, is definitely expressed. From the Holy Alliance, from the general European diplomatic game, and from England’s preference for us who spoke her language and thought her thoughts about liberty, law, what a man should be, what a woman should be, issued the Monroe Doctrine. And you will find that no matter what dynastic or ministerial interruptions have occurred to obscure this recognition of kinship with us and preference for us upon the part of the English people, such interruptions are always temporary and lie always upon the surface of English sentiment. Beneath the surface the recognition of kinship persists unchanged and invariably reasserts itself.

That is my third jackstraw. Canning spoke to Rush, Rush consulted Monroe, Monroe consulted Jefferson, and Jefferson wrote what we have seen. That, stripped of every encumbering circumstance, is the story of the Monroe Doctrine. Ever since that day the Monroe Doctrine has rested upon the broad back of the British Navy. This has been no secret to our leading historians, our authoritative writers on diplomacy, and our educated and thinking public men. But they have not generally been eager to mention it; and as to our school textbooks, none that I studied mentioned it at all.