SHOULD OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM 
 INCLUDE ACTIVITIES WHOSE 
 SPECIAL PURPOSE IS PREP- 
 ARATION FOR WAR? 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN H. FINLEY 
 
D. 
 
 UL 
 
 of D„? 
 14 19 5 
 
SHOULD OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM 
 INCLUDE ACTIVITIES WHOSE 
 SPECIAL PURPOSE IS PREP- 
 ARATION FOR WAR? 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN H. FINLEY 
 
<v 
 
 V <£6 
 
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE DEPARTMENT 
 OF SUPERINTENDENT op THE NATIONAL EDUCA- 
 TION ASSOCIATION AT CINCINNATI, OHIO, 
 FEBRUARY 24, 19 15 
 
SHOULD OUK EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM INCLUDE 
 ACTIVITIES WHOSE SPECIAL PURPOSE IS PREPA- 
 RATION FOR WAR ? 
 
 If by " our educational system " you mean our elementary and 
 secondary schools through which a republic is consciously, sacrifi- 
 cially trying to give her eighteen million children each year 
 tuition of a longing that in its very transmission becomes a 
 prophecy; an institution whose very maintenance is a prayer ut- 
 tered by one generation through a thousand hours of every year 
 for all that "it could never be"; an institution in which the 
 future takes counsel of all the race hope and human failure of the 
 past ; 
 
 And if you mean by " war " that hellish thing which is now 
 going on in Europe, that vocation of jealousy, envy and hate, 
 pursued with every skill that the human mind and hand have 
 learned, with every passion that the brute has bequeathed, but 
 exposing incidentally every virtue that a god knows ; — 
 
 If you mean by " our educational system " that which attempts 
 to express what we most want to keep, out of all human experience 
 in the eternity back of us, and what we most desire to hand on 
 to those who are to live in the eternity before us — some haunting 
 memory of the Creator's purpose for man, some stirring strain 
 that drives us, leads us on, that " harries man to love the best " ; 
 
 And if you mean by " war " that which drags one man back to 
 the savage even while it lets the divinity in another find its exalted 
 eternal expression, that which is strewing with stark and rotting 
 corpses fields already twice red with the carnage of Caesar and 
 Napoleon, that which, as in the days of Jeremiah, has " taken 
 away the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the 
 bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones 
 and the light of the candle " ; — 
 
 If you mean by " our educational system " not merely curri- 
 culums and budgets and licenses and pensions, and miserable lone- 
 some rural schools and beautiful urban structures, but the visible, 
 organized, disciplined aspiration of a race moving toward some 
 higher goal; 
 
 [51 
 
6 
 
 And if you mean by " war " that which is pictured in the recent 
 report in the Alumni Weekly of a Yale man, fresh from the 
 trenches in the north of France : " Then the machine guns opened 
 on them witheringly, they were falling in hundreds, but on they 
 pressed (in dense ranks). They came nearer and the British 
 could hear them singing ' The Watch on the Rhine ' — thousands 
 of voices, while hundreds carried the air on mouth organs. They 
 were getting close. It was time for musketry. The English ob- 
 served that only half of the approaching mass wore uniforms. 
 ' Shoot low,' commanded the English officer, ' they are only boys ; 
 aim at their legs.' . . . Only a few reached the trenches " ; 
 
 If you mean by " our educational system " the " substance of 
 things hoped for " in a democracy's highest faith ; and if you 
 mean by v 'war" that sublimated brutish game played under 
 international rules, whose issue is absurdly assumed to determine 
 relative values of civilizations ; that greatest tragedy which 
 would be the greatest comedy if it were not tragedy — then I 
 answer " No ! " " Our educational system " in its basic nation- 
 wide disciplines, in its earthwide racial heritages and in its voca- 
 tional courses, should not include those whose special purpose is 
 preparation for " war." No, by all our hopes for the millions of 
 children of all nations, whose ancestral hates we seek to quiet or 
 quench, whose parents unite in taxing themselves for the support 
 of the schools which we represent here tonight. No, by all 
 the innocent sufferings and blightings of the millions of the " gory 
 nurse's " children whose fathers and brothers are facing each 
 other on hundreds of miles of entrenched borders this same night. 
 No, as many times as there are children, here and there. 
 
 But if, holding to the definition I have made of " our educa- 
 tional system" (keeping its fences open only on the infinite side), 
 you will let me define " war," I am ready to answer " Yes," — 
 yes, by all the lives that without hate have been nobly given for 
 the love of something higher than one's self; yes, by the " adorable 
 faith " of the soldier who from being a mercenary, a paid 
 slaughterer, in time became a patriot and a martyr ; yes, by all 
 the suffering and struggle and victory of human evolution from 
 beasthood to manhood. 
 
 If you will let me define " war " ! And I begin my definition, 
 
as is the custom of the lexicographer, with the derivation, the 
 etymology. My definition of war will stand on my definition of 
 militarism, and my definition of militarism goes back through 
 the Roman milites, helmeted and bespeared, massed in legions or 
 formed in testudines, back to the slopes of Kabulstan and the 
 plains of the Jumna and the Ganges, to the places of the mother 
 language, the Indo-Germanic, to the Sanskrit word " mil " which 
 signified to associate, to unite — back to the primeval soldiers, 
 those who joined one another to achieve some common object. 
 And, as the most usual common purpose was to attack, or to de- 
 fend themselves against other human beings, so it came about 
 that in many languages, AngloHSaxon, Anglo-Latin, Spanish, 
 Portuguese, French, Old High German and Middle Dutch, the 
 word in which they spoke this common object (" guerre," 
 "".werra"), had the sound of the wings of the followers of 
 Apollyon, which John heard in the Apocalypse, " the sound of 
 chariots, and of many horses rushing to war." 
 
 I am a militarist in this pristine ancient Aryan sense. And 
 I build my martial system on the same foundation as that which 
 all European languages of militarism remember — the assembling, 
 the organizing of individual men into milites, militia. 
 
 It is of such a militarism that Kipling sings : a militarism not 
 primarily of individual valors but of miracles of organization, a 
 militarism in which, as Chesterton says, there is no " epicurean 
 corner," no " place of irresponsibility," a militarism which calls 
 into specific sacrificial service what each man has to give even if 
 it takes him away from his personal prospects, or his personal gain, 
 or takes from him his life. 
 
 On my way to France from England just after the declaration of 
 war in Europe last summer, I journeyed in a compartment from 
 London to the Channel with six or seven Frenchmen and a Russian 
 who had left their occupations and families to join their comrades, 
 each in his appointed place. One was a maker of meerschaum 
 pipes, proud of his skill, but going unquestioningly and without a 
 word of comment or complaint except the hope that " it would not 
 come to bayonets." At that same time, Doctor Carrel, who had but 
 a little time ago received the Nobel Prize, and who had made the 
 heart to beat long after the death of its owner, was going to hos- 
 
8 
 
 pital service in the south of France. And down in Austria there 
 was a musician, Fritz Kreisler, the violinist, (whom I heard last 
 Saturday night), joining his regiment, later rescued insensible 
 from a trench, where he had been ridden down by the Cossacks, 
 and even now lame from the spear-thrust. These all tell of a 
 martial organization which, in its provident thought, had a 
 definite place alike for the meerschaum-pipe maker, the world- 
 famed surgeon, and the composer of the " Caprice," and which, if 
 you could make your way to the German trenches, would reveal a 
 provision for every martial need or emergency, and comfort even, 
 only less than omniscient. (One of my former students who has 
 just returned from there, tells of officers in the field, in the lull of 
 battle, listening by field telephones to music in Berlin.) 
 
 Such a militant organization and with it a specific prediscipline, 
 a preparatory training ! (And preparation for war is war, even as 
 preparation for life is life. ) I think I am almost ready now for the 
 landwehr and a landsturm, a continuation school in which each 
 man shall, apart from his vocation, or quitting even for a time his 
 vocation — as every able-bodied man of France, Germany, Austria, 
 Italy — undergo physical, mental, disciplines for the sake of the 
 State, for the sake of the race. 
 
 Five years ago, after reading William James's essay on " The 
 Moral Equivalent of War," I wrote him that I was prepared to re- 
 cruit a regiment of volunteers for his army, which, he urged, 
 should be conscripted. Perhaps you recall that most stirring of 
 martial documents, put out as peace propaganda, in which he advo- 
 cates the conscription of the luxurious classes to be sent to the coal 
 and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets, to dish washing, 
 clothes washing and window washing, to road building and tunnel 
 building, to foundries and stoke-holes, to the frames of sky 
 scrapers, in order that they might know " the sour and hard foun- 
 dations of the higher life," and feel that they belonged to a col- 
 lectivity superior in some ideal aspect to themselves, something for 
 which they were ready to pay a blood-tax. T was not ready then 
 for conscription, having memory of an experience as a boy in see- 
 ing citizens in this very valley work out poll taxes on the roads. 
 But when I see the miracles wrought by martial organization, I 
 am impatient at times that we have to wait for the conscription of 
 our individual ideals. 
 
When journeying through a pass in the Jura mountains a few 
 years ago one March day, I saw silhouetted against the cold even- 
 ing sky, the figures of soldiers climbing along a ridge to their fort- 
 ress at the end of a day's marching or scouting. In Florence I 
 saw troop after troop crossing and recrossing the Arno to and from 
 the hill of San Miniato where Angelo's David looks across the 
 city to the Apennines. At Siena I was waked by the tramp of 
 soldiers' feet. In the place of the Caesars I saw crowds held 
 in by lines of soldiers, while kings from north and south passed. 
 Everywhere soldiers, and always was rising this thought, " If 
 these men, compelled to military service " — useless as it seemed 
 to be then except in its disciplines — " if they could only be trained 
 and employed to fight against the real foes of a city, a nation, a 
 race, what a power would be released for the general good ! " 
 
 And here my definition of war emerges upon battlefields of 
 promethean yet newest heroisms (if indeed there are such places 
 as battlefields to be left to history). Even while I was making 
 this definition in that recurring thought which came to me in Italy 
 and France, someone, I have learned only within the last few days, 
 was at that very time framing a like definition in Russia : 
 
 " Our awfulest enemies, the elements and germs and insect 
 destroyers, attack us every minute without cease, yet we murder 
 one another as if we were out of our senses. Death is ever on the 
 watch for us, and we think of nothing but to snatch a few patches 
 of land! About 5,000,000,000 days of work go every year to 
 the displacement of boundary lines. Think of what humanity 
 could obtain if that prodigious effort were devoted to fighting our 
 real enemies, the noxious species and our hostile environment. 
 We should conquer them in a few years. The entire globe would 
 turn into a model farm. Every plant would grow for our use. 
 The savage animals would disappear, and the infinitely tiny 
 animals would be reduced to impotence by hygiene and cleanli- 
 ness. The earth would be conducted according to our convenience. 
 In short, the day men realize who their worst enemies are, they 
 will form an alliance against them, they will cease to murder one 
 another like wild beasts from sheer folly. Then they will be 
 the true rulers of the planet, the lords of creation." 
 
 But I have found a more recent and effective statement of 
 the thought that was flung across the sky of many an earth mind 
 by the Philosopher James before he went away, the thought that 
 
10 
 
 troubled me whenever I heard the measured tramp of feet or 
 saw the bayonet in Trance or Italy, the thought that at the same 
 time was stirring this Russian, unknown to me, to cry against the 
 war philosophies of Gumplowitz, something that has at last got 
 from the philosopher's study into the street ■ — even as the 
 philosophies of the European professors have reached the triggers 
 of the peasants' rifles and made men different from all other 
 animals, in that they prey upon their own species. 
 
 " But where does the martial spirit come in " — says the cynic. 
 And the American philosopher, after James's own spirit, replies : 
 " The Nation has never made us look at it in the right way." 
 There i3 nothing " animating about wallowing in a trench or 
 lugging a haversack and a heavy gun all day, except as it is a 
 part of an organized national enterprise." — " Well, then, 
 organize your national enterprise against nature instead of the 
 Belgians or Canadians." As it has been since the Titans fought 
 the gods, " Nature is our implacable enemy. Russians aren't, 
 Germans aren't." 
 
 We have too much softened our vocabulary and our spirits. 
 We speak of " public service " and of " doing good " when we 
 ought to be making, such war, fighting evil and enduring hard- 
 ships. We ought, as some old militant Christian said, to put on 
 our armor and not take it off till we put on our shrouds. For 
 life is not service. Life is struggle alone, struggle together. 
 Life is war. 
 
 I discovered when following the Mississippi river to the Gulf 
 a few years ago, that it was the War Department that was watch- 
 ing its every movement, that was carrying on constant battle with 
 floods, shoals, erosions, burrowing animals and the clouds which 
 every year send the army of waters down the valley with the 
 power of 60,000,000 horses. It is the War Department that has 
 dug the Panama Canal, that has made some regions accessible, 
 that has made others habitable, that has stayed pestilence and 
 ministered most effectively to cities overwhelmed by disaster. It 
 is to the War Department that we turn in our extreme emergencies 
 — flood, fire, famine and earthquake. It is the War Department 
 that is illustrating how we may fight our real and common race 
 foes. 
 
11 
 
 And I would have the conservation of health and the direction 
 of education conceived of as functions of the War Department, 
 scientifically, austerely administered for the common good. 
 Kitchener's letter to the expeditionary force going into France 
 is the best possible literature for us to use who are directing the 
 expeditionary forces which this generation is sending to battle 
 in the thirties and forties and fifties of this century. Here is 
 a meeting of the general staff, Generals Maxwell and Schaeffer, 
 Claxton and Flagg-Young, Jordan and Snyder, who must largely 
 determine their far movements. Would we might commandeer 
 every luxury, every degenerate habit, every extravagant whim, 
 every waste, to support this army. Would we might use one 
 slice of bread for our sandwich instead of two slices if we could 
 thereby make them fight more effectively against ignorance, 
 disease, intemperance, incompetence, sloth, passion, and fight for 
 those things without which human existence were a colossal jest. 
 Till we have taxed ourselves for schools as Europe is taxing her- 
 self for wars, we shall not have done too much. 
 
 But if you say that this is all Utopian, and that without war, 
 as it is illustrated in the trenches and on the mine-spread seas 
 we can not preserve or foster that priceless spirit of courage, 
 honor, disinterestedness, contempt of life, I would point to the 
 soldier, Colonel Goethals, who has divided the continent, and 
 the soldier, Colonel Gorgas, who kept away the hostile diseases 
 while this Hercules was at work ; I would point to Pasteur, who 
 dragged around with him a half -paralyzed body for twenty years 
 and more, fighting microbes, when he might have been living in 
 Horatian ease; I would point to the martial geologist Van Hise, 
 to the martial sanitarian General Wood, to the martial peace- 
 maker Jane Addams. I could, in protesting proof, point to 
 thousands, all the way from the invincible endurer Prometheus 
 who gave fire to men, to that gentle fighter, Richard Watson 
 Gilder, who wrote thi3 for me not long before his death : 
 
 ' Twas said : " When roll of drum and battle's roar 
 Shall cease upon the earth, Oh, then no more 
 
 " The deed, the race, of heroes in the land." 
 
 But scarce that word was breathed when one small hand 
 
12 
 
 Lifted victorious o'er a giant wrong 
 
 That had its victims crushed through ages long; 
 
 Some woman set her pale and quivering face, 
 Firm as a rock, against a man's disgrace ; 
 
 A little child suffered in silence lest 
 
 His savage pain should wound a mother's breast ; 
 
 Some quiet scholar flung his gauntlet down 
 
 And risked, in Truth's great name, the synod's frown; 
 
 A civic hero, in the calm realm of laws, 
 
 Did that which suddenly drew a world's applause; 
 
 And one to the pest his lithe young body gave 
 That he a thousand thousand lives might save. 
 
 I am not so unpractical as not to know that we shall have to 
 prepare for protection, that for a time we shall have to train some 
 men to shoot other men. I have had that training myself and I 
 approve the temperate and sensible program, so far as I under- 
 stand it, of such practical anti-militarists as General Wood and 
 President Schurman. But what I do contend for, beyond this, 
 or in spite of this, is that we must not turn our great public school 
 system into recruiting stations or barracks for the idea that war, 
 as illustrated in Belgium, Poland, and Servia, is the supreme ex- 
 pression, or the necessary school, of a nation's valors or of a virile 
 world civilization. 
 
 I had come to the end of my address when a morning's cable- 
 gram from the edge of the European war brought me the summar- 
 izing, prophetic, graphic epilogue of what I have been attempting 
 to say. It may not be true, but it intimates how what I have been 
 saying may come true. The cable is as follows : 
 
 Berne, Feb. 22 {Dispatch to The London Morning 
 Post). — "All the young men in Germany between the 
 ages of 17 and 20 who have failed to volunteer for the 
 
13 
 
 army and can not give an adequate excuse are now being 
 called out to serve as an untrained Landsturm. The 
 older boys and girls, with the consent of their parents, 
 are to be employed in farm work this Spring, Summer 
 and Autumn in the East Prussian provinces as well as 
 in Bavaria, for which purpose they will be excused from 
 school attendance." 
 
 They are to go to the farms. They too are to fight for their 
 country and in the field ; fight for it with the plough and the har- 
 row, the planter and the harvester, the insect exterminator and the 
 fertilizer. And some day all physical war will be as this. The 
 Landsturm of Fear and Envy and Hate will become the Land- 
 sturm of disciplined, scientific, aspiring, industrial and invincible 
 struggle for man's supremacy over earth, sea, sky and self! 
 
 With that definition of " war," I am ready to say that the 
 schools should, must prepare for it, body, mind and soul. 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
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