The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1917-12-04

l am nearing 60 years of that thing we call life. For more than 30 years have been school-teacher and have given good (and, no doubt, bad) ad- vice to thousands of young people. have my likes and dislikes; my hob bies and my hopes. My lifelong dis like has been war and my lifelong hope has been for perpetual peace.
 By both temperament and physical endowment am a pacifist. As boy I did not play baseball because the condition. of my eyes prevented my seeing the ball before it hit me. The same weakness barre4 me from ten his. I could have played football, but I never felt any desire to kick the other fellow in the head, and I felt a real unwillingness, to have him kick me. I never fired a gun in my life. Perhaps I should have played cro- quet; but games never appealed to me.
 Under a license granted by the Uni versity of Chicago in the old univer- sity extension days, I put to sleep as many audiences in the Middle West as any man on the lecture platform with my War and Peace in American History" In this discourse I indicted war as a thief in the night, who un- expectedly invaded our homes, stole our sons, our property, our sense of justice, our personal liberty, and our civilization. I proved, at least to my own mind, that in this advanced age of the world and with The Hague pro- gram before us, we should never have another world war. I now face once more the great lesson which experi- ence has many times tried to drill in- to my skull, that I can not make a thing true by thinking it is so.
 When the present war broke out I was sore1y disappointed. Then I sud- denly recalled that I had long been thinking the present head of Germany intended to have try at the old game before he quit the job, and since His Highness came into this world, about the time My Lowness did. he is no longer young and consequently had not much time left in which to find an excuse to start something. Some how we "feeP' these prophecies.
 was sorry for the poor people who had to bear the brunt of the war. Like many American tourists (pardon the parenthesis; have no other way of telling you that I have "been abroad" twice., have made merry with the light-hearted French, admired the thoroughness of the Germans, been amused by the airs of the Italians, and exasperated by the cock-sureness of the British. Now, all these peoples were to be led to the slaughter again in the old game of kingcraft. And to most of them it did not matter rap who was king, or what became of an would be funny.
 As the awful thing grew and my theories blew up one after another, I began to see that many things, which at the time seemed only aceidently, were probably planned as part of a Prussian propaganda. Four years ago when I associated with our exchange professor from Germany l thought of him as getting as much benefit from
 us as we got from him. Now began to put little things together and saw | that he regarded himself as mis- sionary, bringing light into American darkness.
 That attitude I could dismiss with a laugh, but how did he get it? Per haps because for years we teachers had been going to Germany to com plete our education and had been sending our graduate students there.
 We were all good fellows and frank | ly, we were successful. Those of us who were scientists, insisted that stu | dents should elect German in their college courses because German was l the great storehouse of scientific i'm formation. At various educational meetings we read papers in praise of l the German system of instruction. We gave ponderous lectures to our fresh men in true German university style. No doubt all this laudation was de-