The silver state. [volume] (Winnemucca, Nev.) 1909-1925, 1918-04-27
III PRUSSIAN

BY GEORGE F. NJ
University of Nevada

board. The press is gagged. The
church is state-controlled. Labor is
a shackled slave to military autoc-
racy. The feudal landlord, the manu-
facturer and the merchant. profess
sional men and the great horde of
bureaucratic ofice-holders are alike
nomic and social system, cunningly
contrived for the dominance of a mill
tary state. and the strongest letters OF
German slavery are forged within the
schools.
For a hundred years the German
have been taught that they are the
chosen people. Their culture has be
come Kultur, destined to destroy o
override the civilization of the world,
If only the Prussian will to conquer
can prevail. The arrogant marchine
song, Il Am a Prussian, Do You Know
My Colors?' was the clarion call &
national robbery and Deutschland
Ueber Allies" became the fixed policy
of Hohenzollern rule.
With us. schools mean opportunity
and public education makes for dem
ocracy and individual freedom. TIL
doors If our school buildings swing
each way on oiled hinges, offering
free instruction, elementary, second
airy and higher, to every boy and girl
who wants it. There is a straight
unbarred road from kindergarten to
university.
In Germany, only for the privileged
classes is there a chance for higher
schooling. The children of the masses
can go merely to the common schools
to get that amount and kind of edu-
cation, whose keynote is obedience,
and thereafter they are forced into a
vocational training to make them able
and willing servants of state indus
trialism. Through all their years Of
schooling, well-directed teachers
preach their duties to the church and
to the state and to their future m
ployers. and finally, for the boys, the
years of military service complete n
discipline which makes for competent.
Industrious, unquestioning servitude,
but not for freedom.
If the German father wants his boy
to have more than a common school
ing, he must decide al the very be-
ginning. when the child is no more
than nine or ten years of age, and
send him to a special kind of school.
Only for the well-to-do is this pos
sible, for tuition is high and the par
ent must be able to support the boy
through a dozen years more of sec
ondary and higher studies and then
have money to launch him on his
LIES work, or it is not worth while
to make the effort. Through all these
years the boy is under teachers whose
main function is to train him to sub
lection to the state. Even when he
goes to the university, which should
be the place for Independent study
and free reflection, he is in any Prus-
sian institution under the care OF
teachers every one or whom is ap-
pointed by one central authority at
Berlin, responsible directly to the
kaiser. His success in school and
university and life depends primarily
on his subservience to the state.
Business prosperity, professional rec
ognition and social distinction are to
be had only at this price. And the
young German student knows it today
better than ever before. One hundred
university professors, his leading
teachers in history, literature, philoso-
ply and science, acclaimed with en-
thusiasm in 1914 the beginning of the
most unjustiiable war that has ever
been declared by a civilized nation.
and have since condoned by their
silence the inconceivable and unfor-
givable brutality and beastliness OF
their soldiers.
In the past generations. thousands
of our young men have gone to Prus-
STA for special studies. Hereafter nc
self-respecting and decent American
will want to study there until many
years of suffering and e~xpiation may
have purified the spiritual miasma
that smothers the German nation and
a new spirit regenerates a misguided
noopIa