. 59 Hollinger pH 8.5 Mill Run P03-2193 AMERICA'S DEBT TO ENGLAND int rHiLurct iu ic«tn int FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERTY 4*\ BY LUCIUS B. SWIFT OF THE INDIANAPOLIS BAR READ BEFORE THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION, CINCINNATI, DEC. 28, 1916 (now extended and revised) PRICE lO CENTS THE KAUTZ STATIONERY CO. INDIANAPOLIS 1917 *i\ By the Same Author Germans In America LUCIUS B. SWIFT OF THE INDIANAPOLIS BAR Read Before the Indianapolis Literary Club October 4, 1915. First Edition, 5,000, November, 1915. Second Edition, 10,000, January, 1916. Third Edition, 15.000, July, 1916. Fourth Edition, 10,000, August, 1916. Price, Ten Cents THE KAUTZ STATIONERY CO. INDIANAPOLIS AMERICA'S DEBT TO ENGLAND. The human aspect of this country has changed from what it was in August, 1914, and for many months following the outbreak of the war. The voice of the peace at any price advocates headed by Mr. Bryan is silent, and Mr. Bryan offers himself for enlistment as a private. Yet up to a very recent date he had a following made up of men and women who sang, "I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier," and who fought hard to make us, by staying at home ourselves and by keeping our ships at home, submit to the domination of the Kaiser now, instead of waiting for his final victory. They were indifferent to the fate of liberty in the world and they daily gave thanks that we were not at war; though to keep out of the risk of war we had suffered national shame and humilia- tion. Their aggregate was large and they seemed dead to patriotism ; they seemed ready to give up self-government and pass under the yoke of any con- queror who came provided they might live their own limp existence unharmed. Nothing but a course, under a conqueror, of slow devilish torture, such as Three triumphant German efficiency has inflicted upon the people of Belgium for nearly three years, will make them believe that liberty is worth fighting for. I am thankful that I was born under different stars and have the hallowed recollection of a different mother. We have not heard the last of them. Peace at any price has existed in all ages. It has always been a refuge for traitors and, while it Avould be far from true to say that every peace at any price man is a traitor, it is true that every traitor in America today is a peace at any price man. Then we had various groups of socialists who ap- parently had never heard of Anglo-Saxon principles and who thought that the only need of the world was what they called economic liberty. They preached that there should be no such thing as patriotism and some of them notified the country that they would not serve in any war. Today their voice is dumb and they stand at the parting of the ways. We had also a multitude of men busy with money- making who wanted to squeeze through and preserve their gains and they ignored the war and passed by on the other side, not heeding the call of liberty. They were silent then and they are silent now, but in greatly diminished numbers. Four We had labor bodies that with seemingly unsur- passed selfishness thought that whatever the crisis of civil liberty, the demands and laws of labor came first. They were like the labor bodies in England at the beginning of the war. But in England a revolu- tion took place ; patriotism resumed its own, and labor with noble sacrifice marched in step with all Britain. Today in America all is changed. On every hand workingmen are raising the Stars and Stripes, and the most powerful labor bodies declare in noble words their devotion to the principles upon which this government is founded. We had a class larger than all of the other classes together made up of those who, moved by a passive dislike of England, looked on with indifference at whatever might happen to her in this war. They had no English-speaking-race patriotism. That this feeling was widespread is plain from the fact that outside of leading magazines and newspapers — in fact in the bulk of public prints read by the American people — there rarely appeared generous and unstinted praise of England. There is no doubt that in the course of a century, at critical moments, the British government was not sympathetic. When I was discharged from the Union Five Army in June, 1865, 1 never expected to forgive the South; yet I retain today no hatred of the South and, while I am glad that I shall never be able to say that she was right, I take an American pride in her deeds of valor. My feeling toward the South is the feeling of the North generally. Could hostile feeling be more thoroughly obliterated? Fifty years and less have done this work. Nor did I ever expect to forgive England for sympathizing with the South. But later I came to remember that Lancashire starved without complaint when we cut off the cotton supply. I read the words of John Bright, that when in our civil war British officials "were hostile or coldly neutral the British people clung to freedom with an unfaltering trust." I came to understand that both in the civil war and in the Revolution the English government for the moment was not the English people. I came to learn of the battles which the English people had fought for the development and establishment of Anglo- Saxon rights and of the great reward of their victories which we had reaped, which I had not before learned from lack of proper teaching in the schools. I also learned how finally in the Spanish war her diplomacy kept at bay the diplomacy of Germany; and at last Six with the frankest and the most open good-will, without request, she ranged her ships and guns with ours in Manila Bay. Is not the score at least balanced? A great and increasing number of Americans today answer that it is. The greatest apparent change of all has taken place among Americans of German birth or descent. Taking them the country over, when the Kaiser drew the sword they seemed to rise as one man to back him up. Led by professors, German and American, they sounded the praises of Kaiser-Germanism and descendants of 48-ers joined in. They believed that the war would be over in a few months and that the Kaiser would win, and they were glad. They urged the superior merit of the German cause on every hand; they promoted the sale of German bonds; to objections to autocracy they pointed out its efficiency, and they had no criticism to make of the invasion of Belgium. They were passionate and imperious, and displayed a zeal which showed that they believed in the German government. In fact they wanted the Kaiser to win and they took no thought of the effect upon Anglo-Saxon ideals of liberty. Of course there were those opposed to all this, but with rare exceptions they kept silent. Today Americans generally of Seven German birth or descent declare themselves united behind the Stars and Stripes against the Kaiser. I shall not attempt to state what has brought about this change. If it is simply the performance of a duty required by law while retaining every one of their former opinions, then their hearts are not yet right. If they agree with the president of the Ger- man-American Alliance of Ohio who says that all German- Americans are with America against Germany but that they hope for the defeat of the Allies of whom America is one, then they are not yet Americans. But if the Kaiser's ruthlessness, if such acts as the sinking of the Lusitania, the murder of Edith Cavell and Captain Fryatt, the enslavement of over 150,000 Belgians, the desolation of Prance, the brazen hoisting of the black flag of the pirate and the frightful dis- play by the German General Staff of will and power to do these things in the face of civilization have convinced German-Americans that civilization cannot remain half democracy and half autocracy and that democracy is the only promise of a peaceful world, and if they have planted themselves upon President Wilson's war message which embodies the whole of freedom and if they have accepted every word of it, l hen their action is a great day for America. Eight These various classes, the spiritless peace at any price advocates, groups of socialists, money-makers, labor bodies, English haters, and Americans of Ger- man origin were not at first in unison with the great body of Americans as to this war. I now come to the question why they existed at all ; why were the people in Germany hypnotized into a unit behind a medieval autocracy menacing civilization itself while the people in America were not united under one of the best governments the world has ever seen? The issues have been plain. On the autocratic side, the government of the Kaiser was framed up on the German people by Bismarck, the most powerful, the most determined, and the most outspoken enemy of free government the last century produced. He fixed that government to run upon the Prussian principle of absolutism. He meant it to be a one-man government and in active operation it so proved. He gave it certain constitutional forms, but the definition of the noted German historian Gneist that it was ' ' absolutism under constitutional forms" holds good. That style of gov- ernment in Germany runs back many centuries to the times when the free and independent German tribes lost their liberties. The German people have known no other kind of government so long that the mind of man "runneth not to the contrary." Nine For the last five hundred years the Hohenzollern family have been the peculiarly efficient exponent of absolute government. Its members have enjoyed one- man rule and have encouraged those classes whose help could be counted upon to continue it, like the present military caste, the descendants of the Teutonic Knights. Frederick the Great advised his nephew to "magnify the army." Every act and word of the Kaiser from the first day of his reign show that he believes this to be the best kind of government. If he should extend his territory from Berlin to Bagdad and should become the dominating power in the world, he would have no thought of making any use whatever of Anglo-Saxon principles of government. For proof of this we have only to look at the bogus reforms which, hard pressed, he now promises, after the war. If the promised reforms were genuine the promise would be tainted by the Hohenzollern blood. The Hohenzollern of the time of the battle of Leipsic and all of the the other kings and princes of Germany and Austria promised the German people that if they would rise in arms and put down Bonaparte, then they should have a share in their government, and after Bonaparte was put down they renewed the promise in writing and then every man of them broke his royal word. Ten It was plain from the start that the triumph of the Kaiser would greatly strengthen the idea of abso- lute government and would make his government dominant in the world. It would not be slow to exercise a practical dictatorship which would paralyze democratic government everywhere or would put it, especially America, into a desperate struggle for existence. Reading the thousand or more speeches which the Kaiser had made, it was plain that he would be such a dictator. He would feel that at last he had realized his hope expressed in 1900 at the dedication of the corner stone of the Imperial Limes Museum which stands upon the Roman wall extending from the Rhine to the Danube : "I dedicate it to our Ger- man Fatherland, to which I hope it will be granted . to become in the future as closely united, as powerful, and as authoritative as once the Roman world-empire was "It was safe to conclude that if the Kaiser had the power, he would teach the world, as he told his soldiers to teach China- men, "never again to look askance upon a German." The coercion of the French Republic by the German government to dismiss a cabinet officer because he was obnoxious to the Kaiser is a mild specimen of what would follow victory for the Kaiser now. Eleven America would refuse to bow to that coercion and would fight — alone. From the beginning it was evident that the first object of the Kaiser's government was to break up the British Empire. It meant to destroy England's sea power and reduce her to the condition of Holland. This had been the Kaiser's object for years and it was understood and applauded long before the begin- ning of the war by German sympathizers all over the world, including America, under the lead of Muenster- burg. The pursuit of this object by war was from the start accompanied by methods of warfare which the world looked upon with horror and anger. The excuse is a fight for existence; but that so-called existence does not concern the future happiness and prosperity of the German people. The only existence in danger is the Hohenzollem and his absolute govern- ment. Even to avoid defeat, the prize-fighter will not strike below the belt, but the Kaiser misjudged his antagonists and the world and defiantly broke the rule. He has raised the black flag. His hand is against every man and every man's hand must be against him. There can be but one result; he who runs amuck is apt to do a good deal of damage, but in the end, he is brought down. For two years and Ttrefve eight months this autocracy has paralyzed the ordinary life of all nations. With the invasion of Belgium it attempted to overthrow faith in treaties, with its cruelty and murder and desolation and black flag it has put in the shade all invaders of all time. To paraphrase President Wilson, while this autocracy exists the world is not safe for democracy. Let us now look at the democratic side of the issue. Although we took little notice of them, we had in America at the beginning of the war a body of Anglo- Saxon rights such as representative government, trial by jury, no taxation without representation, free speech, a free press, habeas corpus, the right of peti- tion, the right of protest, the right of public assembly and many other rights which make a people free. The beginning of the growth of this body of rights was 1,500 years ago at the beginning of the Dark Ages and all through the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages and in modern times down to the Abolition of Slavery in our own times those rights have been held and created and added to by the English-speaking race. They did not come like summer breezes. Most of them came in storm and stress. The autocrat is always and everywhere. He did his best to master the English- speaking race and he failed. For many centuries Thirteen Anglo-Saxon skies resounded with combat for liberty. "Lance and torch and tumult, steel and grey goose wing Wrenched it, inch and ell and all, slowly from the king." The German in Germany learned nothing of this, During all those centuries, liberty was dumb in Ger- many; the only sound was the sound of the glory of a ruler passing by. The German who lands upon the shores of America today finds here that liberty the germ of which his ancestors in the German forests had and lost and which the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes carried into England and handed down to us. That German ought to cry out, "At last I am home again! I here enjoy the full growth of that liberty which was lost in Germany but which the English-speaking race with its strong arm has pre- served for all the modern world ! " No other race has such a record. Other races have their own reasons for pride but this record is the peculiar and the crowning glory of the English-speaking race. When the shock of this war came, France who at a vital moment helped us to gain our independence and who now stands among the foremost of civilized democracies made head against it. With her was England, absolutely controlled by the will of her Fourteen people and who had built for us most of the founda- tions of the remarkable and well ordered liberty and self government we now enjoy. From her had spread over the world those powerful guarantors of freedom, Anglo-Saxon rights; but in the development and spread of those rights the descendants of the ancient Britons found in language and blood in the Welsh of Wales, and the descendants of the ancient Picte found in the Scotch in Scotland and the descendants of the ancient Hibernians found in the Irish in Ireland had all contributed their share. In any praise given to the spread of Anglo-Saxon rights we cannot leave out the Anglo-Celt or the Anglo-Pict. The first questions which ought to have come into the mind of America was "What if the Kaiser should win? Standing at the head of a victorious army, his treasury bursting with war indemnities, with France bled white as he promised and England reduced to the condition of Holland, where will be left a battle ground for liberty except here in America, and who mil be left to fight that battle except America alone?" The answer to these questions should have been that the allies were not only fighting the battle of democ- racy against absolutism but that they were fighting our battle and that not only patriotism but self- Fifteen interest called upon us to throw in our whole strength upon their side. I shall not go over with recrimination the long period which elapsed before we took our stand against this enemy of mankind. My thankfulness is too great that at last my country is to suffer and sacrifice in the cause of the liberty of the world and not leave the battle to be won by others while we only gather in the profits of the struggle. I shall confine myself to a single question when the mighty issue of this war loomed up before us what was the failure on our part which not only raised up the multitude of slackers in the defense of Anglo- Saxon rights composed of the classes I have named but made the whole country so slow in comprehending the danger to its institutions? There is only one answer. We have never even named the foundations of their liberty to American youth. Much less have we told them the story of the storms which for cen- turies raged around the building of those foundations, nor of the blood and sacrifice and suffering which went into the construction; and we have never mentioned the subject to immigrant citizens. Autocratic govern- ments impress upon their subjects the virtues of emperors and kings and princes to cement allegiance. Sixteen We do not even take the trouble to bring to American citizens the knowledge of the history of the rights which make them free. If we did it would become a religion arousing all Americans at any sign of danger. If you ask the inhabitants of America what are the foundations of the liberty they enjoy, a great majority will name the American Revolution only. For this situation I blame the schools and particularly the grades below the high school because more than three- fourths of American youth never reach the high school. For more than a century we have brought up American children to hate England and this has led us to slur over the history of those foundations of our liberty which rest upon English soil. We send the children out to form public opinion founded upon ignorance and prejudice, and this in a crisis is an opinion dangerous to the welfare of the country. For more than a century we have in effect taught each generation of children that Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill were the beginning of all liberty; and after hearing us talk our immigrant citizens have come to the same conclusion. Let me say at once that whatever we have taught, the importance of the Revolution itself will never diminish. The Fathers fought for the rights of Eng- Seventeen lishmen and Avon. They not only secured to us im- perishable blessings but they freed every English colony from a selfish colonial policy; and their action inspired the people of the civilized world to examine into their own rights. This examination caused a realization of wrongs which set the world ablaze, first in the French Revolution, and again in the continental uprisings in 1848 — the one leading by painful steps to the self-governed France of today, the others done to death by the bayonets of autocracy. Our Revolution and our Abolition of Slavery were indeed major foundations of American liberty and they are America's noble contribution to the list. But other battles had been fought and won, in the cen- turies past, which educated and inspired our Fathers and made them master builders to build these two American Foundations. The results of those other victories lie in the midst of us and yet unseen ; genera- tions come and go in happiness because of "Ancient right unnoticed as the breath we draw." Let me refer briefly to some of those ancient rights and how they were won and how they have been for- gotten and why. Americans are as familiar with elections as with the alphabet. They see the representatives of the Eighteen people, chosen in various ways, go to their duties in every direction, from township officers to the president and congress; from the justice of the peace to the supreme court of the United States. We do not stop to consider that this representative government is vital to American liberty and that without it, we should pass under the yoke of arbitrary rule. Knowledge of its origin and history can alone make us comprehend our debt, No youth should leave school without knowing that our Anglo-Saxon forefathers carried representative government from the forests of Ger- many into England ; how it nourished in the hundred- moot, the shire-moot and the folk-moot ; how all gov- ernment was laid prostrate for the moment by William the Conqueror; how starting again with the Great Council of the Norman Kings, the people of England slowly against their kings built up a more and more representative government, which developed into the English Parliament and the American Congress of today ; how the people of England drove to the block and to exile their kings who would rule in defiance of their laws and without the representatives of the people in parliament assembled ; and finally how our English Fathers came and planted representative gov- ernment upon the shores of America ; how ever since, Nineteen those who had known only the hand of a ruler have come here and have been permitted to enjoy the ancient Anglo-Saxon right of joining in the choice of representatives of the people and so have become rulers themselves. We settle our disputes by courts. These were not invented by Washington and Hamilton and Jefferson. I would have children taught that they are not new; that they were not granted by any king; that they were present in the elements which produced the Anglo-Saxon race. The village-moot, the hundred- moot and the folk-moot were all courts. In all of those courts disputes were settled according to the customs as stated by the elder-men. This was the making of the common law. After six hundred years William the Conqueror and his successors built upon this Anglo-Saxon foundation the courts which have developed into the English and American courts of today. The recorded decisions of those courts century after century gave shape to the magnificent structure of the common law, the customs of the people, which had been growing from the earliest ages at a pace equal to the task of protecting the lives, the liberty, and the property of the people. When the Cavaliers and the Puritans came, they did not have to invent a Twenty system of courts or enact a body of law ; they brought both with them from England and they are here today. To teach this history to American boys and girls is simply to prepare them to be ordinarily intelligent citizens. In every county seat in the country is the court- house. American youth are familiar with the twelve seats for the jurymen, but beyond that they know little. No one teaches them the venerable origin of those twelve seats ; that the germ of the jury appeared in France; that the Normans found it there and carried it into England 850 years ago; that it died out on the continent, to 1 be revived in later centurias but that England seized upon and developed it until, in the fourteenth century, it came to its full growth when "twelve good men and true" were put into the jury seats and sworn to "a true verdict give." This was a new way to enforce an old right. Already, for many centuries, the Anglo-Saxon, in the hundred- moot, the folk-moot and the shire-moot, had had the right of trial by his equals, and Magna Charta had already registered that right in the declaration that no freeman should be proceeded against except by the "legal judgment of his peers." No one has seen the jurymen rise from their seats, Twenty.one at the end of the evidence in a murder trial, and slowly file out to decide in privacy the question of life or death, without a feeling of awe; but when we add to this the fact that for six hundred years these twelve men have been a shield of justice protecting the weakest of the community, then what was common- place becomes glorified. Which is better, to have no impression whatever of trial by jury, except that we have it, or to make the heart- swell Avith pride by the knowledge that, for 1500 years, every Anglo-Saxon has had the right of trial by his equals, and that all who come from all parts of the world enter here into the enjoyment of this ancient right as a free gift? Americans have no vivid picture of the mighty drama of Magna Charta; of the English people de- manding that a written record be made of their centuries-old rights. And when it was written and presented to John Lackland, he answered, "I will never grant such liberties as will make me a slave." And England rose in arms and confronted John, and then he signed. And the next day he was in arms against what he had signed and brought over foreign troops. And the history of England for the next eighty years is the history of the struggle for the enforcement of the charter. At last, Edward I, before Twenty-two all the people in Westminster Hall, burst into tears and admitted that he was wrong; and while later kings evaded the charter, not one denied that is was the law. When this picture is unfolded before American youth and when they read the words written seven hundred years ago: "We will not go against any man nor send against him save by the legal judg- ment of his peers or by the law of the land," then they will realize that their right to live in full enjoy- ment of the liberty guaranteed by those words was established by an immortal struggle: and that when our Fathers came to America, no matter from what country, they stepped at once into full enjoyment of that right, We cannot afford not to have that fact and the picture of that struggle indelibly written upon the mind of every boy and girl in America. Some months ago a man was locked up in Indian- apolis upon the charge of loitering. He had not loitered, but the police, suspecting him to be a crim- inal, made this charge to keep him in jail while they looked up his record. By command of the judge the sheriff brought the man into our circuit court in order that the lawfulness of his detention might be deter- mined. The court found the detention unlawful and the prisoner was set free. This is the process of Twenty-three habeas corpus and it is so familiar and so matter-of- fact that we have forgotten that we owe anybody anything for it. Americans never stop to think that from the earliest records of the English law running back centuries no freeman could be rightfully detained in prison except by the legal judgment of his peers ; and when Magna Charta so declared, it only declared what had always been the law. Nevertheless in the face of Magna Charta the king claimed the right to put a man in prison and keep him there and give no reason; and the claim was sustained by a cringing court. Then began a new struggle lasting 464 years, through the Planta genet, the Tudor, and into the Stuart line from Magna Charta to 1679. During all those centuries, the king laid his hand upon men and cast them into prison. Three hundred years after the Charter eleven judges filed a protest against imprisonment by order of noblemen ; but they admitted that Elizabeth might send men to prison at her own will. The fight went on and a later court held that the order of Charles I was enough to deprive a man of his liberty; and men like John Hampden looked out from behind prison bars. Still the fight went on until in the second parliament after the Restoration, in 1679, the English Twenty-four people, again in possesion of their government, de- clared that not even the King's order could stand against the writ of habeas corpus. When the writ of habeas corpus was mentioned in our constitution in 1789, it was not denned ; it needed no definition. The makers of the constitution knew what this bulwark of their liberty had cost; but we do not teach it to American youth. Americans do know that we fought the American Revolution with "no taxation without representation" as our leading war-cry; but they never think of the struggle of the English people through many cen- turies to settle it that they should not be taxed except by law which they had a hand in making. Yet with- out the example of that fight before them our Revolu- tionary Fathers would never have thought of raising objection to the Stamp Act and the Tea Tax. Ameri- cans do not realize that when five hundred years after the Conqueror, Henry VIII, in 1525, without law levied a tax of one-tenth of every man's substance, and when the people rich and poor cursed the King's minister, Cardinal Wolsey, as "the subverter of their laws and liberties" and rose in insurrection, and when Henry, bull-dog though he was, had to back down and pay back, the English people were in the midst of a Twenty-five battle which never ended until Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. Here we find the man not afraid to stand alone — to make the one-man fight. Twenty years later Henry called for voluntary contributions but fixed the amount each man had to pay. Alderman Reed re- fused and was put into the army as a soldier on the Scotch border at his own charge, with orders to be put to the hardest and most perilous duty; he was captured by the Scots and had to pay more for his ransom than the gift to the King amounted to ; but he made his fight and here is his name on the roll of those who have advanced the cause of self-government. Charles I, in 1627, called upon each man to make him a loan. Two hundred country gentlemen were clapped into irons for refusing and were shifted from prison to prison to break their spirit. Dr. Mainwaring preached before Charles that the King needed no" parliamentary warrant for taxation, and that to resist his will was to incur eternal damnation. John Hamp- den, one of the richest commoners in England, an- swered that he could lend the money but he feared the curse named in Magna Charta for its violation ; and he was sent back into close confinement. Again, the Petition of Right said that no man Twenty-six should be taxed except by law of parliament, and Charles agreed to it. Then he levied tonnage and poundage. Parliament denounced it and was ad- journed by the King. Merchants refused to pay but the courts decided against them. Parliament came back furious and Charles dissolved it. Richard Chambers refused to pay. Summoned before the King in Council, he told them in their teeth that not even in Turkey were merchants so wrung as in England. The Star Chamber fined him two thousand pounds and ordered him to make humble submission. He was a Puritan. He refused and was sent to prison ; and for three hundred years his name has been on the roll of patriots. In 1636 Charles ordered ship-money collected and the highest court decided that no statute prohibiting arbitrary taxation could be pleaded against the King's will. But notwithstanding courts and kings we always find the English people facing the King with the declaration that they cannot be legally taxed without their own consent, and long before the American Revolution they had won the victory. George III and his packed and corrupted parlia- ment, which did not represent the people, proposed to tax America. Our Fathers, mindful of the cen- Twenty-seven turies-old struggle which, the English people had won, answered the proposal to tax them with a demand for the rights which Englishmen enjoyed in England; and for those rights they fought. And from whatever country our Fathers came that was the fight. La- Fayette and Muhlenberg and Herkimer and Steuben and Kalb and Pulaski and Kosciusko did not fight for the rights of the French in France nor of the Ger- mans in Germany, nor for the Poles in Poland but they fought for the rights which Englishmen had won for themselves in England and which as part of the English empire were our heritage, along with the common law, trial by jury and habeas corpus. And this was Washington's opinion. "American freedom," he said, "is at stake; it seems highly necessary that something should be done to avert the stroke and maintain the liberty which we have derived from our ancestors. ' ' In the New York farm house in which I was born, great beams hewn from forest trees outlined the foun- dations; these were the sills. Other hewn timbers extended across from side to side, a few inches apart ; those were the sleepers. This massive foundation, which a hundred years have not shaken, is all unseen, unless you go into the cellar. American children have Twenty-eight never been taken into the cellar of their political history where they might see the sills and the sleepers which are the foundations of the marvelous and well- ordered liberty which they enjoy today. If they had been, the first gun of this war would have warned a united people of the danger to democracy. It is time to begin ; and when the children ask who built these foundations of free speech, free press, right of peti- tion, trial by jury and all the rest, with the two American exceptions, there can be only one answer — England. And when they ask, what of England today, they will have to be told that when George III was trying to conquer us, the English people, led by Chatham and Burke and Fox, were struggling for the same ideals we were fighting for; and that what we won by the sword they won against the same enemy by years of political struggle until England stands today the government most responsive to the will of the people. And when they ask what race has preserved these foundations and spread civil liberty over the world, the answer will have to be — the English-speaking race. In teaching history it is essential to be truthful for truth's sake; but it is equally essential that all im- migrant citizens as well as native born Americans Twenty-nine realize the struggle and the sacrifices of the hundreds of years consumed in building up the Anglo-Saxon foundations of liberty upon which the government of civilized democracy rests today. Knowing its history they will recognize the vast heritage of civil liberty which they here enjoy; and that that heritage was not built up by America alone, but is the common work of the English-speaking race. They will feel in their inmost souls that democratic government is a pearl without price and will view with the deepest anxiety and place before everj'thing else the danger of its being shaken or checked in the world and with their backs to the wall will resist every kind of encroachment upon it. And now the call has come. Let no one be persuaded that there will be a greater issue for America in some later war witli some other nation. The issue of freedom for the world is here and must be settled on this battlefield. Thirty "America's Debt to England" as originally written was read before the American Historical Association at Cin- cinnati, December 28, 1916, and appeared in the April, 1917 number of the Educational Review under the title, "Failure to Teach the Foundations of Liberty". It then embraced the part indicated by that title. Since then it has gradually been extended and revised to its present limits to keep pace with the progress of events and in the meantime it has been read before the following: The Indianapolis Bar Association. The Indiana Dental College. The Indianapolis Literary Club. The Indianapolis Law School. The Indiana University School of Law at Bloomington. The Engineers' Club of Indianapolis. The History Club of Indiana University at Bloomington. The General Arthur St. Clair Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The Brotherhood of the First Baptist Church of Indian- apolis. Indianapolis, May 1, 1917. Thirty-one LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 020 914 136 fi HolIin§ ph a. Mill Run P LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ■■■■■■■■■■Si 020 914 136 A