The Danger of Safety
Collins, Nelson
470 THE COMMONWEAL September 23, 1925 moment. "Look at their diplomacy!" (the admiring words are wrung from Ambassador Page on September 22) "Sir Edward Grey was heart-broken when he could...
...It made one just a little tired of excessive talk about speaking an inherited foreign language necessarily making a worse citizen of the United States...
...I have known and admired that mood...
...It can only be from an over-development and an overassertiveness of these...
...but they gave me no satisfaction...
...Not all the king's horses and all the king's men, not all the school-bus tractors and contractors in the United States could dig these children out of their remote farm homes and haul them to school each morning and evening in the dead of a north Michigan winter...
...and the compulsory public schools case, as fought through mainly by the Catholics in 1925, is more apt to have Lutheran reactions that need self-scrutiny—the sense of danger within ourselves, just because we are so safe at last...
...the admiring words are wrung from Ambassador Page on September 22) "Sir Edward Grey was heart-broken when he could no longer keep peace...
...I do not yet see any way (this on July 29) for England seems to me to be doing everything that can be done...
...There would be no children to attend the public school, supposing it existed...
...Krakow is not far away...
...Find out what is the matter up there," said the bishop within whose spiritual domain the county lies...
...I asked the sisters why they didn't alter that...
...These are the chapters in which he tells of his ardent new relation to the United States, undertaking to prove his Czecho-Slovakian excellences to his fellow-citizens of other strains...
...The danger is not only from Catholic populations...
...Within the Catholic Church the situation affects especially the Polish population...
...Posen has no public school at all...
...Men are citizens, even while they sit in church...
...Compulsory education falls down in Presque Isle county, excepting in its three villages...
...There are two problems, the result of the two decisions, which should be solved by those concerned and not by outsiders...
...Nor is it from any right pride of inherited traditions or blood qualities...
...Rather it is from the fixed article of belief in Lutheran September 23, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL administrative tradition that not only no control, but no affinity, shall exist between the church and the state...
...This interplay of the state with the parent, the church, the child and the teacher is a problem that her* and there, in reactionary or careless corners, may prove to be a Catholic problem—but from the very nature of Lutheran administrative principles it is much more of a Lutheran problem than it is a Catholic problem...
...The altar boys who served the Mass for me couldn't say 'Our Father;1 or 'Hail, Mary,' in English or Latin—only in Polish...
...The farm homes of these children are isolated one from another by bad stretches of byroads, lumpish ways of worn corduroy in many cases...
...Find out for yourself," he said again...
...they will receive great residences and large grants and their families will become great families in the realm . . . The story will be the story of English freedom again saved and again broadened, of the empire become bigger...
...It is to be, under God's providence, "an English—not a French nor a Russian victory . . . These English are the only people in Europe who have the habit of success...
...In the schools campaign, Presque Isle county had been made more or less notorious from soap-boxes, rostrums and pulpits as the acme of ignorance...
...It is England's danger, England's opportunity, England's eventual chance of a firmer grip on a bigger empire that is Page's preoccupation...
...It may not be even mainly from Catholic populations...
...One is the problem of giving the state its full legal and moral part in the education of every child, allowing it to have its chance as well as the parent and the church...
...We know that efforts were made...
...I found out...
...A firmer basis, too, for that aristocratic society so grateful in the nostrils of this southern Democrat...
...of India become really loyal and far better treated, of new African colonies to exploit...
...Wilson at Versailles, may well have acquired "the habit of success...
...But, when war came, Russia and France were already engaged before England went in...
...The fact is, the compulsory school law does not work in Presque Isle county with any completeness, and it functions less in the public schools of the countryside than in the parochial schools...
...That makes it all the more imperative that their development shall be carefully disciplined by themselves...
...Something is the matter up there, I suppose," I said to its bishop...
...There are two or three little towns in the county and a good many farms, but most of them isolated one from the other...
...There is a danger now that these two court decisions may lead, especially in isolated districts, to assertiveness of moods that responsible administrative groups never have countenanced...
...Here is a conjuncture that, in French phrase, "makes one think furiously...
...It is not challenging Britain's right to the mandates which the war secured her nor impugning the general beneficence of her rule to suggest that a system whose spokesmen could convey impressions so diverse and yet so timely, one upon Mr...
...So I went, asking myself—"Is it a Catholic something that is the matter ? Is it a Polish something that is racial and not religious...
...Children come from the countryside, seventy-five or eighty of them, each Monday morning and join the children of Posen village...
...The other problem is giving the English language and American idea ample scope early in the life of the child...
...Page in London, the other upon Mr...
...Why indeed should they be...
...But there is a balance to be struck in these matters, and to me the great usefulness of the two decisions of our highest courts, is that they leave the attaining of this balance to inner development—not to outer compulsions...
...Except for the Catholic parochial school at Posen, "truly a praiseworthy but a perilous adventure into the field of popular education," as Charles W. Eliot called the whole Catholic parochial school system recently, elementary education in Presque Isle county, Michigan, would be considerably worse off than it is...
...A "broken-hearted" foreign secretary—at one end of the war and "new colonies to exploit" at another...
...There is an Americanization problem...
...They are kept until Friday afternoon and then go home for the week-end, each to an isolated farm...
...I used to hear it in connection with ships' crews, and now I hear it in connection with churches and schools...
...I had occasion to say in the Atlantic Monthly in 1920, after I had gone into Kiev with Marshall Pilsudski's Polish army and on the way back met so many of the Haller's army men— The best of Poland and the best of the United States was in these men...
...England—in which four days later the ambassador thought he noted "almost a satisfaction" that war was certain...
...Children are candidates committed to citizenship, even while they sit in school...
...The possible danger among the Lutherans, among the responsible Lutherans at least, is not so much in the assertion of their Germanic prides and inheritances...
...It is curious, but I think it is true that with legal victories won, the language case, as fought through by the Lutherans in 1923, is more apt to have Catholic reactions...
...I doubt that you'll find Posen as bad as you have heard...
...The main roads are good and the side roads are travesties...
...And both its excellencies and its insistences come to me now as I think of the barely possible dangers there are in our so amply assured present legal safety...
...But throughout the letters there is scant reference to hapless France, to invaded Belgium or to the peril threatening western Europe...
...Is it neither of these, but the helpless result of Presque Isle county being the most isolated county in Michigan, most isolated from all the other counties in the state, most isolated one part of it from another, one 'settlement' from another, one farm from another...
...The British leaders "will be made peers...
...But will anyone now believe that they were as persistent or heroic as a man less the hostage of his hero-worship might have made them...
...The same cause that somewhat depressed the German language in the United States has exalted every Pole's sense of his language...
...Hendrick, in his comment as editor, reminds us that many of the letters were written under great strain, when British aid to France and Belgium was dubious, and when "national dishonor" impended...
...In the fall of the year the children stay home picking potatoes out of the hills...
...I have no patience with two-thirds of the talk about 100 percent Americanism...
...To overcome this condition, Saint Casimir's parochial school has dormitories...
...and yet it is primarily a war between England and Germany...
...The state shall not dominate the schools, we know now, but it shall have its rightful assertiveness there, in all of them...
...It was the war...
...As early as August 2, he could detect "in English opinion an acquiescence, almost a satisfaction, that war between England and Germany is now certain . . . It is better to have it now when Germany will have other enemies in the field—better, too, when the responsibility for starting it lies at Germany's door...
...Gasoline doesn't know how to do it, and horses know too much to try it...
...It is like Mount Angel, Oregon, in that...
...Out in Michigan I was directed by two Catholic bishops, when it should become convenient, to have a look at Presque Isle county, the educational "black spot" of the state, with a greater percentage of illiteracy than any other county in the state, and with a large Catholic population, predominantly Polish...
...His wave of the hand deprecated any discussion...
...But its true agents are not those satisfied to "shove 'em through the mill" in a hurry, veneering Americanism upon them...
...How far did Page's conviction that whatever England did was for the good of the world at large hamper his efforts for peace...
...THE DANGER OF SAFETY By NELSON COLLINS THE United States Supreme Court decisions of 1923, in the Nebraska foreign-language case, and of 1925, in the Oregon compulsory public schools case, have given exceedingly ample protection to vital American principles...
...I think the first three chapters of Michael Pupin's From Immigrant to Inventor, are more valuable than 75 percent of the Americanization pamphlets...
...The re-birth of glorious Polish nationalism has led to renewed emphasis in the minds of our Polish citizens on every thing that has to do with Poland...
...I would like to trade these men with their deficiencies in our language and with their fighting mood of United States citizenship, for some voluble English-speaking citizens I know . . . They thought in Polish of their love for, their identification with, America...
...I said Mass at Metz a few years ago," another bishop of the state informed me...
...They are all in the parochial school attached to Saint Casimir's church, which lies a mile outside the village...
...Posen and Metz lie within a few miles of each other...
...It is a little hard to follow their extreme development of this admirable standpoint...
...The court has asserted that great masses of our population shall not be recklessly disciplined by others...
...in the spring they lead the ploughing horse along the turning furrow...
Vol. 2 • September 1925 • No. 20
