A Straight Deal or the Ancient Grudge

te from study of these documents the complete truth about England and ourselves during the Revolution. His admirable book tore o

follow up his victories over us, because they didn't wish us to be conquered, they wished us to be able to vindicate the rights to which they held all Englishmen were entitled. These men considered us the champions of that British liberty which George III was attempting to crush. They disputed the rightfulness of the Stamp Act. When we refused to submit to the Stamp Tax in 1766, it was then that Pitt exclaimed in Parliament: "I rejoice that America has resisted.... If ever this nation should have a tyrant for a King, six millions of freemen, so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would be fit instruments to make slaves of the rest." But they were not willing. When the hour struck and the war came, so many Englishmen were on our side that they would not enlist against us, refused to fight us, and George III had to go to Germany and obtain Hessians to help him out. His war against us was lost at home, on English soil, through English disapproval of his course, almost as much as it was lost here through the indomitable Washington and the help of France. That is the actual state of the case, there is the truth. Did you hear much about this at school? Did you ever learn there that George III had a fake Parliament, largely elected by fake votes, which did not represent the English people; that this fake Parliament was autocracy's last ditch in England; that it choked for a time the English democracy which, after the setback given it by the excesses of the French Revolution, went forward again until to-day the King of England has less power than the President of the United States? I suppose everybody in the world who knows the important steps of history knows this--except the average American. From him it has been concealed by his school his

resource gathered through centuries of struggle. Mad mobs, whole races of people who have never thought at all, or who have now hurled away all pretense of thought, aim at mere destruction of everything that is. They don't attempt to offer any substitute. Down with religion, down with education, down with marriage, down with law, down with property: Such is their cry. Wipe the slate blank, they say, and then w

those school textbooks wherein our boys and girls have been and are still being taught a history of our Revolution in the distorted form that I have briefly summarized. His bo

er obstruction is possible, by every influence visible and invisible that pro-German and pro-Irish propaganda can exert. Thousands of our American school children all over our country are still being given a version of our Revolution and the political state of England then, which is as faulty as was George III's government, with its fake parliament, its "rotten boroughs

ny prominent Englishmen who devoted themselves to the cause of the Americans." Of course, what dwindles is the amount said about our English sympathizers. In groups three and four this is so scanty as to distort the truth and send any boy or girl who studied books of these groups out of school into life with a very imperfect idea indeed of the size and importance of English opposition to the policy of George III; in group five nothing is said about this at all. The boys and girls who studied books in group five would grow up believing that England was undividedly autocratic, tyrannical, and hostile to our liberty. In his careful and conscientious classification, Mr. Altschul gives us the books in use twenty years ago (and hence responsible for the opinion of Americans now between thirty and forty years old) and books in use to-day, and hence responsible for the opinion of those American men and women who will presently be grown up and

e the hope I expressed in my original article, and which I here repeat. Surely the publishers of these books will revise them! Surely any patriotic American publisher and any patriotic board of education, school principal, or educator, will watch and resist all propaganda and other sinister influence tending to perpetuate this error of these school histories! Whatever excuse they once had, be it the exp