Our attitude toward
them is precisely our attitude toward the Mexican People. We believe,
and with good reason, that the German system of education is
authoritative and false, and was more or less deliberately conceived in
order to warp the nature and produce complexes in the mind of the German
people for the end of preserving and perpetuating the power of the
Junkers. We have no quarrel with the duped and oppressed, but we war
against the agents of oppression. To the conservative mind such an
aspiration appears chimerical. But America, youngest of the nations, was
born when modern science was gathering the momentum which since has
enabled it to overcome, with a bewildering rapidity, many evils
previously held by superstition to be ineradicable. As a corollary to
our democratic creed, we accepted the dictum that to human intelligence
all things are possible. The virtue of this dictum lies not in dogma,
but in an indomitable attitude of mind to which the world owes its every
advance in civilization; quixotic, perhaps, but necessary to great
accomplishment. In searching for a present-day protagonist, no happier
example could be found than Mr. Henry Ford, who exhibits the
characteristic American mixture of the practical and the ideal. He
introduces into industry humanitarian practices that even tend to
increase the vast fortune which by his own efforts he has accumulated.
He sees that democratic peoples do not desire to go to war, he does not
believe that war is necessary and inevitable, he lays himself open to
ridicule by financing a Peace Mission.
Pages:
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30