Communication

(We invite all men in the University to submit communications on subjects of timely interest, but assume no responsibility for sentiments expressed under this head.)

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Will you permit me as a graduate and M.A. from Harvard to state a few facts about myself in connection with the European war? I am aware indeed that even the word of honor of the holder of five university and college degrees and author of ten volumes of history will avail little against the leaden mass of ignorance and prejudice that weighs down our country. Permit me to say that I am the completes American both by descent and by bringing up, and that when I first went to Germany in 1884, after a year of the then wretched instruction in German at Harvard, I could speak scarcely a word of the language. I was in Germany from November 7, 1913 to July 28, 1914. I was under contract to complete by October 1, 1914 a volume on Germany for a series to be called "Present Day Histories." I had made up my mind that my chief source of inspiration should be the newspapers. I read them unremittingly, morning, noon and night. I subscribed, from January 1, 1914, on, to the Zeitungsarchiv which, in a daily and monthly edition, gives the gist of the important articles from 120 newspapers of all shades of opinion from Social Democratic to stock conservative. It can be consulted in the Harvard Library. Now I wish to say that never in all that time did I meet an utterance that gave me the least impression of Germany's desiring to provoke a war. The country was simply teeming with great plans for the future which would inevitably have been frustrated by war. I am led to send you this declaration by the sudden discovery that some of our noted men still believe that Germany, driven by a militarist party and through lust for conquest deliberately precipitated this struggle. I declare such a view to be absolutely and fundamentally false. ERNEST T. HENDERSON '84, Ph.D., L.H.D.