International Newsreel
Julius Rosenwald (right), President of Sears, Roebuck, and Co. and noted
philanthropist, spends hours at Judge Sabath’s Court in Chicago, studying
divorce conditions at first hand. Can his millions help cure the divorce evil?
and soul. We are forced to the conclusion, then,
that the waywardness of youth is due, not to the
fact that they are ‘‘innately’ worse than those of
preceding generations, but to the fact that the
conditions into which they were born — conditions,
by the way, provided by their parents and grand-
parents and over which the youth have no control —
have produced a generation that is without parallel
in the history of mankind.
SCRAPPING AGE-OLD SCRUPLES
T IS a generally accepted commonplace that the
World War was the greatest catastrophe in the
history of the human race. Men have spent much
energy trying to measure the war in terms of its
responsibility, number of lives lost, billions of dollars’
worth of property destroyed. But who has the power
to evaluate the Great War in terms of its results on
the youth of today, who were boys and girls of the
most impressionable age during the years of that
awful struggle? During those days fathers and moth-
ers used every known instrument of instruction, psy-
chology, and compulsion, through the press, from
the pulpit and the platform, and by legislative act,
to teach and force mankind to repudiate every moral
standard that had been laboriously worked out and
accepted during the course of human history. The
attitude toward murder and falsehood will serve as
illustrations.
Nations that had held murder in horror and the
murderer as the worst of criminals ‘suddenly broke
out in sturdy anthems of praises for killers and
killing.” And it is not to be expected that boys and
girls of five to fifteen years of age can well distinguish
between ‘‘legalized’ Killing on the battlefield, and
killing in an obscure hallway, a dark bedroom, or a
PAGE FOUR
back street. “The boys [and girls]
who are killing now were seven,
eight, nine, or ten. They waged
mimic wars with tin soldiers and
they chose for hero worship the man
who had brought down fifteen
enemy planes, who had bayonneted
twenty in a rush across the waiting
trench.”
FALSEHOOD AS A WEAPON
GAIN, falsehood is a recognized
and extremely useful, and hence
a highly developed, weapon in
modern warfare. 1 quote from a
letter recently received from a
New York publishing house an-
nouncing the publication of the
book, “Falsehood in Wartime,” by
Arthur Ponsonby, M. P.: “People
must never [in time of war] be al-
lowed to become despondent; so
victories must be exaggerated and
defeats minimized, and the stimulus
of indignation, horror, and hatred
must be assiduously and continuously pumped into
the public mind. Lies are circulated with great
rapidity. . . .
““There must have been more deliberate lying in
the World War from 1914-1918 than in any other
period of the world’s history. Everything was
legitimate which could make the soldiers go on
fighting. Any attempt to doubt or deny even the
most fantastic story has to be condemned as un-
patriotic, if not traitorous. This allows a free field
for the rapid spread of lies.””
It is a long step from the McGuffey readers, that
formed the cornerstone of the education and training
of our fathers and grandfathers, to that five-year
period in world history when all moral restraint
was swept away — when every phase of life that
came in contact with our boys and girls was saturated
with the worship of hatred, falsehood, brutality,
and bloodshed. And today we are reaping the results,
not because the youth of today are naturally inferior
to, or worse than, those of the past, but because they
have had forced into every physical, moral, and
spiritual fiber germs that can breed nothing but
the worst forms of excess and crime.
The boys and girls of any age appropriate those
conditions, instruments, institutions, and customs
transmitted to them by preceding generations; in
this way alone is the continuity of history preserved.
But how different the heritage of the present genera-
tion from that of any preceding age! And never in
the history of the world has humanity reaped a
more bountiful harvest from seed sown than 4t
the present time. In place of love and reverence
for the truth, we fed our boys and girls falsehood and
lies; instead of teaching the sacredness of human
life, we were butchering men (Continued on page 28)
THE WATCHMAN MAGAZINE