Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems: Expanded Edition

An American Thinker on the War: Professor Royce

an american thinker on the war Professor Royce  In my last letter I believe that I laid some stress to you upon the necessity, both patriotic and academic, of my trying to preserve a formally strict neutrality of expression, not merely because the community of mankind as a total community is my highest interest, as it is yours, but because our President’s advice to the nation, and our manifold relations to foreigners, both in academic life and in the world at large, limit our right, or have limited our right, to express ourselves regarding matters of the war and of current controversy. It is now a relief to be able to say with heartiness, that one result at least The title is the Editor’s. The text consists of the relevant extracts from a letter written by Professor Royce to the Editor, permission for the publication of which is given on p. 268. With the exception of two passages (in the second paragraph on p. 266 and the end of the last paragraph), the extracts were published in the London Morning Post of July 5, 1915. It will be noted that whereas Dr. Förster’s pamphlet, discussed by Mr. Lowes Dickinson in the preceding article, was written before the sinking of the Lusitania, Professor Royce writes after the event.—editor [Note in the original]. {  } an american thinker on the war  of the Lusitania atrocity has been and will be to make it both necessary and advisable to speak out plainly many things which an American professor in my position has long felt a desire to say upon occasions when he still supposed it to be his duty not to say them. Thus, for instance, immediately after the Lusitania incident, and before Wilson’s first letter, addressed to Berlin, I quite deliberately told my own principal class in metaphysics that, and why, I should no longer endeavour to assume a neutral attitude about the moral questions which the Lusitania incident brought to the minds of all of us. That friends of mine, and that former pupils of mine, near to me as the students whom I was addressing are near to me, were on the Lusitania—this, as I said to my class, made it right for me to say, ‘‘Among these dead of the Lusitania are my own dead.’’ And so, I went on to say, ‘‘I cannot longer leave you to suppose it possible that I have any agreement with the views which a German colleague of mine, a teacher at Harvard, recently maintained, when he predicted what he called ‘the spiritual triumph of Germany.’ It makes very little difference to anybody else what I happen to think, but to you, as my pupils, it is my duty to say that henceforth, whatever the fortunes of war may be, ‘the spiritual triumph of Germany’ is quite impossible, so far as this conflict is concerned. I freely admit that Germany may triumph in the visible conflict, although my judgment about such matters is quite worthless. But to my German friends and colleagues, if they chance to want to know what I think, I can and do henceforth only say this: ‘You may triumph in the visible world, but at the banquet where you celebrate your triumph there will be present the ghosts of my dead slain on the Lusitania.’’’ I insisted to my class that just now the especially significant side of this matter is contained simply in the deliberately chosen facts which the enemy of mankind has chosen to bring into being in these newest expressions of the infamies of Prussian warfare. I should be a poor professor of philosophy, and in particular of moral philosophy, if I left my class in the least doubt as to how to view such things. And that, then, was my immediate reaction on the Lusitania situation.  an american thinker on the war Of course, one still has to live with his German colleagues in the midst of this situation. I am glad to know at least one such German colleague—and, I believe, a thoroughly good patriot—who views the Lusitania atrocity precisely as any honest and humane man must view it, unless wholly blinded by the present personal and social atmosphere of ferocity and confusion in which so many Germans live. I do not endeavour to have unnecessary controversy with these colleagues , or with...