Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/40

This page has been validated.
28
DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY

appreciate and pay for intelligently drawn maps.[1]

In this country we value the moral side of education, and it is perhaps intuitively that we have neglected materialistic geography. Before the War not a few teachers, within my knowledge, objected to geography as a subject of education, on the ground that it tended to promote Imperialism, just as they objected to physical drill because it tended to militarism. We may laugh at such excesses of political caution, as men of former centuries scoffed at the anchorites who secreted themselves from the world, but the protest in each case was against an excess in the opposite direction.

Berlin-Baghdad, Berlin-Herat, Berlin-Pekin—not heard as mere words, but visualised on the mental relief map—involve for most Anglo-Saxons a new mode of thought, lately and imperfectly introduced among us by the rough maps of the newspapers. But your Prussian, and his father, and his grandfather have debated such concepts all their lives, pencil in hand. In arranging the detailed terms of peace, our statesmen will, no doubt, have the

  1. In my Address to the Geographical Section of the British Association at Ipswich in 1895 will be found an account of the rise of the German schools of geography.