Lehre und Wehre St. Louis, Missouri — April 1916, Seite 166

German transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

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166 Vermischtes.

Germany is the most autocratic in Europe. The German people
do not know what political and social liberty is. They have no con-
ception of such liberty as we enjoy.“ In der Rede von 1913 sagte er:
„he German universities to which the first American students re-
sorted weré in part recent creations and in part reconstructions on
old foundations, but how rich they were, how free and how strongl.
The American pionéers in Germany brought back various kKnowledge,
various skills, and many pregnant doctrines. The variety of knowl-
edge and skill which could be procured at the German universities
was sométhing astonishing to these American youths, soméething in-
describably rich and various. With their oπwn personal experiences
and gains they brought back also to America the structure of the
modern German university, then voung in Germany, and in America
not yet conceived of. They had, moreover, absorbed that noble policy
of academie freedom. fréedom for thé student and teacher alike. This
academie freedom meant emancipation from tradition and prejudice
and from authority. whether governmental or ecclesiastical.“ In sei⸗
nem Buch von 1915 dagegen erklärt er: „The German universities are
chiefly supported and ruled by the Government, and there are no
free endowed institutions to compete with them. For any vital teach-
ing of civil and religious liberty one must go back to individual
German teachers and préachers of an earlier time.“ — In seiner Rede
von 1913 sagte Eliot: „The educational obligations of America to
Germany areé indecd wide and deep. They relate to literature, science,
Art, education, and religion. ... The pioneèers from New England
in the first half of the 19th century Bave béeen followed by a stream
f Ameérican youth, going over to enlarge their experiences, to make
new observations, to put in practise the inductive méthod of ar-
riving at truth. and to learn to think profoundly and accurately in
the German universities. That stream has flowed backward all over
this country, fertilizing it with German thought and German methods.
These thousands have absorbed in Germany that splendid spirit of
scientific research now developed in all fields of knowledge on the
same method and in the same spirit. Seientifie research has been
learned through practise in Germany by thousands of American
students and teachers. It is impossible to describe or even to imagine
what an immense intellectual gift this has been from Germany to
America. It is, of course, true that America is indebted not only
to Germany, but also to other countries, . . . but America is more
indebted to Germany than to any other nation, because the range of
German rescarch has beéen wider and deper than has been that of
any nation.“ Ganz anders 1915: „Thereé is another fleld of human
activity, the development of great pioneers in thinking and imagining,
in which the Germans are accustomed to claim leadership; but that
claim is without warrant. In the first place, German literature and

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