RELATION

NO. 100 AND THE HAGUE CONVENTION WITH RESPECT TO THE LAWS

Prepared by Major General George B. Davis, U .S. Army.

34-37 Property belonging to relig- Art. 56.

ious or charitable founda

tions, or used for such

Art. 9, in part.

80 Extortion of information
from prisoners of war.

Definition of term "par- Not mentioned.

81

THE CHAIRMAN. It gives me pleasure to recognize Major General George B. Davis, who will make a few remarks upon the subject of Mr. Root's paper.

General DAVIS. Mr. Chairman, after the very just and lucid presentation of the life and services of Dr. Lieber, to which we have just listened, it seems to me that there is little room left for anything further in the way of speech, especially upon such a warm evening. But there are some little side lights that I can throw upon Dr. Lieber's career, which may prove of interest to some of you.

It is interesting to know that his first service and his last were essentially military in character. As a boy, brimming over with patriotic enthusiasm, he was struck down by a French bullet on the battlefield of Namur. In these days of merciful projectiles we find little to remind us of the woes and projectiles of the Napoleonic era. An ounce bullet was in use then, something like three-quarters of an inch in diameter, and anybody that was hit with such a projectile knew it. It was not a case of the bullet going clean through the body of the sufferer and of his making the discovery, somewhat later, that he had been pierced with a ball. In the Waterloo campaign the wounded man knew it at the very instant when he came in contact with an ounce of lead.

Dr. Lieber was twice wounded, once in the head and a second time in the body--he thought at the moment he had been shot through the lung, but, fortunately, that was not the case. Due to his youth and constitution, he recovered from these wounds very quickly after the surgeons were able to get at him, which was a very long time, indeed, as was usual in those days. A few weeks after his recovery, he was attacked by typhus fever-not typhoid, but typhus; and he survived that.

The abounding patriotism that led him to defend his country was, somewhat later, to be his undoing. The sentiments that were so applauded by the members of the ministry in arousing a spirit of resistance to the operations of the Emperor Napoleon, were not forgotten at Waterloo but continued with him to the end. He did not forget them when Napoleon had been eliminated as a factor in European politics, but he continued to cherish them as he had done before 1815 and, as a result got himself into trouble with the authorities and was obliged to migrate, first to England, and a little later, to the United States.

His career for something more than thirty years in the country of his adoption was that of a thinker and educator, and I feel that I am

correct in saying he was one of the ablest and most respected educators that worked and taught during that period.

I have often wondered why it was that this adopted citizen, conceding all his engaging qualities, and they were many, his manner of inspiring enthusiasm among his students, attaching them to him with hoops of steel-why it was that this German scholar became such an influential figure in the world of education. I cannot but believe that, at the time he came, education was at rather a low ebb; in other words, I should put it a little better, perhaps, if I were to say that the higher education had not sufficiently developed to be the force that it ought to have been in the United States at the time when Dr. Lieber's great work as a teacher began.

Dr. Lieber and another very eminent German, Dr. Karl Follen, who settled in Boston in the early part of the last century, were trained university men, trained teachers, men of broad educational views; and that was the very thing the need of which was so generally and clearly recognized in the United States.

An anecdote or two I think will put the situation before you and enable you to reach a conclusion-not that which I have reached, but something possibly in that direction.

General Leavenworth, of the army, was born about 1790, in a little town in northwestern Connecticut, and as he grew toward majority, he had a most earnest desire for some kind of accurate scholarship, for something exact in the way of knowledge. He did not know quite what it was that he needed, but he had the yearning. He found that the only thing that gave him the mental training that he needed in the way of exact study was Blackstone's Commentaries, then as now a most useful and learned work, admirable above all things in the logical way in which principles of the common law are presented. A little later George Ticknor, of Boston, one of our greatest American scholars, who had been taught Latin and Greek by a tutor from Trinity College, Dublin, an expert in the teaching of those languages, was sent by his father, for some strange reason, to one of the smaller New England colleges. Young Ticknor wrote to his father and said, "Why did you send me here, I would really like to know? I know more Latin than the professor of Latin, and I know more Greek than the professor of Greek." His father saw that he had made a mistake and sent young Ticknor to Germany, and he was the first American student to enter a German University and take the