Lynch, Frederick . Personal Recollections of Andrew Carnegie / by Frederick Lynch
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Chapter 11

XI
FOREIGN MISSIONS AND FOREIGN POLITICS

    IT WAS at a meeting of the Armstrong Association at the home of Mr. William J. Schieffelin, its President, that Mr. Carnegie made his testimony to foreign missions. The Armstrong Association was created to work for Hampton Institute. It was Hampton's representative at New York. For its annual meeting Mr. Schieffelin used to invite the members to his beautiful home. At this meeting reports of the work were submitted by Dr. Frissell and some one especially interested in the advancement of the colored people was invited to speak. On this occasion Mr. Carnegie was the speaker and dwelt upon the value of technical training for all boys -- not colored boys alone. He recalled the fact that many years ago his grandfather had written an article in a British paper called "Handication versus


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Headication," and how in that article his grandfather had thanked God that in his youth he had learned how to make shoes. This was a favorite theme of Mr. Carnegie's and I need not quote here his well-known view on technical education. In some way he got upon the theme that the one thing we ought to do for China was to put a lot of Tuskegees and Hamptons in her midst.

    Then he said, "Perhaps some of you have sometime heard me speak somewhat critically of foreign missions. It is true I used to have a prejudice against different sects going to China or India and trying to make converts to their particular creeds. But after I visited those countries and saw what medical missions and our schools were doing, I changed my mind and I came home thoroughly convinced that we could make no greater gift to these people." Then he added: "I sometimes wish we could put all our missionary work under undenominational agencies, as the Young Men's Christian Association does its work."

    I afterwards recalled this testimony to missions to Mr. Carnegie and asked him if he had seen Mr. Taft's most eulogistic praise of


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the missionaries in the Philippines. He had not seen it and asked me what he had said. I sent him the passage in Mr. Taft's address, made, if I remember rightly, before a meeting of the Laymen's Missionary Association, where he spoke of the remarkable things the missionaries had done in the Far East and the Philippines wherever he had been, and how they had always been back of him in any reform he had undertaken. "That's a very fine tribute," was Mr. Carnegie's comment.

    I think I might depart from my subject for a moment here to say that one evening in October, 1919, while at dinner at Lambeth palace, I related to the Archbishop of Canterbury the remarkable tribute our Ambassador to Turkey, Mr. Morgenthau, who is, as all know, of the Jewish faith, had paid to the missionaries in Turkey. I told the Archbishop that Mr. Morgenthau had been making many addresses on behalf of Armenian Relief, and that again and again, he had said that the missionaries were the statesmen of the Near East, that they had shown most marked ability in administering relief and had been of the greatest aid to the


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government in all its undertakings. The Archbishop was greatly impressed by this and asked me if I would not, when I returned to America, have exact copies of Mr. Morgenthau's words made, as he could make good use of them.

    One of the most amusing incidents I ever witnessed happened one afternoon in Mr. Carnegie's library. It threw more light upon international complications and the origin of wars than whole volumes of political essays. Mr. Carnegie was never tired of referring to it as an illustration of the inevitable feature of an unorganized world. We were sitting before the fire talking when suddenly a young Englishman was announced bearing a card of introduction from an eminent member of the British government, a friend of Mr. Carnegie's. Of course Mr. Carnegie welcomed him heartily. Very soon he told us that he had come on a confidential errand from England to see prominent Americans and tell them what was going on in Germany -- this was five years before the war, remember -- how Germany was building up a vast army and enlarging her fleets and that they in England had good reason to believe that it was all


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part of a well laid plan eventually to invade England. They thought Americans ought to know this and be acting accordingly. Hardly had the Englishman left the room when a well-known publisher, a friend of Mr. Carnegie, was ushered in. He knew nothing of the Englishman's visit, although he must have passed him in the hall. He had just arrived in America, straight from Germany, and was full of his European experiences.

    After a moment he said, "I saw many of your friends in Berlin, Mr. Carnegie, and they are all worried over England's naval activities. They thoroughly believe that England is building this vast navy with ulterior purposes against Germany. In fact one or two of your friends asked me to bring this matter to your attention."

    When the publisher had gone, Mr. Carnegie turned to me and said, "There you have it, there's war right in the making. How can such a condition as that end in anything but war? If you had a League of Nations now, there would not be any need of either of these nations increasing their armaments on this vast scale, and if either one began its armament it would have to give its reasons before


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the whole council of nations." (It is interesting to note that that is just the provision that is in the present League of Nations Covenant. )

    Mr. Carnegie could sometimes be very severe where carelessness was evinced on someone's part; but the bigness of his nature was displayed in the fact that if he called someone severely to account for what he considered carelessness or imprudence, and afterwards found himself in the wrong, he would put himself out to say that he was in error and do everything possible to make amends. I had two or three experiences of this sort which led to such a revelation of his magnanimity that they greatly increased my admiration for him and deepened the friendship between us.

    The first was when I came home from Europe in August, 1914. I had been caught in Constance, which lies in the South Eastern corner of Germany, when the war broke out. I had about thirty Americans and Englishmen with me who were the guests of Mr. Carnegie and the Church Peace Union (one of his endowments) at a Conference of Churchmen. I saw the war clouds gathering in England,


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France and Germany during the latter part of July. Some of the Englishmen in our party were members of Parliament, and not only close to the British Government, but had intimate relation with influential Germans. I knew from first-hand contact what efforts Sir Edward Grey was making to check Austria and Germany in their mad career. I left Constance and got to London in time for the great evening in Parliament when England decided that it was her duty to enter the conflict. I had the English White Book giving a full account of all the correspondence between England and Germany and Austria in my hand the moment it was issued. (I brought the first copy of the White Book to America and gave it to the New York Times, which printed it in full in a special Supplement of its Sunday issue.) I left England on the "Laconia" shortly after the war began, and on the steamer I wrote a book called "Through Europe on the Eve of War," in which I told the truth. The book was off the press ten days after I had been home and was soon in the hands of thousands of readers. Mr. Carnegie read it with great delight and, as I was at the house almost daily for a while


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after he had returned from Europe, we often spoke about it. Mr. Carnegie was trying very hard to remain neutral, both because of President Wilson's request, and because he could not believe at first that the Kaiser and other Germans in the Government whom he knew intimately, could have deliberately and cold-bloodedly perpetrated this diabolical thing. Everything went well until someone -- he would never tell me who it was -- took a copy of the book and marked about twenty passages where I had said that Germany was deliberately guilty of the whole affair and had long been making preparations for it. It greatly disturbed him and he sent for me at once. J. Allen Baker, M. P., was in New York at the time and he asked him to come also. We went through the book together and Mr. Carnegie frankly told me that he greatly regretted my having written those things, that I had violated our neutrality, that it would greatly hinder any future influence of the Endowment of which I had charge with Germany, that if Germany got hold of the book (Germany did get the book and I was most heartily damned both by Germans in Germany and in the United States) it


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might even lead to international complications.

    From his point of view Mr. Carnegie was right and we discussed the matter for several days. My only defense was that I had told the truth, and that time would reveal it. But I have no purpose in relating the incident here except to say that several months afterwards, when the whole truth had been revealed, and the German methods in Europe and the machinations in America so disgusted Mr. Carnegie that he became the most ardent pro-Ally in the country -- this was before we entered the war, and he was in heartiest sympathy with that act -- he took occasion to say to me one day, "I want to tell you how much I regret losing my temper over your book. I see now that you were absolutely in the right, and we would all of us have done well if we had seen the truth right at the beginning and told it plainly as you did."

    "Oh," I said, "I had forgotten all about it long ago."

    "But I had not," he said.




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