Before I began the airplane journey from Warsaw I went to take my last look at the statue of Copernicus, whose conception of a heliocentric universe is the capital event in modern thought. At the foot of the Vosges Mountains, which I crossed a day or two later into France, there is the little village of St. Dié, where, in a book on the Ptolemaic System, the name America was first put on the printed page, and on a world map. America was baptized into the Ptolemaic cosmos, but its inhabitants (after the aborigines) dwelt from the first in a Copernican universe, wanderers in an infinity of space, "with a shuddering sense of physical immensity."
Europe could not readily forget the geography of its infancy and childhood and maturity, but America began its God-fearing settlement with an astronomy of infinite distances, with a cosmography in which it was itself infinitesimal, and with a geography partaking of the sky, as well as of the sea and land.
With this Copernican consciousness of the universe, America should be the least provincial, and Americans the most "universe-minded" of all the inhabitants of the earth.
Isolate we have indeed been as a people, but not provincially nor narrowly nor proudly isolate. We kept out of the partisan Ptolemaic concerns of Europe, but when the freedom of mankind was threatened, America's policies leaped to the world horizon of her interest in humanity. Our America has had from the first a cosmic view, a concern for all mankind. "All men" are included in its national creed. It is only those who would narrow our horizon of sympathy and bring a Ptolemaic sky over our heads again that it has in its doctrine excluded.
So it is not by accident, I think, that we have put the stars in the field of our flag. They are cosmic symbols gathered from the immeasurable universe, not from pieces of earth and stretches of water, which together make up what we are accustomed to call, whatever our origin, "our native land"--a people of clearly defined national personality, but of planetary consciousness and of interdependent destinies.
But in this land of Copernicus, where "the capital event of modern thought" occurred, I found that only two million eight hundred thousand children of school age out of four million six hundred thousand had any schooling whatever. It was hoped by the minister of education that by 1928, if only the fear of a new partition of Poland could be removed and credits found, they might make some most elemental provision for the rest--_and this only because so many of the young men of Poland had perished in the World War that the coming generation would be a smaller one_. I could present statistics of like import for other European states. They would all support my thesis, that since we have had a World War for freedom, we should have a world plan for giving the children who have suffered in this divided earth (the millions of "Pelegs") an elemental chance to enjoy that freeing of the soul which is, with the unity of mankind, the ideal end of the state.