Excerpt from Modern Language Teaching, Vol. 11: The Official Organ of the Modern Language Association

Our Association again took part in the Annual Conference of Educational Associations, and held its Twenty-Second Annual Meeting in the West Gallery of the University of London on January 7 and 8. Notwithstanding the national crisis and the absence of many of our members at the front, the attendance was quite as good as in previous years. The addresses, papers, and discussions were of more than average interest, and much more helpful than usual. The meeting was honoured by the presence of Dr. Headlam (Board of Education) and Mr. Stanley Leathes (Chief Civil Service Commissioner), both of whom took part in the discussion on the Teaching of European History. The meeting had also the pleasure of hearing a former President, Dr. Macan, Master of University College, Oxford, who proposed a humorous vote of thanks to the President of the year for his Address.

Of the realities of the war our members were reminded by the Lecture given by Professor Dontrepont, of the University of Louvain. After a short business meeting, at which some of the Rules of the Association were altered, at twelve o'clock the President began his Presidential Address, which might be entitled, A Plea for Charity, for Accuracy, and for Better Literature:

To no Society meeting in London this week should the war appeal more poignantly than it does to the Modern Language Association. At the call of the country, many of our members have undertaken duties that prevent them being here to-day. Some are standing in peril of their lives, a few have passed out of the range of earthly peril, and all of us, as citizens, have felt the continuous weight of public anxiety, and, from time to time, have endured a stab at the heart as we have heard of the death of some relative or old pupil.

Besides the stake that we, as citizens and teachers, have in the war, it touches us still more closely as teachers of French and German. The vast majority of our members have spent weeks and months, possibly years, not as tourists, but as residents in one or other, if not in both, of the countries that are the protagonists in this great war. We, if any, should understand the tragedy of what is happening, and we pay for that complete understanding by a deeper heartache. Some of us have sung Deutschland über alles in a German Kneipe. Some have watched from the great Dresden river the Whit-Sunday sun gilding the Saxon Highlands. Some have cheered, with their contemporaries, the burning eloquence of the Spanish democrat, Castelar, in the Collège de France. Some have enjoyed the freedom of the Quartier Latin, and tramped with buoyant French students through the forest of Fontainebleau, till the boots which were sold to us as students, with price and sole alike reduced, gave us a respectable excuse for calling for a halt and food. Some have felt the spell of Wagner in the Opera House at Bayreuth. Some can never forget how they laughed with Jeanne Samary, how they cried with Bartet, how they thrilled at the voice of Got and le Bargy as they listened to Moliere or Racine, or Emile Augier, in the parterre of the Théâtre Français.

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