perior patriotism is affected and paraded in order that it
may camouflage its other and real activities.

When at times we forget ourselves and speak of rights rather than duties
in connection with our country, it were well to recall and to repeat the
words of Franklin: "The sun never repents of the good he does nor does
he ever demand a recompense."

Not only is constant vigilance incumbent upon us, but realising the fact
that the boys and the girls of today are the citizens of tomorrow--the
nation's voters and law-makers--it is incumbent upon us to see that
American free education through American free public schools, is
advanced to and maintained at its highest possibilities, and kept free
from any agencies that will make for a divided or anything less than a
whole-hearted and intelligent citizenship. The motto on the Shakespeare
statue at Leicester Square in London: "There is no darkness but
ignorance," might well be reproduced in every city and every hamlet in
the nation.

Late revelations have shown how even education can be manipulated and
prostituted for ulterior purposes. Parochial schools whether Protestant,
Catholic, Jewish, or Oriental, have no place in American
institutions--and whether their work is carried on in English or in a
foreign language. They are absolutely foreign to the spirit of our
institutions. They are purely for the sake of something less than the
nation itself. Blind indeed are we if we are not history-wise. Criminal
indeed are we to allow any boys or girls to be diverted to them and to
be deprived of the advantages of a better schooling and being brought
under the influences of agencies that are thoroughly and wholly
American.

American education must be made for American institutions and for
nothing less than this. The nation's children should be shielded from
any power that seeks to get possession of them in order at an early and
unaccountable age to fasten authority upon them, and to drive a wedge
between them and all others of the nation.

The nation has a duty to every child within its borders. To fail to
recognize or to shirk that duty, will call for a price to be paid
sometime as great as that that has been paid by every other nation that
did not see until too late. Sectarianism in education stultifies and
robs the child and nullifies the finest national instincts in education.
It is for but one purpose--the use and the power of the organization
that plans and that fosters it