not long ago he
wandered into one of those neighborhood schoolhouse meetings, and there
found himself among people who were discussing matters in which they were
all interested; and when he came out he said to me: "I have been living in
America now ten years, and to-night for the first time I saw America as I
had imagined it to be. This gathering together of men of all sorts upon a
perfect footing of equality to discuss frankly with one another what
concerned them all,--that is what I dreamed America was."

That set me to thinking. He hadn't seen the America he had come to find
until that night. Had he not felt like a neighbor? Had men not consulted
him? He had felt like an outsider. Had there been no little circles in
which public affairs were discussed?

You know that the great melting-pot of America, the place where we are all
made Americans of, is the public school, where men of every race and of
every origin and of every station in life send their children, or ought to
send their children, and where, being mixed together, the youngsters are
all infused with the American spirit and developed into American men and
American women. When, in addition to sending our children to school to
paid teachers, we go to school to one another in those same schoolhouses,
then we shall begin more fully to realize than we ever have realized
before what American life is. And let me tell you this, confidentially,
that wherever you find school boards that object to opening the
schoolhouses in the evening for public meetings of every proper sort, you
had better look around for some politician who is objecting to it; because
the thing that cures bad politics is talk by the neighbors. The thing that
brings to light the concealed circumstances of our political life is the
talk of the neighborhood; and if you can get the neighbors together, get
them frankly to tell everything they know, then your politics, your ward
politics, and your city politics, and your state politics, too, will be
turned inside out,--in the way they ought to be. Because the chief
difficulty our politics has suffered is that the inside didn't look like
the outside. Nothing clears the air like frank discussion.

One of the valuable lessons of my life was due to the fact that at a
comparatively early age in my experience as a public speaker I had the
privilege of speaking in Cooper Union in New York. The audience in Cooper
Union is made up of every kind of man and woman