"Steel and iron manufacturers employ 58 per cent of foreign-born helpers; the slaughtering and meat-packing trades, 61 per cent; bituminous coal mining, 62 per cent; the silk and dye trade, 34 per cent; glass-making enterprises, 38 per cent; woolen mills, 62 per cent; cotton factories, 69 per cent; the clothing business, 72 per cent; boot and shoe manufacturers, 27 per cent; leather tanners, 57 per cent; furniture factories, 59 per cent; glove manufacturers, 33 per cent; cigar and tobacco trades, 33 per cent; oil refiners, 67 per cent; and sugar refiners, 85 per cent.
"You will agree with me that future security compels attention to such concentrations of unread, unsocialized masses thus conveniently and perilously grouped for misguidance.
"They live in America, but America does not live in them. How can all be 'free and equal' until they have free access to the same sources of self-help and an equal chance to secure them?
"Illiteracy is a pick-and-shovel estate, a life sentence to meniality. Democracy may not have fixed classes and survive. The first duty of Congress is to preserve opportunity for the whole people, and opportunity can not exist where there is no means of information.
"It is a shabby economy, an ungrateful economy that withholds funds for their betterment. The fields of France cry shame upon those who are content to abandon them to their handicap.
"The loyal service of immigrant soldiers and sailors commit us to instruct and nationalize their brothers in breed.
"The spirit in which these United States were conceived insists that the Republic remove the cruel disadvantage under which so many native borns despairingly carry on.
"How may they reason soundly or plan sagely? The man who knows nothing of the past can find little in the future. The less he has gleaned from human experience the more he may be expected to duplicate its signal errors. No argument is too ridiculous for acceptance; no sophistry can seem far-fetched to a person without the sense to confound it.
"Anarchy shall never want for mobs while the uninformed are left at the mercy of false prophets. Those who have no way to estimate the worth of America are unlikely to value its institutions fairly. Blind to facts, the wildest one-eyed argument can sway them.
"Not until we can teach our illiterate millions the truths about the land to which they have come and in which they were born shall its spirit reach them—not until they can read can we set them right and empower them to inherit their estate.