“I have been looking over your school reports and have been noting the disproportionate number of girls who are graduated.
“Your boys and young men are impatient for business. Even those in well-to-do families leave school very early. I find that ninety-two per cent. of your children leave school before they ever study any text-book of history, and that seventy-five per cent. leave before they reach the grade where a little historic information is given through the aid of biographical sketches and stories.
“Think of it! Seventy-five per cent., the majority of them our future voters, who have never so much as heard of the Pilgrim Fathers or the war of the Revolution, and who have far too feeble an educational equipment to lead to much further study!
“But even of those who have some smattering of history we find thousands appearing at the polls every year, having heard a little of the cant and the bluster of partisan politics, and having nothing more to fit them for their duties as citizens in a land whose national and state and city governments they have never studied.
“Moreover, they have the wildest notions in regard to those great questions of labor, wages, and reform which are agitating our country. Such are the men who hold the ignoble conviction that every man is selfish at heart, that to the victors belong the spoils, and that desire for office is inevitably ambition for personal gain.
“You have learned in the past somewhat of the cost to this city and state of the presence of anarchists within your midst. But what are you doing to make good citizens of the thousands of men, women, and children who are said to be enrolled in anarchist Sunday-schools here in this city?
“What is being done to prevent the children of the mob that tears up your horse-car tracks when you have a strike from following ten years hence their fathers’ example?
“But I am not speaking merely of rumsellers or anarchists, or of ignorant foreigners or men who sell their votes. I am speaking of the banker’s sons as well as the blacksmith’s.
“There is among many of the hard-headed young business men of our time whom I have met a
TERRIBLE SKEPTICISM.