V É Piò HQ 7 t ; • Socialism in the Schools Hon. Bird S. Coler HON. BIRD S. COLER, broker, publicist, author, lecturer. Graduate of Brooklyn Polytechnic School and Phillips Andover Academy, active member of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Mr. Coler was Comptroller of the City of New York in 1897, Democratic candidate for Governor of the State of New York in 1902, and President of the Borough of Brooklyn from January 1, 1906, to January 1,1910. 1 "Two and Two Make Four" is one of Mr. Coler's latest publications. It is a work The Boston School of Political Economy recommends. "I t is one of the most remarkable and most valuable publications of present times," says the Most Reverend Archbishop of St. Paul; " a more impartial and more exact conspectus of facts, with their causes and consequences, I have never had in my hand. No student of history jn earnest search of truth, should allow it to be absent from his table. . . . For thè welfare of America the book should have the widest circulation." GitiW*- 2 / Socialism and the Schools. THE School Question in the United States has become trouble-some, I think. The public schools are fast becoming the temples of a new religion. This statement may startle some good citizens who are under the impression that all religion is being excluded from the schools. I t , i s true nevertheless; just as true is it in psychology as in physics that nature abhors a vacuum. The old religion is being excluded from the public schools, but a new religion is rushing in to take its place. It is variously called. By some it is known as Agnosticism, by some Atheism, by some Socialism, and by others Ethical Culture. It is affirmative, dog-matic, intolerant. Atheism is not satisfied with its own assertion that there is no God; it insists that you shall accept that assertion. Your agnostic is never satisfied with his undisputed declaration that he does not know; he will knock your head off if you do not admit that you do not know either. And your Socialist, while he pleads for your votes on the ground that his creed is merely political, turns back for his faith and his inspiration to the literature which declares there is no room for a God in the material universe, that the deistic conception is merely the reflex of economic conditions. As a recent writer has pointed out, he substitutes the promise of a heaven on earth for the promise of a heaven on high, and abolishes hell altogether. He ignores the fact of death. And this is the religion that is being taught in the schools. This is the faith that is being substituted for the old faith in a God and a God-given ethical system. If you will look carefully you will find that it is with the school system that the Fabian is most deeply concerned. You will find that Socialists are hungry for seats in the Board of Education. You will find that in our schools, under the cloak of humanitarianism, Socialism is being translated from theory into practice. Nowhere, I think, is this more true than in New York City. Nowhere has the pet socialistic theory of State supervision of the child, of the substitution of State control for family control, had a more practical result. For the public schools of New York not only teach the child how to read and write and figure, but how to sew and cook—things that the mother: was at one time supposed to teach. The State doctor now examines the ii child, looks at its teeth, its hair, its clothing; takes into his hands the matter of the health of the child, and recently has also taken up the question of feeding the child. Something had to be crowded out to let all this in. Something was crowded out. God was crowded out. Thorough methods of instruction were crowded out, and "get-wise-quick" methods have become as popular with educators as "get-rich-quick" methods have become popular in business. Perhaps there is a relationship between the two things. The result of the crowding-out process is beginning to be felt, in the world of work. There is a .very general complaint among business men that young clerks and stenographers do not know how to spell. One college president, if my memory is not playing me false, published not long ago a similar complaint with regard to college students and college graduates. Certainly the art of reading has gone back. A young man just out of school is apt to read the word "elephant" as "element" to-day, or "elevator." He doesn't try to learn how it is written; he just takes a slap-dash at it. Per-haps the modern "sight-reading" method of the public schools has something to do with this. Perhaps he would be more likely to read it as it is if he had been taught in the primary classes to read it as it was instead of to read it as what it "looked like." That something crowded out, then, has left us with godless schools. It has left us with a school-house which has ceased to be the source of the religious training and has become the model-room of applied Socialism. All this, in the words of the hour, is "going some." It is a long way beyond what Horace Mann believed in, and Horace Mann i s known as the Father of Public Schools. He was against denomina-tional studies in schools, but it was "Christian denominationalism" he meant. He says so himself; he berated Roman Catholicism, but resented with hot anger the accusations of the Congregationalists of Puritan New England that he was driving Christianity out of the schools. He cited the universal experience of the nations to show that a godless people must decay; that Greece fell when her gods became allegories; that Rome grew rotten when her people lost faith; that, in every one of the dead nations, faith was the soul of the people, and putrefaction followed its departure. As a matter of necessity some god there must be, or man dies. He is not sufficient unto himself alone—he never has been. Atheists have devised beautiful ethical codes, but never have been able to get people to live them. The man who sees only death before him is careless of what he does with his life. Teach man that he is of the earth alone, and he will be of the earth earthy. Teach man that he has no soul, and he will act as if he had none. Will man pause on the road of his heart's desire for any crime, great or small, if he has not before him the warning "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul"? The most beautiful program of what he ought to do will make no appeal to him if you cannot tell him why he ought to do it. Do the majority of the pepple of the United States want godless schools? Does the Christian want a school from which the Father Almighty has been eliminated? Does the Jew want a school from which the God of Abraham and Isaac has been shut out? Does the Moslem want a school whose doors are closed to Allah? I think not. Yet in the United States that is what we are getting, Christian and Jew and such Moslems as are among us; that is what we are getting. Dr. Hodge in the Princeton Review, as far back as 1887, cites the instance of a refusal of a work on political economy as a text-book for the public schools of Chicago on the ground, as the Superintendent of Schools stated it, that "the first sentence damned it for public use." And the first sentence was, "All natural wealth is due to the beneficence of God.'.' This old world is so numerously and so variously troubled that no new trouble, clamorous for attention, finds a ready consideration awaiting it. It staves off its perplexities as long as possible. It never grapples with its troubles until they have grappled with it. It wrestles with its evils only when they have it by the throat. It never has been and never will it be a "stitch in time" world. We, as a part of'it, are much like the rest of it in this: we are given to procrastination. It is not the Spaniard only who says, "Manana." Or, if it is, we have something just as good; we say, "To-morrow." We have said it quite a lot. We said it about black slavery until black slavery became red war. And then it said to us—as all such things do sooner or later—"Not to-morrow! Now!" It answered our procrastination with its own terrible promptness. It closed our long sentence in the future tense with a bloody period in the present tense. It dragged us violently out of the foggy subjunctive mood into the fiery imperative. It is to be noted that when hand-grips came at last, the nation did the right thing. It didn't let black slavery kill it; it killed black slavery. For black slavery had become an evil intolerant, and an ii evil intolerant is an evil intolerable. It is really seeking destruc-tion when it is looking for fight. So from this instance a generaliza-tion may be projected by the optimist. We have projected, it being optimistic. But if black slavery died, procrastination didn't. It is too much a part of us to be rooted out by so terriffic a storm even as the war we had. Other questions were pressing which we staved off, other problems were calling for solution which we pushed from us, or, rather, from which we retreated. One of these questions had loomed up at the very beginning of our national life, but, as it was a hard one, we put it off. We stepped back from the face of it while we told ourselves-we were solving it. Sometimes we stuck an American flag on top of it and called it a patriotic and an admirable thing and no question at all. Sometimes we boasted of it as a little boy boasts of the mumps. It was the School Question. It is the School Problem. We must grapple with it now. We must do it now for the simple —and the selfsame—reason that you cannot defer a settlement with a fellow who has an oppressive thumb on your windpipe. You must knock him down or choke. The State must grapple now with the School Problem or choke, morally and intellectually. There is a question as to which aspect is the more important — the moral or the intellectual. It isn't a debated question; it is a question which is fought. For it reaches deep; men are in deadly earnest about it, and the things, about which men are in deadly earnest are the things about which they fight. Matters of opinion we debate; matters of desire and necessity we fight about. It is a mistake to say that men ever bandy anything more substantial than word's over opinions; "men willing to die for their opinions" never existed, and the phrase, although common, does not mean what it says. It isn't his opinion that the religious or patriotic enthusiast is willing to die for—it is his faith: ids faith in his country, his faith in justice, his faith that there is a God, his faith that there, isn't, his faith that he is of God's chosen people, his faith that Roman Catholicism is the only true Christianity, his faith that it isn't, his faith that there is one God and Mahomet is his Prophet, his faith that the Son of God died on the cross of Calvary to redeem sinners! With us the first shall be last—we shall give precedence to the intellectual aspect of the matter. We shall try to demonstrate that Socialism in our public schools means intellectual strangulation. For the thing behind the secularization of the schools is Socialism. It sails under false colors; it always does. It pleads for liberality, but it is the least liberal of all things. It asks for tolerance, but it is the most intolerant of all things. In the schools it will defend itself from assailants behind the "little red school-house" of Puritan New England. But it isn't the "little red school-house" at all. The "little red school-house" was the home of a very real and very virile faith in a very real God! This thing is its antithesis. No, this is not the "little red school-house" ; it is the modern red flag. It is well to demolish first a popular misconception. It finds expression in the term "a half-truth." There is no such thing as "a half-truth." Truth must be complete ; it must be flush with the facts; it must be just, in the sense in which mechanics use the word. There is no more "a half-truth" than there is a two-sided square or a half-dimension. If I state that a block, which in fact is four hundred feet long, is two hundred feet long, my statement is not half true, it is all false. Two halves make a whole ; two such statements would not make a truth. I may assume, I take it, that education is, on its intellectual side, the development of a man's intellectual capacity by teaching him the truth. It is the furnishing him with facts for the development of his mind. It is the lighting of the lamp by whose gleams he is to look ahead. For it is ahead that man must always look, and it is from his back that the light must come. If you think you can sfee anything ahead with a lantern held in front of your eyes, try it. Only, if you happen to be driving a horse or an automobile, it would be prudent to have your life insured. If you can see any glimmer in the future that is not a reflection of the past, you are either a seer or there is something wrong with your works. Either you have the spirit of divine revelation or a lesion in your brain. If you have either of these, this is not for you. It is for the common run of us whose brains are normal and who lack the spirit of prophecy. For us the future is a fog, with lights and shadows vaguely thrown upon it by the sun and the things of yesterday. We look forward to ae|ial transportation because it is the gigantic and uncertain shadow upon the mist of the morrow cast by a few daring men who learned yesterday the secret of precariously sustain-ing themselves in a machine heavier than the supporting medium. If we see in the future the longed-for government of thè world by law instead of by brutality, it is merely the glorious light thrown ahead by the fact of yesterday that the spirit of peace has made some headway among the rulers of nations against the spirit of war. If we dimly see wireless telephones ahead, it is because we can clearly see wireless telegraphy behind. ii I remember seeing once a great, long spar lying upon a dock in the New York Navy Yard; the butt of it and some ten feet of its length were clearly visible, the rest of it to the tip was hidden in a cloud of steam. Because of what I could see I knew that there was a continuation of that spar in the steam; how much there was I could not tell. The vapor hid all that. It is so with the future. We know from the past—because everything back of the period of this sentence is in the past—what has been; we can conjecture from the lines that are in the visible past something as to their development in the invisible to-be. Uncertain, then, as is this basis for conjecture, dim as this light of the past may be, we need every bit of it to guide the race on its path into^the unlighted to-morrow. Deprived of all the knowledge of the past, we should stumble and scuffle, and, in utter blindness and frightful panic, slay each other until our mistakes had kindled another lamp to light us on our way. Deprived of any part of that knowledge, we lose so much light, and our progress is so much more difficult. Napoleon is quoted as saying, "If there were no God, we should have to make a God." I can paraphrase that just as truly, and say, if there were no past, we should have to make a past. What, then, are we to think of the madness of socialistic education, which seeks to unmake a past? What are we to make of a system that seeks to establish a false thing by shutting off the light which shows it to be false? No just man can object to an assertion of Socialism if it can stand the light of experience. But what we object to is the projection of Socialism without that light. No just man will object to the speech of Atheism. What we object to is the silencing of the living words that came from a living God. If Atheism can stand against the evidence of revelation, then let it stand. But if it cannot stand against that, it must fail; the world will refuse to exclude that evidence because its admission embarrasses the defendant. The rudimentary education is all that most of us get from the public schools. The number of students who go through the system is comparatively inconsiderable. In the primary classes the schools teach geography, spelling and later grammar, the basis of arithmetic, and the first lessons in history. Until recently these studies were not limited, and therefore not mutilated. They were considered originally in their proper place and their proper relationships. History, in particular, as the study of racial experience, was wide in its sweep. It took in the ancient ii mythology, it dealt with the Egyptian religion, with the belief of the American aborigine in the Great Spirit. It explained Christmas, it told of the significance of Easter. It may still deal with the faith of the Egyptian, with the Olympian deities of the Greek, with the Mánitou of the Indians, but Christmas is taboo, Easter is a subject prohibited. No man believes there was ever a Mercury with wings on his heels, but that may be taught in the schools. Every one knows there was a Jesus of Nazareth, but that must not be mentioned. It is not hard to see whither all this tends. It means the exclusion ultimately from all the histories of the mention of Christ and the suggestion of God. The mere assertion that "all natural wealth is due to the beneficence of God" was enough to kill a text-book for use in the public schools of Chicago. The logical thing to do, if that be right, is to cut the name of God out of the Declaration of Independence, to publish without it the Farewell Address of the Father of His Country, to leave some significant blanks in the sublime sentences of Lincoln over the dead of Gettysburg. We must be taught that a strange faith sprang up in the bosom of Rome and spread over the area of Roman conquest, but we must not be taught whence it came or why it spread. We must be taught that the followers of Mahomet raised their crescent flag against the cross, but we must not be taught what the cross signified. We must be taught that the Crusades poured out the blood and treasure of Europe to take from the Moslem the tomb of a carpenter, but we must not be taught what was the torch that lighted their fiery faith. We must not know of the -patristic literature, nor of the wave of scholasticism that rolled over Europe, because if we play with fire we shall be burned, and those old controversies were red-hot. We must be taught history, but not the meaning of his-tory. Some of the facts of human experience are to be allowed us, but the central fact of human history is to be barred. We may be taught that there were great currents of human thought, but of the greatest stimulant of human thought we must not be taught. The intolerance of Socialism in education results, then, not in truth, but in falsehood, or that which is not true. It results, not in more light, but in less light. It takes from the intellect the truth which nourishes it, and gives it instead the ignorance which must choke it. Therefore my first protest against socialistic education, based not upon my Christianity but upon the fact that I am a citizen and a ii taxpayer, is against the expenditure of the public funds for a teach-ing which is incomplete and untrue. I object to the use of the public funds for the propagation of a social apd economic religion in which I do not believe; I object to the teaching of the history of the United States with a mutilated Declaration of Independence, to the teaching of the world history with the fact of Christianity 0 I T h e r e is a second aspect, as I have indicated,—the moral. And in considering this I shall not do so as a Christian, but as a taxpayer simply. I shall base my protest again upon the improper use of blic funds * ^ W h a t i s the idea behind the public school? It is that the public school shall benefit the State; for that reason the State pays the cost. Upon this ground can the payment of the cost by the State b e H o w S r e the public schools to benefit the State? By their effect upon the constituents of the State. For the State is made up of men and women and children, and if the State is to prosper and fulfil its purpose, the men and women must be intelligent and must be moral. Particularly they must be moral. States which have been composed of intelligent men and women have fallen apart, collapsed because of their own rottenness at the core; no State whose people were moral ever did so. Some of the most depraved men have been at the same time men of great intellectual power and education. Common honesty would solve nine tenths of the eco- nomic and political questions which vex us to-day. It may seem unnecessary to state all this, but it is sometimes the plainest facts of life that we overlook. Your Socialist is working on the theory that the State makes the man. Yet the State has never produced a single child. A child is born of a woman, begotten bv a man, the product-of the family, which preceded the State and constructed the State. Your Socialist seeks to destroy the family, to substitute the State for the family. But the family, having produced the child; gives the child to tne State- it builds up the State with children. And the State very properly insists that the material which is to go into its structure shall be molded and tempered for the work it has to do. For the State is an active structure, not an inert structure. It is a machine, not a house. . . . . What effect, then, must the schools have to carry out the purpose of the S t a t e ' Is it an effect upon the mind or. upon the moral nature? Must they turn out graduates intellectually acute or morally upright? The answer to this question is the answer to another—What is the purpose of the State? We are dealing with this State, the American Union; what, then, is the purpose of this State? Where shall we seek the double answer, the enveloping answer? It has been written for us. Fortunately, we need have no doubt about it. It speaks in the opening lines of the supreme law of the land, the Constitution of the United States. Here it is: "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union» establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." To provide for the common defence and promote the general welfare may be regarded as political and material purposes, both of them necessary to the insurance of domestic tranquillity, and that in turn necessary, as a material fact, to the formation of any-thing like a perfect union. -But there are the two purposes plainly stated, the establishment of justice and the securing of the blessings of liberty for the present and for the future. These things have to do with the moral province, they reach into the domain of ethics. If history teaches any lesson, it is that an immoral people is never a free people. "Eternal vigi-lance is the price of liberty." Eternal self-sacrifice is the essential of eternal vigilance. Continence is the guardian of . mental and physical strength. The self-indulgent are the slaves of the world. Greece, believing with a real belief in false gods, was a conquering and a free Greece, a Greece of Spartans, a Greece of heroes. Greece, believing in poetry and philosophy, talking virtue and practismg self-indulgence, became a slave Greece, a Greece of effeminate babblers, a Greece in which nameless crimes were wrapped in the silken robes of literature. It is unnecessary to seek other illustrations. No system of ethics that had behind it no living faith, was ever effective in curbing the evil inclination of human flesh. We know of no written statute that will enforce itself. There is on earth no automatic law. Behind every statute with which the courts deal there must be the living authority of the government. It may be a popular government, but it must be a real government, it must be alive and not dead. Like-wise there has been no ethical code that has ever been worth its paper which did not have behind it the authority of a living faith. The good of the race never made a man live a blameless life yet. The good of his soul has made millions live such lives. i i "Selfish!" your Socialist will cry. Perhaps. But do not too hastily condemn selfishness. The patriot who spills his heart's blood for his country's sake spills it, after all, for his country and not for some one else's. The martyr who goes to the stake for his faith endures the torture for his faith and not for the faith that is not his. Selfishness may be base, but selfishness may be sublime. It is the root of self-indulgence, but also a root of self-sacrifice. In a world into which each human being is born to work out his own destiny, selfishness must be the basis of every motive that impels a man. . . . Are the American people, as a result of socialistic education, morally better than they were some years ago? That is a question each man must answer according to his own experience. If he is inclined to be gloomy about it, to be discouraged by the number-less disclosures that have followed the investigations of public and private business, if he has reached the conclusion that dis-honesty is the rule in private business as well as in public business, who can blame him ? If he finds popular applause controlled by what a man has and not by how he obtained it; if he knows that a day's illness will lose a two-dollar-a-day laborer in the city's employ his day's wages, while a highly paid official may be ill for months, and as a result absent from his desk, and lose nothing; if he finds that there is throughout society a fear of mere money which could not exist if justice were established and the purpose of the Constitution carried out, is he to be condemned for concluding that the money the State spends on its public schools is not bringing an adequate return,, that the instrument the State employs, and the only instru-ment it can employ, to establish justice is not doing its work? Thoughtful men have realized this for years. The Roman Cath-olic Church has realized it and has withdrawn its children from a godless school. The other churches have slowly come to the same conclusion—one Protestant Episcopal church alone maintains nine day-schools in the city of New Yprk. Great students and educators like Dr. Hodge of Princeton have seen the danger and have pleaded with the people to meet it in some way. Even men outside the church, champions of the godless school, are realizing it and are suggesting the teaching of ethics as separate from religion in the public schools. But here again we meet the old difficulty. It isn't instruction we need in this matter; it is inspiration. It isn't to learn what is right and what is wrong; it is to be inspired to do what is right and not to do what is wrong. 12 And if ethics are taught as a science and not as an inspiration, how are they to be taught except by the precepts of the masters? The teacher must have his authority from somewhere—it cannot be left to each instructor to determine what is right and what is wrong. He must teach what the ancient moralists, the ancient philosophers said; he must marshal the thinkers of the p a s t -Confucius, Diogenes, Plato, Cicero, Shakespeare, Erasmus, Moses, Tolstoi, and all those who sought to make a moral system for man-kind. And is he to leave Christ out? Is he to teach what Plato says of morals, and leave out what Jesus of Nazareth said? Is he to quote from the Vedas, but leave out the Sermon on the Mount? Is he to summon to his aid aU the teachers but the Great Teacher, to enforce his precepts with all authority but the Supreme Authority? And if he does, what then? The dead code, the code of morals of the Greek philosophers, was like their statuary, beautiful but cold, excitative of admiration but not of emulation, designed for ornamentation but not for life. ' . . . . Perhaps this is not the place to state just what we need in this country, but we shall state it nevertheless. We need good citizens. If we have those we shall have good public officials and good govern-ment and good business. A good citizen must first be a good man. If he is a Jew he must be a good Jew. If he is a Christian he must be a Good Christian. . ' What is the public school, paid for by public funds, doing to make good citizens? It isn't teaching God, because Socialism doesn't want God. Marx sensed the weakness of his theory; he knew that death, the final fact of this world for each human being, gave the lie to a promise of a heaven on earth, and that if he would take the minds of men off the more important life beyond the grave he must convince them that there is no such life; that if man is to have any heaven he is to have it here. The attack upon the family is due to the same cause. Man cannot be happy upon earth if he knows he is to lose some loved one, therefore he must have no loved ones; there must be no family. ' . The public school isn't teaching any ethics that are compelling, because unauthoritative ethics are never compelling. But it is teaching something. Every once in a while the news-papers give us a hint of the logical developments of the socialistic tendency in education. A few weeks ago, for instance, there was some indignation expressed by one of the old-fashioned[ministers of the old-fashioned faith because of a discussion by the teacher before a class of girls of fourteen. The subject was the relationship between Lewes and George Eliot. The teacher sought to explain it according to her view of it. She gilded it with the genius of the novelist whose sin it was, she tried to spiritualize it because the sinner was an intellectual, even if the sin was just a plain sin. If the Superintendent of Education had any objection to such a discus-sion in such a place, I have not heard of it. If ther teacher has been dismissed from the service, I have not seen the fact published anywhere. In fact, that incident seemed to cause little disturbance of any kind. The pastor of one of the girls was indignant, but the public seems to have become too much accustomed to the modern "liberal-ism" of our schools to let so slight a thing shock. The tendency of socialistic education is toward such discussions, and if there were no other symptom of the rottenness of the philosophy that should be sufficient. For it is more than a coincidence, that most of the great apostles of Socialism have a kink on the subject of s e x -Ferrer, Gorky the Russian, a Professor Herron who put away his wife a few years ago in order that he might preach what he was pleased to call Christian Socialism while living upon the wealth of a "soul-mate." There is a long procession of them, who made a parade of their left-handed relationships of this kind, who made rather a boast of them, who so worked them that they became proof of "free thought," of defiance of slavish conventionalism. Not, understand me, that all Socialists believe in this—I qm quite con-vinced that the mass of them are decent men and women and clean-living men and women—but it is the tendency of the philosophy of their movement; they cannot regard marriage as a sacrament, but as a part of the social contract, and somehow this corruption, this sexual aberration, manifests itself in the lives or the preachments of most of the exponents, of Socialism. The following is from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of January 16, 1911. I quote it without comment. It tells its own story. FREE THOUGHT FOR CHILDREN "Alden Freeman Would Have Them Left to Form Their Own Religious Opinions." "The People's Culture Circle of the Kaplan School, 1731 Pitkin Avenue, was addressed yesterday afternoon by Alden Freeman of the Open Forum, East Orange, N. J . Mr. Freeman took for his subject 'Crimes against Childhood.' "He contended that children should be brought up in an atmosphere of free thought and allowed to arrive finally at their own religious conclusions. Sec-ondly, he said, it was a crime against children that they were not carefully instructed in the sex relations, physically and morally. The third crime, he said, is child labor. The fourth crime is the system of education, which, he said, in these days should be so directed that every child should be prepared to earn his livelihood." , 14 You may ask me, What is the remedy? It is not practicable to teach all religions in the public schools; what right has one religion more than another to the inculcation of truth according to its formula? Would not sectarian education at public expense be contrary to the spirit of American institutions ? These are some of the questions behind which Socialism hides. It is impracticable to teach »11 creeds in the public schools as they are to-day conducted. It is not contrary to the spirit of Ameri-can institutions to teach religion. What is contrary to that spirit is the use of public funds for proselyting purposes. That is the thing Constitution-makers feared and opposed. You will find it back in the controversies over Horace Mann's "reforms" in the New England educational system. The makers of the national Constitution let the question alone. They put into the basic law the things they thought for the good of all, the things upon which compromise was possible- But religion is not and cannot be in its nature a matter of compromise. Therefore the plan of Dr. Hodge for a system of Christian education upon which Catholic and Protest-ant might agree is impracticable. Besides, it is hardly just to the Jew, or to—the atheist. And a thing must be all just to be just at all, just as it must be all true to be true at all. How, then, can the matter be arranged? How can we have a God-fearing, religious people educated each according to his own faith? It is a simple thing. The State can take supervision of all schools, public and private, insist upon character and competence in the instructors, and then pay each school upon a per capita basis for the secular education furnished. • It can conduct examinations yearly, and upon the result of these examinations base its appropriation to each school. This would not be using the public funds for sectarian purposes, but for purely secular education. If, then, the churches, or the non-churches, desired to intermix religious teaching .with the secular teaching, that could be paid for by the church. Thus the Roman Catholic could get his share of the taxes he pays for the secular education of his child, so could the Jew, so could the Protestant, so could the Socialist. This would require some slight change, in New York State, of the State Constitution, but the State Constitution has been amended before this, and for purposes much less important. Would this be unfair to those who believe in Socialism, or who do not believe in God? I think not. Under such an arrangement the atheists could conduct their own schools for their own people and get the same measure of support for secular education that the ii Christian and the Jew received. The only danger to them would be the fact that they would hesitate, I think, to send their own children to the godless school. They may consider themselves safe in their infidelity, but would they consider their children safe? The situation as it stands now is that the socialistic minority controls the system of public education, and the Roman Catholic Church has made a stand and is doing its own educational work, and is demanding that either taxation for school purposes cease as regards Roman Catholics, or that the Catholic schools be paid for the secular instruction they give. The Protestant churches are beginning to awaken to what it all means, and truly it is high tune that they ceased to surrender the faith of their children to the socialistic demand for a godless school. Read SOCIALISM: The Nation of Fatherless Children By DAVID GOLDSTEIN and MARTHA MOORE AVER"* THE EVANGELICAL, Harrisburgh, Pa. : "Socialism: The Nation of Fatherless Children" is a strong contribution aeainst the further aggression of this disintegrating infection in our national C d w e l l d S e r v e f a wide reading. It will be found both entertaining and instructive, and thus especially helpful to the true Chnstianand the loyal citizen, ^ ¿ w i t h s t a n d i n g and coibating the deadly, onward tramp of ^ a v o w e d foe to Christianity and American l i be r ty . . . . It is certainly destined to accom-plish a noble mission." BOSTON SCHOOL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 468 Massachusetts Avenue Boston, Mass.