EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY. 371 



of the tenements, when I read of the terrible ravages of tuberculosis 

 in the same quarters, I can not but think that the city should provide 

 wholesome food at the lowest possible cost in public school kitchens. 

 To lay the legal burden of learning upon children whose blood is im- 

 poverished and whose digestion is impaired by insufficient or unwhole- 

 some feeding is not in accord with the boasted altruism of an ad- 

 vanced civilization or with the Divine command: Feed the hungry. 

 Is this not also a subject for investigation by our National Council? 

 And should it some day come to pass that men will look upon 

 corruption in public and corporate life, such as of late we have seen 

 exposed in New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis, with the same 

 loathing with which they regard crime in private life, it will be when 

 the schools are in earnest about teaching our young people the funda- 

 mental laws of ethics, that 



The ten commandments will not budge, 

 And stealing still continues stealing. 



But economic perils and racial differences are the teacher's op- 

 portunity. Here in this country are gathered the sons and daughters 

 of all nations. Ours is the task not merelv of teaching them our 

 language and respect for our laws, but of imbuing them with the spirit 

 of self-direction, our precious inheritance from the Puritans; the spirit 

 of initiative which comes to its from the pioneers who subdued a 

 continent to the uses of mankind ;* and the spirit of cooperation which 

 is symbolized by and embodied in the everlasting union of sovereign 

 states to promote the common weal. And as, in my own city, I see 

 the eagerness of foreigners to learn, and the skill and devotion of our 

 teachers, I can not but think that we are overcoming our almost insur- 

 mountable difficulties. 



There is perhaps no more striking moment in all history than that 

 at which the Apostle Paul, standing on Mars Hill and pointing to the 

 blue ^Egean, the center of the then known world, proclaimed the new 

 but eternal doctrine: God hath made of one every nation of men for to 

 dwell on all the face of the earth. Standing here as we do, on the 

 border of the Atlantic Ocean, and beholding on the one side the dove 

 of peace alighting from the hand of our President on the fields of 

 carnage in the far east and on the other side the homes of peoples of 

 all nationalities stretching from the Atlantic to the isles of the Pacific, 

 under the protection of the American flag, may we not realize that we, 

 as teachers, have a great part to perform in bringing a vast company 

 to an understanding of the sublime truth that God has made all men 

 one to dwell on the face of the earth — that their mission is not to 

 defraud and to slay, but each to do his best for himself and to help his 

 fellows. 



* Miinsterberg, The Americans, Chapter I. and XL 



