SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 1 71 



a class in sociology I should not begin by considering the struc- 

 ture of the human family, the departments of government — the 

 whole universe of history which can be had only in bocks. I 

 should do exactly what you botanists and chemists do when you 

 hand your class a real plant or a bit of actual earth to work upon. 

 I should say to my class: In front of the schoolhouse you will 

 find a hole in the pavement. Go out and study it; find out 

 exactly what it means. And I'd have a report on that hole, and 

 before I got through with it, I warrant you, my class would 

 know more about the alderman and the mayor and the political 

 boss than most voters you and I are acquainted with. And if 

 I had a class in economics, do you know what I'd do? I'd 

 give them specimens to work on, too. I'd bring in a new shoe 

 and cut open the sole. I'd show them that while it was sold 

 at a high price as solid leather, in reality it was half paper. I'd 

 set that class at work on the shoe and keep them at it until they 

 knew the whys and wherefores of the fraud. 



Under present conditions, even when educated men are 

 called upon to serve as public officers, or to vote for public offi- 

 cers, or to spend the public money, they do not know how to go 

 about it. The result is that the government of our cities too 

 often falls into the hands of inefficient or corrupt men, who 

 waste or steal the wealth with v^^hich the pubUc intrusts them. 

 Is it not astonishing, when we come to think of it coldly, as a 

 fact, that while we cunningly train our engineers, our lawyers, 

 and our farmers, we are willing, in many instances, to take 

 untrained men, even saloon-keepers, ward-heelers, and crimi- 

 nals, and place them over us as our officers, our governors, 

 legislators, mayors, and give into their control aU of the vast 

 sums of pubHc money ? Think of it ! I wonder what a visitor 

 from Mars, coming down here to study our institutions, would 

 say about such a system. We might expect him to write to his 

 home paper, something to this effect : 



''They educate everybody in this country called America: 



