“Some are beginning to see and feel this clearly. But no teacher in your public schools is allowed at present to teach that profit, interest, rent, and taxes are wrong because they arise from the monopolization of natural opportunity and are therefore destructive to the highest human welfare. No teacher in your public school is allowed to teach that we ought never to take up a gun for the purpose of shooting our neighbor in defense of any flag; for a man as such is always better than a flag; for a collection of people can even be happier and more orderly without a flag than with one. As a rule, your teacher who teaches that your women are not enjoying the same privileges that your men enjoy is looked down upon, and your board of directors or state do not desire to employ such a person as teacher. They look upon him as the contemporaries of Socrates looked upon Socrates. “By this you can plainly see that thousands of your most cultivated and thoughtful teachers of your public schools, the same as many of your preachers, are not at liberty to teach _all_ their best thoughts and sentiments. The masses are not sufficiently matured intellectually to assimilate them. He must therefore suppress some of his best thoughts. “In proportion as people became conscious of the facts, they lost their patriotic sentiments for the compulsory public schools, and they could find no other solution out of the difficulty than to take the control of school education out of the hands of the state and place it in the hands of the individual, the same as they had done with the church long before. You see as long as we are compelled by the state to think only in one narrow, prescribed channel, there is little opportunity for rapid mental development. Under this state constraint, some of the best thoughts are frequently never born, and if they are born, they are generally dwarfed for want of room and opportunity. All who desire aid from the public school room are compelled to walk within the narrow path laid out by the state. “But things are entirely different when any individual, under free competition, can open a school and teach whatever he desires. His school must then prosper by virtue of its own merits, in a large field of keen, free competition. Under individual instruction there would be the widest possible difference in the course of study and in the mode of discipline. All could very likely be suited somewhere, no matter how widely they may differ in thought and belief. Those who desire to pray could find schools in which prayer is the most important exercise; those who desire to study the doctrine of special creation could find their school and teacher. The evolutionist could find his. There would be schools in which all the various phases of thought were taught and discussed--social, political, theological, industrial, sexual, and scientific. Under such keen, free competition, all but the fittest would soon disappear.”