Now this is wrong. There is something lacking in the sense of a society that would permit it in a land of public schools that assumes leadership in the world. Here is raw material truly, of the most important kind and the greatest possibility for good as well as for ill. Save! Save! Save! This has been the mandate for the past two years. It is a word with which this report is replete. But we have been talking of food and land and oil while the boys and young men that are about us who carry the fortune of the democracy in their hands are without a primary knowledge of our institutions, our history, our wars and what we have fought for, our men and what they have stood for, our country and what its place in the world is. The marvelous force of public opinion and the rare absorbing quality of the American mind never was shown more clearly than by the fact that out of these men came a loyalty and a stern devotion to America when the day of test came. Had Germany known what we know now, it would have been beyond her to believe that America could draft an army to adventure into war in Europe. There should not be a man who was in our Army or our Navy who has the ambition for an education who should not be given that opportunity--indeed, induced to take it--not merely out of appreciation but out of the greater value to the Nation that he would be if the tools of life were put into his hand. There is no word to say upon this theme of Americanization that has not been said, and Congress, it is now hoped, will believe those figures which, when presented nearly two years ago, were flouted as untrue. The Nation is humiliated at its own indifference, and action must be the result. To save and to develop, I have said, were equally the expression of a true conservation. What is true as to material things is true as to human beings. And once given a foundation of health there is no other course by which this policy may be effected than to place at the command of every one the means of acquiring knowledge. The whole people must turn in that direction. We should enable all, without distinction, to have that training for which they are fitted by their own natural endowment. Then we can draw out of hiding the talents that have been hidden. The school will yet come to be the first institution of our land, in acknowledged preeminence in the making of Americans who understand why they are Americans and why to be one is worth while.[5] FOOTNOTES [1] Extract from the annual report of the Secretary of the Interior for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1919. The page numbers are the same as those in the report.