The most important institutions in this country are the public schools--the gymnasiums of human brains. The most important citizens of the nation are the teachers. The greatest criminals are the employers of child labor, because they deny education, cut down in childhood the citizen's chance of progress and success. Work and vote for more and better public schools. POVERTY IS THE FATHER OF VICE, CRIME AND FAILURE These are days when men do their hardest work for money, when they scramble and struggle and strike each other down in the effort to reach wealth. And it is not possible to blame them. They are trying to escape from poverty, from a disaster worse than any prairie fire or other physical danger. Dire poverty is the worst of curses. It combines every kind of suffering, physical, mental, moral, and in the end it means either death or degradation. The great task of humanity is the abolition of poverty. The great benefactors of humanity are the great industrial organizers of this day, because, in spite of individual selshness,{sic} they are planning production on a scale that will in the end provide for all. It is worth while to discuss and to realize what real poverty means. If we can realize its meaning every one of us must be more anxious to relieve, as far as we can, the poverty around us, and especially anxious to work for the social betterment that shall one day wipe out poverty forever Poverty means dirt. The thoughtless and comfortable have a way of saying: "The poor might at least be clean." But cleanliness is a LUXURY; it demands leisure and peace of mind, as well as bathtub, soap, hot water and good plumbing. The very poor cannot be clean. Poverty means ignorance, and it means ignorance handed down from father to son. Poverty means drunkenness. The pennies of POOR men and POOR women pay for more than half the vile whiskey, gin and other poisons that men buy to help them forget. Poverty and its sister, Ignorance, fill the jails and the insane asylums. Poverty is the mother of disease, and it fills the hospitals. Tens of thousands of consumptives alone are murdered every year by poverty. They are too poor to do that which is required to save their lives. ---- The great men of the world do not emerge from poverty, from squalor. They come from very modest homes, from the log cabin, and from the towpath, as advertised. They come from those whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers had at least enough to eat, and enough fresh air to give them pure blood and proper nourishment for their brains. Poverty destroys ambition, inventive power and the capacity to struggle. A starved body produces a starved brain. The greatest genius that ever lived could not think better than a child of ten if you deprived him of food for ten days. What can you expect of the inferior minds that have been half fed through a lifetime, or through several generations?