Teach a child year in and year out that the American Constitution is the ultimate embodiment of political wisdom and you increase tenfold the difficulty of rational and necessary amendment by the generation to which that child belongs. Set him under teachers like those of whom Professor Harper tells us that seventy-seven per cent “contended that one should never allow his own experience and reason to lead him in ways that he knows are contrary to the teaching of the Bible”, and fifty-one per cent that “our laws should forbid much of the radical criticism that we often hear and read concerning the injustice of our country and government”, and the openness of mind upon which reason depends for its victories will be well-nigh unattainable.[42] Those only who realize the importance of education will understand how a Southern audience could go wild with anger over an account, in large outline untrue, of German atrocities, and yet listen with indifference to the description of a lynching in their own community so revolting in its detail as to be unfit almost for transcription. And we must add to the school influence in childhood, that of the home, the church, the streets, in the terrible certainty that there are few impressions which do not leave their trace. It is necessary, if I may so phrase it, to urge men to live dangerously. To the degree that their happiness depends upon making their decisions conform to the facts, they cannot avoid danger. It is dangerous to leave a child in the hands of teachers who believe that all experience and reason must be abandoned which does not square with that recorded in the partly mythical annals of a primitive Semitic tribe several thousand years ago, or who equate patriotism with a fervid acceptance of the present political system. The adult is endangering his happiness if he believes that truth is what Karl Marx said, or Mussolini tells him, or the inferences of Mr Baldwin which the latter has in turn drawn from material prepared for him by the Research Department of the Conservative Central Office. Happiness depends upon being able to approach with an open mind facts which have been prepared by independent persons who have no interest in seeing that their incidence is bent in some particular way. Anything else imprisons the mind in dogmas which only work so long as that mind does not travel beyond the narrow confines within which the dogmas work. Once it goes beyond, unhappiness is the inevitable outcome.