“A Chicago gentleman recently said to me, ‘The fact is, we get careless here. We are so busy about our own private affairs that we let our voting go by for a year or two, till finally about once in seven years things get so bad we can’t stand it, and then we all get mad and roll up our sleeves and go in and have a general clearing out. After that, things work well for a year or two, and then are as bad as ever.’ “I understand that at present you have a fairly good city government, that your leading officials for the most part are not corrupt. But even if this were sure of lasting, of what a thing to boast! “In the minds of too many I find the idea seems to prevail that so long as taxation is not raised, and there is a police force competent to quell turbulent strikers, and no infamous scandal at the City Hall, so long there is nothing else to be done in the line of good citizenship than to cast one’s vote, pay one’s taxes, and keep one’s sidewalk clean. “Now I hold that such a conception of the duties of citizenship is unworthy a Christian and a patriot, and it is as Christians and patriots that I am addressing you. “I am not here to remind you of the unequaled folly and expense of bad government, and to point out to you the material benefits accruing to a city where there is a pure and economical city government and an incorruptible court. “I am not here to speak to you on the ground of mere utility and expediency, though with a different audience such arguments might hold the first place. But I speak to you as scholars, as men and women of insight who need not to be reminded that the state, as one of the three great human institutions by which civilized man has differentiated himself from the savage, has higher functions than those which appeal most forcibly to the ordinary man and woman of to-day. “We live in a MATERIALISTIC ATMOSPHERE, where the things of the senses allure far more than the things of thought, where a man of ideals is laughed at by the majority as an unpractical theorist, and shrewdness is esteemed the highest virtue. “I have been looking over your school reports and have been noting the disproportionate number of girls who are graduated. “Your boys and young men are impatient for business. Even those in well-to-do families leave school very early. I find that _ninety-two per cent. of your children leave school before they ever study any text-book of history_, and that seventy-five per cent. leave before they reach the grade where a little historic information is given through the aid of biographical sketches and stories. “Think of it! Seventy-five per cent., the majority of them our future voters, who have never so much as heard of the Pilgrim Fathers or the war of the Revolution, and who have far too feeble an educational equipment to lead to much further study!