In all the decades prior to the one ushered in by 1910, there was not a state, county, city or school district which had as its purpose the absolute removal of illiteracy. When the startling announcement was made by the census-takers at the beginning of the new decade that five and a half million men and women in the Nation had confessed that they could not read or write, there was nowhere an expression of shame or pity or even of surprise. It was accepted as a thing inevitable--the waste product of an inefficient school system. Even the press, usually alert and looking for unusual conditions to exploit, found nothing worth featuring in these tragic figures. There was a vagueness and confusion in the public mind as to the term illiteracy and what constituted it, where the boundary line between literacy and illiteracy was fixed. Not one person out of ten in the United States could define illiteracy. Few had thought of it at all or had taken occasion to familiarize themselves with the term. It was such an unfamiliar one that the first Illiteracy Commission had to impress itself, to explain itself--its very name, repeatedly. Forestry commissions and fish and game commissions were familiar enough but one which had as its purpose to redeem men and women from illiteracy was a foreign and unintelligible thing. The public, in general, knew little of the baneful effects of illiteracy on the individual or the community. Searching the files of educational reports we find no addresses on this subject, and on the shelves of the public libraries there was nothing to be found save a few statistical reports in scientific journals. The man who made his mark aroused no more concern than the one who wrote his signature. Nowhere in all history is there a record of more general apathy having settled down on a crying need or a worthy cause. The example of a few states leading out in the early part of the decade in a crusade against illiteracy without federal oversight or aid, without funds from the state and with but little public sentiment aroused, and the readiness with which state after state recognized the need, sought the remedy and fell into line, is one of the most hopeful chapters in educational history. The moonlight school has as its avowed purpose the removal of illiteracy. It has its secondary aims and its indirect results, but until illiteracy is banished it must remain devoted to the one idea of redeeming illiterates--of freeing them from their bondage.