It is inevitable that some expression of this should find voice at the polls, and the question is how to make the American issues so fine and big and strong and world compelling that they will engulf this great human sorrow and devotion and make it of service to America. How can we in this next election make every voter feel that America is for him--to serve, to guard, to use, so we may stem the great tide of discontent, aversion, and desertion which has set in among our foreign-born voters? How can we in this coming election remove the indifference, irresponsibility, and profit seeking which characterizes our native-born voter? Now that we face the crisis and know the necessity, we look with amazement and alarm at what our preparation has been. We turn to our schools and ask them what they have been doing in the way of preparing the voter--what has he been taught about America and its government, institutions, and opportunities? How have these been related to his own local civic life? What sense of national service has he acquired in his town school? Alas--we find there is nothing held so cheap as the American vote, and the last form of preparedness is that for voting. Of the American boy we require that he shall be born here, and shall be 21 years of age. We assume that somehow the public school, which he is required to attend in some states only, will teach him the value of the vote and how to use it, and something of his duties and obligations to his country. We also assume that the boy’s parents will educate him along these lines. To the girl in most states we deny the vote for apparently no reasons other than precedent, prejudice, conjecture, or apprehension. There is no ceremony, no pledge of allegiance, no occasion made patriotically memorable in the mind of the boy when he casts his first vote. No one makes him welcome as a citizen of the country. He registers in his home town in an automatic way, and if he thinks of voting in the future as an obnoxious duty that interferes with his business or week ends, it is surely not entirely his own fault. In some schools there is an increasing attempt to bring his rather localized experience into relation to the broader questions of the day, and into the national political life, but the mass of boys depend upon the newspapers and such discussion as they stimulate or hear among their fellows. This is good so far as it goes, but it is too critical, too superficial, too opinionated, too provincial to serve the great national need of America in the crucial test of elections. Despite our many thousands of educational organizations it is very difficult to obtain an impartial and scientific statement on any political controversy. There are many briefs for one side or the other, but few impartial statements that are not special pleading.