A study of our history is fundamental to the construction and the maintenance of a sound national life. Thomas Carlyle once very correctly said that one cannot manage the present or predict the future except from an accurate knowledge of the past. All sectarian textbooks in histories, partisan textbooks or sectional textbooks, are naturally distorted and perverted. Men who hold tenaciously to a particular setting, given a religious truth or any other historical fact, have looked at their fellowmen through a distorted perspective. The trivial has frequently appeared to them to be the magnificent, and the magnificent the trivial. Bias has characterized all such narratives. It is difficult enough to secure a history of any country or its people in its political, economic, industrial and social development, that is basically true to the facts. The man who writes is apt to be tremendously impressed by the age in which he lives. The tale that he tells is often a crude compilation of errors. Only recently the manuscript of a history in its making was tendered by a well known publishing house to a patriotic organization of the South for review. One of many glaring errors that obtruded from this book, which was designed to become a text book, was the statement that the democratic party originated with the original Ku Klux Klan of the Sixties. Another history in common use in the public schools of the country, filled with all sorts of inaccuracies and misstatements, was recently taken from the schools in one great section of the country. When the attention of the author was called to the inaccuracies, he offered to expurgate the offensive statements of which the section complained, but refused to change his history for other sections of the country where the statements were as yet unchallenged. If such histories are foisted upon our school system, and our children are taught the errors of the prejudiced and inaccurate historian, how much worse, and how much more dangerous, would the teaching be if the history texts are purposefully written by narrow sectarians, and the facts discolored by religious prejudice? The time has surely come when real history should be written by the truthful and wise, and the facts of our national virtues and vices, our strength and our weakness, our dangers and our securities, should be taught in our public schools, and taught to all the children. The preparation or selection of school text books in history is no more a fitting subject for rancorous bickering among sectarian politicians than the writing of text books in chemistry. It is entirely a matter for trained historians and professional teachers. We must insist that politicians of all breeds keep their hands far removed from these things. CHAPTER XXV The Conservation of the American Home