To understand our problem fully we must never forget the platitude that our immigrant people are not Americans. They are Europeans. Immigrant Catholics are European Catholics. In almost every country of Continental Europe there is a Catholic party. The Catholic political party of Germany, of France, of Italy, of Belgium, of Austria, or of Hungary, seeks to win the elections and control the government outright. Again, to repeat myself, is there anything strange about the fact that when these immigrants form themselves into enormous foreign communities in our great cities or industrial districts they should act here just as they act in Europe? I do not think so. It is all simple enough. Its outward effects, at least, are as easily understood as a Mississippi flood or a San Francisco earthquake. We must either put an end to this thing or this thing will put an end to our democracy. We can not have a Hungarian, a Polish, an Italian, or an Irish peasant Catholic party among us and still preserve the political system of our American nation which has been created by three centuries of democratic evolution. A political system run by sectarian ecclesiastics and an Anglo-Saxon bill of rights can not live on the same soil. In these things there can be no compromise. To surrender an inch is to surrender all and yield to the executioner. As regards this whole matter, our American humility and false modesty has already worked us great harm. These matters must at last be dragged into the open and publicly discussed. Hence this exceedingly plain statement. If some of our citizens wish their children to attend parochial schools, then we want those parochial schools properly inspected. We would like to know what textbooks are being used. The public ought to know just how much education, and what manner of education, the fourteen-year old immigrant boy or girl is possessed of when he leaves school. What does this boy or girl know about himself? How much reading and writing and arithmetic has he laid hold of? What has he learned of American history and American institutions? We Americans of all sections confess, not without shame, that we have not as yet done nearly enough for public education. But the means we have provided we wish to have used; the standards we have set, none too high, we wish to have regarded; and what we are seeking to do for the immigrant we would like to have fully appreciated.