Recently seventy-two Americans, members of a literary club, in a small industrial town in New York, took a census of their children. They discovered, much to their surprise that altogether they were rearing exactly fourteen offspring. Meanwhile fourteen children is not an uncommon number at all for an Italian or French-Canadian couple to add to the citizenship of our country. Questions arise here which it is quite necessary for us to answer at once. Why, indeed, do we Americans lay such great store by our peculiar racial heritage? Are not our recent immigrants, taken as a whole, as "good" as we? If we do not desire to bring children into the world, should not our country be left to others who are willing to undertake the responsibilities of parenthood? Hence, why are we not disposed to accept our dissolution silently and go to the grave with a smile? The answer to these questions is implied in the title of this article. It is the cherished belief of the members of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan that democracy--democracy in all its aspects, the social spirit of democracy, the practice of democracy, the regeneration of the soul of mankind through democracy--that this is the greatest of all values created by modern civilization. We hold further that the part played by the American people in the evolution of democracy has been of primary importance. Despite all our mistakes, and they have been many, we have succeeded. And our success, even with its limitations, has been, we fully believe, as a light and as a leading to all the world. It was our glorious privilege to unlock the prison door of France when our sister republic was first created in the French Revolution. It was largely the success of universal, white, male suffrage in America which impelled our brethren of the British Empire to undertake the same colossal experiment. No doubt our history has been the subject of far too much fervid eloquence and vain boasting. We have not often hesitated to tell all the world about ourselves. Here I am seeking merely to state the simple facts, because without them the standpoint and argument of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan could not be understood.