In discussing the public school system of the country there is little new for me to say. But the importance of the public school system in our democracy makes it necessary to state again and again the dependence of our government upon the public school. In the building of a peculiar civilization, the home and the church, as two necessary institutions of divine planting, have been everywhere emphasized. But in the maintenance of a democracy, a system of free schooling is as absolutely necessary as the home or the church. Democracy, however interpreted, must mean a leveling of all the people upward. Intelligence is essential to progress. There is no pathway to higher and better living except that which is illuminated by the light of a general intelligence. Our democracy must be taught to think, and taught to think right, if it is to live. The nations that continue to grovel and grope, indeed, the nations that are being overwhelmed by internal revolutions and internecine strife, are all untaught or badly taught. I have been told that a hungry man near starvation has strange dreams of palaces and feasts. Untaught human minds, unfed by information, unstimulated by sound knowledge and undirected power of logic, have strange dreams. Communism, Sovietism, Bolshevism, Anarchy, are the nightmares of ignorance. Our American democracy, in its earliest declarations, emphasized the necessity for the general public training of the children and the youth. Probably this was the real thought in the mind of Mr. Jefferson when he wrote his equality clause in the Declaration of Independence. Nothing he ever said has been so misinterpreted and misapplied. Certainly he could not have meant that all men are fundamentally and constitutionally equal. John C. Calhoun, the most logical mind in American history, except perhaps Hamilton, said that that would be a self-evident falsehood and not a self-evident truth. The great Lincoln said that there were physical differences between the African and the Anglo-Saxon that precluded political and social equality. No two things in the universe are equal in this impossible sense which has been distorted from Mr. Jefferson's statement that, "It is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal." Among the billion colored people of the earth, the black, the red, and the yellow, not one nation has ever developed and maintained a constitutional government. If there were equality in the essential things that go to make up the characteristics of the colored races, certainly during the ages there would somewhere have developed among them a civilization capable of producing an upright, dignified, independent manhood. All that this phrase meant at the founding of the republic, and all it means to-day, is equality of opportunity for realizing the inherent possibilities that are locked up in human nature.