You may be ignorant, but God knows you will fight! Then fight for the white children of your state—fight these laws and the politicians who made them with strings to them—made them to be evaded. Fight for more and better schools and the abolition of child labor until your state stands in the column where its pedigree and its past record entitles it to stand! For you will fight, thank the Lord! I journeyed last spring to New Orleans just to see the plain upon which Tennesseans stood and fought to a bloody finish the bullies of beef-eating England and secured by their victory to our nation the Louisiana Purchase and a century of foreign peace, which the memory of that battle strengthens yet in the minds of their children. The old ditch was a swamp of water lilies; the breastworks had gone back to the plain; but the great Mississippi flowed on to the sea, unhampered by Spaniard or Briton, the great artery of a boundless, unbroken and undivided country. And I stood upon a soil made American by the blood of Tennesseans; I looked up at a sky purple, blue and beautiful, thrown over the landscape by the God of our fathers, even as a king of old would throw his royal purple over the masterpieces of the great master. And on the sky and on the land and on the bosom of the mighty river I read: JACKSON—JACKSON—JACKSON! As I stood there the fighting spirit of my Irish sires came back to me as I saw the ghosts of those long-haired Tennesseans standing behind that bloody ditch fighting for the country which God had ordained should belong to them and the oppressed of the world. The hot blood surged in my cheek as I thought of the 60,000 little white children of the South and the 2,000,000 in the cotton mills and factories and mines and sweatshops of the nation, robbed of their rights of childhood by the greed of gold, the graft of politicians and the low ignorance and lazy debasement of their own parents, stealing from them not only the rights of an education, but even the right of life! And as the blood surged in my head, beating drumbeats in my brain and marshalling in the fine frenzy of prophetic visions the gray host that stood shoulder to shoulder there, I saw again that sallow-faced leader, with the form of a battle spear and the eyes of a god, riding up and down the long lines—bloody, blasphemous and brave—and forever settling with the invaders the issue they had postponed, but not abandoned, at Yorktown. And, seeing him, I saw again that pitiful picture in the Waxhaw Settlement—the Irish immigrant mother, her husband but a week ago buried in a poor white’s grave, two babes at her knees and this one at her breast, with no money and no home and no bread for their mouths, and I said: “Thank God, there were no cotton mills in South Carolina then, or Andrew Jackson would have died there before he was grown, in the lint and the dust and the grind of them, robbed of his childhood and of his chance in life!”