The distinguished gentleman and ex-Governor who has just preceded me, has said most eloquently much that I myself do most heartily endorse. And while I dislike to sound in this assembly one discordant note—to strike one chord of the minor here—where all seem so satisfied, I feel that I shall not be true to the great cause of childhood if I fail to say what I do know. It is good for us, now and then, to be shown our shortcomings. It is well for us to see at times into our soul of souls. It is progress to search after better things. Self-sufficiency is retrogression; self satisfaction is decay, and contentment is the sure messenger of degeneracy and death. There is no god as great as the God of Discontent. False glory is the masque of ignorance and self-conceit is the gaudy mantle of the king’s fool. In telling you then, as the collected teachers and county superintendents of this state, that you have done nobly and performed your solemn duties, the distinguished gentleman has used an hyperbole which strikes me with ironical exaggeration and which has aroused in me this flow of bitterness and gall which I shall now pour out upon your complacent heads. And I do if with this amendment—that if you are doing your duty, if you have fought for the rights of childhood as you should and failed, then the law makers of this state, and the people of the state who send that kind every two years to this capitol are fearfully, wonderfully and criminally derelict in their duty to the children of their own firesides. For I have it from the lips of your chairman himself, in a speech he delivered in Columbia last fall, that in all the forty-five members of the great United States, in numbers of natural born illiterates, North Carolina stands at the very bottom and Tennessee, your own Tennessee, in which you are doing such noble, uplifting work, stands next to her, holding in her hand the black flag of illiteracy. Does the full force of this get into your peripatetic souls to ruffle the feathers of your immaculate conceit? Great God, it hurts me to think of North Carolina, the birthplace of my father and all his fathers before him that I know anything of, the birthplace of Polk and Shelby and Robertson and a host of others as great sons as ever God gave to the republic, the land of the Anglo-Celt, of patriotism and tar-heel gameness—it hurts me, I repeat, to learn that she stands at the foot, and Tennessee, her daughter and her equal in past grandeur, patriotism and principles, stands next! Don’t look at me as if you did not want to hear it! Neither do I want to hear it, but it is sometimes good for us to hear the truth—the truth even to crucifixion.