See what a game it is that we are now playing. We teach our small boys that this is a country of glorious opportunities. In picturing the possibilities before them, we know no bounds. We go even to the brink of the ultimate and look over. Away in the distance, we see the White House, and point to it. “There,” we say to our boys, “there is where you may some day be. Each of you has a chance to be President. And, if you should not be President, each of you has a chance to be a Rockefeller or a Carnegie. Carnegie began as a bobbin boy. Rockefeller began as a clerk in an oil store. If you are honest and industrious, perhaps you can do as much.” Now, what are the facts? Not one of those boys has much more chance of becoming the President than a ring-tailed monkey has of becoming Caruso. It is not that the boys are worthless—they may have in them better timber than any past President ever contained. But unless we shorten the Presidential term, and shorten it a good deal, we cannot accommodate very many of the lads with the use of the White House. During the next eighty years, even if no President shall serve more than one term, there can be no more than twenty Presidents. During the same time—if we go on repeating such foolishness—perhaps a billion boys will be solemnly assured that each of them has a chance to be President, though, as a matter of fact, only twenty boys can cash in on their chances. Do we never consider how ridiculous we make ourselves? Do we never fear the crushing question that some bright boy some day will ask: “Dad, just how much do you think twenty chances in a billion are worth?” I mention this only to show at what an early age we begin to hold out to our boys false hopes of the future. I cannot attempt to explain the fact that no boy asks his father why, in such a country of glorious possibilities as this, he contents himself with driving a truck—but that does not matter. The point is that we go on fooling the boys until they are old enough to know better. They are not very old when this time comes. The world teaches them young. It is the exceptionally stupid young man who does not know, at the age of twenty-five, that the chances against him in playing for a Presidency, a Rockefellership, or a Carnegieship are infinitely greater than would have been the chances against him, if he had lived two generations earlier and played the Louisiana Lottery. Beside such a prospect, the chance of winning a fortune at the race track looks like a certainty. Yet we drove the Louisiana Lottery from the country because it was such a delusion that it amounted to a swindle, and we are beginning to drive the race tracks out of the country for the same reason.