Side by side in our public schools sit the children of many races, ours and others. Week by week, month by month, year by year, the teachers pick out the brightest pupils and fasten the medals of honor on their breasts; and a startling discovery brings a cry to their lips: the children of the foreigners outclass our own! They who begin handicapped, and labor against obstacles, leave our own children far behind on the road to scholarly achievement. In the business world the same strange phenomenon is observed: conditions of life and work that would prostrate our own boys and girls, these others use as a block from which to vault to the back of prancing Fortune. In private enterprises or public, in practical or visionary movements, these outsiders exhibit an intensity of purpose, a passion of devotion that do not mark the normal progress of our own well-cared-for children. What is the galvanizing force that impels these stranger children to overmaster circumstances and bestride the top of the world? Is there a special virtue in their blood that enables them to sweep over our country and take what they want? It is a special virtue, yes: the virtue of great purpose. The fathers and mothers of these children have not weaned them from the habit of contemplating a Vision. They teach them that, in pursuit of the Vision, bleeding feet do not count. They tell them that many morrows will roll out of the lap of to-day, and they must prepare themselves for a long and arduous march. That is the reading of the riddle, and if we do not want to be shamed by the newcomers in our midst, we must silence those sophisticated teachers of the people who ridicule or pass over with a smile the idea that we, as a nation, are in pursuit of a Vision, and that those things are good for us which further our quest, and the rest--even to bleeding feet--do not count with us. It is the obliteration of the Vision that causes the emptiness in the lives of our children which they are driven to fill up with tinsel pleasures and meaningless activities of all sorts. The best blood in the world is in their veins,--the blood of heroes and martyrs, of dreamers and doers,--filtered through less than half a dozen generations. If they do not arise and do great deeds all around us, it is because their noble blood is clogged in their veins through the infiltrations of materialism in the teachings of the day.