Our public schools therefore form one of the chief cornerstones of our American republic; they are the sheet anchor of our hopes. The growth and prosperity which have characterized the first century of our schools fulfills their mission. Education is the watchword of the hour among Protestants, but never among Catholics. We must educate if we would elevate, and unless we elevate the minds of men we will have humanity running riot with vice and immorality, and this is why the Catholic nations of the earth are found with their morals trailing in the slime of degeneracy. Our public schools are to-day the great assimilating power in this country. We find in them children of all nationalities, and whether they be English, Irish, Scotch, Danish, Norwegians, French, Italians, or some other nationality, when they enter these institutions they pass out of the school houses, scattered all over this land, _Americans_, one and all, as it is absolutely impossible to make anything but a _true American_ out of a pupil who has been turned out of the public schools of this country, and one who has been permitted to assimilate the doctrines of broad education taught in these schools. The influence of the public schools works rapidly upon childhood and is felt through all of their after lives. A child who has been educated in the public schools of this country is always an unrelenting foe of caste, but the child who is educated in the parochial schools is taught to look up to innumerable superiors, and such an education dwarfs the minds of childhood and teaches them to continually look to others for their individual happiness, but the teachings of the public schools broaden the individual mind and gives courage, which enables the child to swing out from the influence of others and become a mighty power in the mechanism of the universe. We touch upon the public schools in this chapter, only in connection with the dominating influence of the Pope over nations which he completely rules, in order that the reader may thoroughly understand that ignorance begets crime and crime begets illegitimacy, as we expect to dwell more fully upon the education of nations in the future, but we want the reader to begin at the "Alpha" of reason, so that when he or she is through with this chapter that there will be no doubt in their minds as to why the power of the Pope breeds illegitimacy among his followers. We have contrasted the difference in morals of the inhabitants, which are completely dominated by Roman Catholicism, to that of the inhabitants of Protestant America, but we have made this comparison in a general way; but we now want to select a country which for its absolutism of Catholic monarchy has no comparison, and that country is Ecuador.