“Where were you previous to the eighth and immediately subsequent thereto?” asked the city attorney. The prisoner looked sheepish and made no answer. A box car had been robbed on the eighth and this man had been arrested in the freight yards. He claimed to be a steel worker and had shown the judge his calloused hands. He had answered several questions about his trade, his age and where he was when the policeman arrested him. But when they asked him what he had been doing previous to and immediately subsequent thereto, he hung his head as if at a loss for an alibi. I was city clerk at the time and had been a steel worker. I knew why the man refused to answer. He didn't understand the phraseology. “Where were you previous to the eighth and immediately subsequent thereto?” the attorney asked him for the third time. All the prisoner could do was look guilty and say nothing. “Answer the question,” ordered the judge, “or I'll send you up for vagrancy.” Still the man kept silent. Then I spoke up: “John, tell the court where you were before you came here and also where you have been since you arrived in the city.” “I was in Pittsburgh,” he said, and he proceeded to tell the whole story of his life. He was still talking when they chased him out of court and took up the next case. He was a free man, and yet he had come within an inch of going to jail. All because he didn't know what “previous to the eighth and immediately subsequent thereto” meant. The man was an expert puddler. A puddler makes iron bars. They were going to put him behind his own bars because he couldn't understand the legal jargon. Thanks to the great educational system of America the working man has improved his mental muscle as well as his physical. This taught me a lesson. Jargon can put the worker in jail. Big words and improper phraseology are prison bars that sometimes separate the worker from the professional people. “Stone walls do not a prison make,” because the human mind can get beyond them. But thick-shelled words do make a prison. They are something that the human mind can not penetrate. A man whose skill is in his hands can puddle a two hundred-pound ball of iron. A man whose skill is on his tongue can juggle four-syllable words. But that iron puddler could not savvy four-syllable words any more than the word juggler could puddle a heat of iron. The brain worker who talks to the hand worker in a special jargon the latter can not understand has built an iron wall between the worker's mind and his mind. To tear down that wall and make America one nation with one language is one of the tasks of the new education.