ve white children of
native parents, fifteen to nineteen years of age, were illiterate.

If we continue our attention to the colored children, the case is, of
course, much worse.

We cannot hope to make intelligent workmen and intelligent citizens of a
group of people, over forty per cent of whose children six to fourteen
years of age were not in school a single day during 1909-10; for the
other sixty per cent the school term in the majority of cases was
probably less than five months. Of the Negro children ten to fourteen
years of age 18.9 per cent were illiterate; of those fifteen to nineteen
years of age 20.3 per cent were illiterate; of those ten to fourteen
years of age 31.4 per cent did not go to school a single day in 1909-10.

What is the trouble? It is simple. We are spending one dollar for
education where we should spend ten dollars. If tomorrow we multiplied
our effort to educate the next generation ten-fold, we should but begin
our bounden duty. The heaven that lies about our infancy is but the
ideals come true which every generation of children is capable of
bringing; but we, selfish in our own ignorance and incapacity, are
making of education a series of miserable compromises: How ignorant can
we let a child grow to be in order to make him the best cotton mill
operative? What is the least sum that will keep the average youth out of
jail? How many months saved on a high school course will make the
largest export of wheat?

If we realized that children are the future, that immortality is the
present child, that no education which educates can possibly be too
costly, then we know that the menace of Kaiserism which called for the
expenditure of more than 332 thousand millions of dollars was not a whit
more pressing than the menace of ignorance, and that no nation tomorrow
will call itself civilized which does not give every single human being
college and vocational training free and under the best teaching force
procurable for love or money.

This world has never taken the education of children seriously. Misled
by selfish dreamings of personal life forever, we have neglected the
true and practical immortality through the endless life of children's
children. Seeking counsels of our own souls' perfection, we have
despised and rejected the possible increasing perfection of unending
generations. Or if we are thrown back in pessimistic despair from making
living folk decent, we leap to idle speculations of a