ay to murder, maim, and destroy! Why? Because the blind, brutal
crime of powerful and selfish interests made this path through hell the
only visible way to heaven. We did it. We had to do it, and we are glad
the putrid horror is over. But, now, are we prepared to spend less to
make a world in which the resurgence of such devilish power will be
impossible?

Do we really want war to cease?

Then educate the children of this generation at a cost no whit less and
if necessary a hundred times as great as the cost of the Great War.

Last year, 1917, education cost us $915,000,000.

Next year it ought to cost us at least two thousand million dollars. We
should spend enough money to hire the best teaching force possible--the
best organizing and directing ability in the land, even if we have to
strip the railroads and meat trust. We should dot city and country with
the most efficient, sanitary, and beautiful school-houses the world
knows and we should give every American child common school, high
school, and college training and then vocational guidance in earning a
living.

Is this a dream?

Can we afford less?

Consider our so-called educational "problems"; "How may we keep pupils
in the high school?" Feed and clothe them. "Shall we teach Latin, Greek,
and mathematics to the 'masses'?" If they are worth teaching to anybody,
the masses need them most. "Who shall go to college?" Everybody. "When
shall culture training give place to technical education for work?"
Never.

These questions are not "problems." They are simply "excuses" for
spending less time and money on the next generation. Given ten millions
of dollars a year, what can we best do with the education of a million
children? The real answer is--kill nine hundred and ninety thousand of
them quickly and not gradually, and make thoroughly-trained men and
women of the other ten thousand. But who set the limit of ten million
dollars? Who says it shall not be ten thousand millions, as it ought to
be? You and I say it, and in saying it we sin against the Holy Ghost.

We sin because in our befuddled brains we have linked money and
education inextricably. We assume that only the wealthy have a real
right to education when, in fact, being born is being given a right to
college training. Our wealth today is, we all know, distributed mainly
by chance inheritance and personal favor and yet we attempt to base the
right to education on this foundation. The result is grotes