who love their country, I am greatly interested,--the movement to open the
schoolhouse to the grown-up people in order that they may gather and talk
over the affairs of the neighborhood and the state. There are schoolhouses
all over the land which are not used by the teachers and children in the
summer months, which are not used in the winter time in the evening for
school purposes. These buildings belong to the public. Why not insist
everywhere that they be used as places of discussion, such as of old took
place in the town-meetings to which everybody went and where every public
officer was freely called to account? The schoolhouse, which belongs to
all of us, is a natural place in which to gather to consult over our
common affairs.

I was very much interested in the remark of a fellow-citizen of ours who
had been born on the other side of the water. He said that not long ago he
wandered into one of those neighborhood schoolhouse meetings, and there
found himself among people who were discussing matters in which they were
all interested; and when he came out he said to me: "I have been living in
America now ten years, and to-night for the first time I saw America as I
had imagined it to be. This gathering together of men of all sorts upon a
perfect footing of equality to discuss frankly with one another what
concerned them all,--that is what I dreamed America was."

That set me to thinking. He hadn't seen the America he had come to find
until that night. Had he not felt like a neighbor? Had men not consulted
him? He had felt like an outsider. Had there been no little circles in
which public affairs were discussed?

You know that the great melting-pot of America, the place where we are all
made Americans of, is the public school, where men of every race and of
every origin and of every station in life send their children, or ought to