send their children, and where, being mixed together, the youngsters are
all infused with the American spirit and developed into American men and
American women. When, in addition to sending our children to school to
paid teachers, we go to school to one another in those same schoolhouses,
then we shall begin more fully to realize than we ever have realized
before what American life is. And let me tell you this, confidentially,
that wherever you find school boards that object to opening the
schoolhouses in the evening for public meetings of every proper sort, you
had better look around for some politician who is objecting to it; because
the thing that cures bad politics is talk by the neighbors. The thing that
brings to light the concealed circumstances of our political life is the
talk of the neighborhood; and if you can get the neighbors together, get
them frankly to tell everything they know, then your politics, your ward
politics, and your city politics, and your state politics, too, will be
turned inside out,--in the way they ought to be. Because the chief
difficulty our politics has suffered is that the inside didn't look like
the outside. Nothing clears the air like frank discussion.

One of the valuable lessons of my life was due to the fact that at a
comparatively early age in my experience as a public speaker I had the
privilege of speaking in Cooper Union in New York. The audience in Cooper
Union is made up of every kind of man and woman, from the poor devil who
simply comes in to keep warm up to the man who has come in to take a
serious part in the discussion of the evening. I want to tell you this,
that in the questions that are asked there after the speech is over, the
most penetrating questions that I have ever had addressed to me came from
some of the men who were the least well-dressed in the audience, came from
the plain fellows, came from the fellows whose muscle was daily up against
the whole struggle of life. They asked questions which went to the heart
of the business and put me to my mettle to answer them. I felt as if those