Page:Frank David Ely -Why defend the nation? Sound Americanism... (1924).pdf/58

54 A gap-bridging agency, supplementing our present educational system, is essential to education in the vital fundamentals of good citizenship. It should constantly hold in public view the superior rights of our citizenry. It should tell what America offers that other nations do not, and why it is possible for America to offer what she does to all. With better general understanding the false theories of radicalism would be steadily exposed to the merciless light of truth. We have no right to expect a crop of anything unless we prepare the ground and sow good seed, and this is as true of crops of good citizens as of crops of any agricultural or other product. But the seed now being most industriously sown is the seed of radicalism. It is high time for all good Americans to awake and to be up and doing.

What we need is the America of the Constitution. We don't want it "reformed." We do want a clear, broad road of understanding for growth and development. The bypaths and swamp-roads of illiteracy, infested with the sink-holes of radicalism, are unsuited for our sweeping progress. As stated in a prior chapter, the Constitution was the result of over two centuries of purely American experience under sixty-nine separate forms of government either in actual operation or prepared and considered for use, from the first charter granted to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584 down to and including the various forms of constitution prepared following the Declaration of Independence. Our Constitution has withstood the storm and trial of domestic and foreign strife. Under it the Nation leaped to prosperity and fame. Its past sufficiency is the best possible guaranty of its present and future adequacy. Absolute liberty and freedom such as it insures is the greatest boon a government can offer or secure for a people, and it is folly to even think that better can result from any effort of man.

Preachers of sedition, of communism and socialism and all the other "isms," have no place on the national rostrum. Our freedom and purity of American thought and speech should be free and exempt from all taint of those radical ideas and expressions which are now so inimical to our whole welfare; which permeate and honeycomb much of Europe; which brought upon them and upon us the worst scourge of war the world has ever known; and which left much of the world in a mael-