Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/373

Rh inhabitants there should as regularly be a good public college as there is now a public high school in each similar smaller community. Besides federal and municipal institutions there should be national ones, not of the same grade, but for entrance to which graduation from a federal institution might be a prerequisite. Whether these suggested institutions should come into existence by taking over the "plants" of the present denominational colleges or by some other method need not be worked out in this article. Ways and means can always be discovered when an act is recognized as a necessary one.

If this is not done, there is but one alternative. If the denominational colleges continue to exist, and to combine general training and education for citizenship with religious instruction, basing such religious instruction upon the contents of the accepted book or books of any religion, or the interpretation of these books by any church or personal interpreter, or propound any more definite monotheism than the motto on our coins, "In God we trust," and if these colleges continue to be exempt from taxation then we must at once and forever abandon the pleasant fallacy that in the United States church and state are independent.