Jasper County Democrat, Volume 22, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 July 1919 — Make Schoolboy’s Soul a Temple and No Fanatic Can Change It To a Sewer [ARTICLE]

Make Schoolboy’s Soul a Temple and No Fanatic Can Change It To a Sewer

By WILLIAM HEYLIGER.

Writer of Boys* Boob

Today, for the first time in the history of the world, victorious nations seek to create a peace based on justice rather than on greed. That ideal of that peace was nourished in America. It sprang from the soil of a nation conceived in human liberty. It seeks to banish forever years of horror such as blanched the cheeks of civilization from 1914 to 1918. It may succeed, it may fail; but it marks a turning point in the ethics and conscience of the world. And yet, even as this great call from America is debated at the peace conference, in the schoolhouses of America, according to charges made by prominent educators, wolves in sheep’s clothing are carrying on a vicious propaganda to inoculate the American boy with the virus of a diluted anarchy. What a ghastly calamity if our own boys, born to a heritage of American freedom, absorb the poison that whispers that American idealism is nothing but a meaningless phrase and that anarchy and murder are to be preferred to law and order. As against the sinister propaganda of anarchy cunningly urged on him by men who have won his confidence by reason of the close association of the classroom, give the boy the book that upholds the American ideal of fair play and honor. Give him the book that spells life to him in terms of decency and right living. Give him the book that tells him the glorious truth that his land is blest above all lands of the earth. Help him to cultivate in his soul an eternal love of the true and the clean. Make his soul a temple, and no-crack-brained fanatic will ever succeed in transforming it into a sewer.