People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 April 1895 — The School House Must Go. [ARTICLE]

The School House Must Go.

If we are to judge by the trend of sentiment among those who arrogate to themselves the power to govern in this country it is only a question of time when the schoolhouse or the treeschool system must go. Only recently a judge in passing sentence on some laboringmen for violating the orders of the court gave one man three months extra time, for, as the judge said, '“he is more Intelligent and therefore more dangerous.” Only a few years ago the chancellor of the Kansas university was removed because of his advanced views on eco-t nomic questions. Prof. Bemis of the Chicago university was compelled to resign recently

Because of hfs outspoken opinions and his tendency toward socialism. ” Only a year or so ago the present governor of Alabama —by fraud and ballot-box stealing—declared in substance that it was not necessary to educate the farmers’ sons and daughters. The aristocracy that has grown up in this country realize that the systems that sustain the social conditions now extant must necessarily be at war with intelligence and freedom of thought and hence we see the unmistakable outcroppings of what' will eventually terminate in the abolition of our free-school system, with the higher Institutions of learning in the hands of men who will be as clay in the hands of the potter—teaching whatever their plutocratic mastery may dictate. There may be those who will poohpooh this idea, but as surely as day follows night will this result follow if the American people do not arousd from their lethargy. Slavery and intelligence cannot g< together. The old slave oligarchy fully realized this when it was made a crime to teach a slave to read. A nation or people do not lose theii liberties in a day. It is little by little —the giving by degrees their rights te the power encroaching upon them—that as stealthily does its work as the snake that crawls upon its victim. The American people are submitting to conditions and wrongs heaped upon them that would not have been endured ten years ago, and it is because they have been brought upon us so gradually that we have come to accept them as a natural consequence, and, while the burdens are increasing, the people seem to be so benumbed as to have almost reached the point where they are unable to resist the encroachments upon them. We verily believe that the American people are menaced with more danger than ever before since the founding of the republic.