There is a movement on foot in which, in common with many men and women who love their country, I am greatly interested,—­the movement to open the schoolhouse to the grown-up people in order that they may gather and talk over the affairs of the neighborhood and the state.  There are schoolhouses all over the land which are not used by the teachers and children in the summer months, which are not used in the winter time in the evening for school purposes.  These buildings belong to the public.  Why not insist everywhere that they be used as places of discussion, such as of old took place in the town-meetings to which everybody went and where every public officer was freely called to account?  The schoolhouse, which belongs to all of us, is a natural place in which to gather to consult over our common affairs.

I was very much interested in the remark of a fellow-citizen of ours who had been born on the other side of the water.  He said that not long ago he wandered into one of those neighborhood schoolhouse meetings, and there found himself among people who were discussing matters in which they were all interested; and when he came out he said to me:  “I have been living in America now ten years, and to-night for the first time I saw America as I had imagined it to be.  This gathering together of men of all sorts upon a perfect footing of equality to discuss frankly with one another what concerned them all,—­that is what I dreamed America was.”

That set me to thinking.  He hadn’t seen the America he had come to find until that night.  Had he not felt like a neighbor?  Had men not consulted him?  He had felt like an outsider.  Had there been no little circles in which public affairs were discussed?

You know that the great melting-pot of America, the place where we are all made Americans of, is the public school, where men of every race and of every origin and of every station in life send their children, or ought to 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.