The time has come when the pupils of our public schools must be taught the love of country, and Catholicism does not teach this, but the reverse.  The children of this nation must learn to love their native land.  To whom shall we look for the inculcation of those patriotic sentiments which should inspire the heart of every American citizen?  Not to Catholicism, by any means, but to the three hundred thousand teachers of our public schools.

Over every school house in hamlet and city, in country and town, in the North and in the South, in the East and in the West, the American flag should kiss the morning breeze.  Place it where twenty millions of children will see it every day, and learn to love it as the emblem of all that is great and good.  It will represent to us and to all the world, in a new and peculiar manner, the great fundamental truth that the bulwark of our liberties is in the education of our people.

The war of the revolution was fought to establish our nationality.  Incalculable blood and treasure have been spent to establish and keep our national life intact, and the national policy with relation to our public schools is part and parcel of that all-absorbing determination to secure the perpetuity of the state.  Men make better citizens for being educated.  The higher the popular intellect is raised the more intelligent and independent will be its vote.  The stronger the source of government, the stronger the government.  If the “bayonets that think” are the most potent, the “ballots that think” are the most beneficent.

Every victory which our nation has won has been a victory of the public schools and a death knock to Catholicism.  They have been the nursery not only of our statesmen, but of our patriots and soldiers.  They are an American institution and are destined to live as long as the republic survives.  There is no other American institution that American people would sooner fight for and die for than that which secures an educated and intelligent nationality.  Let us maintain inviolate our public schools to the end that our nation may ever be the home of liberty, “the land of benedictions.”

In the unbounded universe of God’s domain there are manifold diversities, and yet there is an essential unity that binds the world together; there is a common point where all matter unites.

As there is great freedom and diversity permitted in the unity of nature, so, in our country of religious and political freedom, we must grant the greatest latitude possible to the individual conscience in personal, religious and civil rights consistent with good government.  But that there must be a code of morality common to all as the basis of our civilized jurisprudence, in which the rights of all center or unite and are equally protected, every reasonable mind must admit.  But where do we get our ideas of what is morally right, and what is morally wrong, as the basis of our common law and jurisprudence?