insist upon conformity, and all progress will be shut off. This has been the experience of history. The past shows that those nations that have been most tolerant have been most progressive. How can you get any progress at all when you have the closed mind? The indispensable thing for progress is the open mind, the mind willing to examine, to listen, to learn, and not only that, to cooperate. Our forefathers, therefore, knew a little social science when they wrote toleration into our Constitution. They knew that was the best way to bring people to agreement, to bring them to work together, to bring about progress. When you have intolerance in society along any line, people are going to be afraid to express their opinions, are going to be afraid to lead into new fields, going to be afraid to take up the great battle for truth and right, and so for progress. Smother the conscience of the individual, deny him free expression of opinion, and you put an end to all improvement in your social order. Intolerance, of course, sanctifies the social order, and says it was made once for all. Is that justifiable? Oh, no, we are learners—we always have been, and always will be-learners in the greatest undertaking this universe knows: the building of a righteous human world. We cannot afford, therefore, to say that we know it all, because we are all so ignorant. The scientific attitude of mind is open-mindedness, the love of truth, the search for truth, for facts, willingness to investigate and consider, fairness to opponents. That is the scientific attitude, and it is indispensable for progress.

There is something worse than this about intolerance, and you ought to know it. Intolerant people generally believe they are preserving the social order, that they are keeping things fixed and quiet when they put on this policy of "hush-hush," saying you may not talk about the wrongs of this class or that group. But what are they really doing? What happens in human society when people cannot settle their differences by talking them over, by having free and friendly discussion? It may not always happen, but it is likely to happen, that if they cannot settle them by discussion, they will fight over them. Intolerance breeds mutual suspicion, antagonism, aloofness, separateness, and separateness leads to misunderstanding, and the road is clear to conflict, to war, and to revolution. President Wilson expressed this when he said that "repression is the seed of revolution." How many people are we repressing in this country? Read the recent book of Professor Herbert A. Miller, of the Ohio State University, on Races, Nations, and Classes. He points out one class after another in this country that feel themselves at the present time repressed, or even suppressed. If repression is "the seed of revolution," then ponder carefully as you read that book. He says the Roman Catholic element in this country feels itself repressed; that the Negro has felt repression, more than almost any other people, at our hands; that many Jewish people in certain localities feel it; that many foreign nationalities feel it. What are we doing? Making enemies for American society and for American institutions. Those who believe in repression believe that in this way lies security. They are misguided. The Czar and his followers

believed that, and instituted repression against nationality and religion in Russia, against this and that element, and when one form of repression did not work, they tried another; they sent people to Siberia, they imprisoned them, and executed them. They did it all for the stability of Russian society-and now look at Russia. Did all their repressions and intolerance help? Will repression and intolerance help us any? Were not our forefathers right? Listen to them, and let us give the greatest amount of freedom of speech and of opinion consistent with courtesy, decency, and truth. Were they not right in thinking that, as the Englishman says, this free expression of opinion is a safety valve? But we in America have not learned this lesson yet. We had an institution in the South which our forefathers believed should be abolished, and they talked freely about it when the Constitution was adopted, and for years thereafter; but after a time slavery became profitable, and they said: "It is a divine institution, and anybody who says it is not, is not of our faith," and so they kept the institution until a great revolutionary war swept it away in tears and blood, a war from which we have not yet recovered. When are we going to learn these lessons of history? Of course revolutions are not made by agitators. The agitators only voice the discontent that already exists. Revolutions are made by the foolish policy of trying to stop progress and trying to prevent the discussion of grievances and of needed reforms. The same thing happened in France in the eighteenth century that occurred in Russia in the twentieth. There the French nobility tried repression after repression; church and state united in intolerance, of all sorts. Louis XVI was told by Turgot that the only way to fight revolution was by suitable reforms, but he would not listen; and France went through a dreadful convulsion from which she has not yet recovered. It has been the pride of English-speaking peoples, from Magna Charta until now, that they have learned so well to settle their differences by free and open discussion, but this tradition now, in the United States, seems to be lost, at least in certain sections.

Every social worker should be a teacher and should teach above everything else that we should constantly be inquiring into social conditions, studying these, and constantly discussing them. You are the vanguard of progress. If revolution is to be avoided in this country, it must be through efforts such as yours. Such efforts cannot be made under cover, nor without the cooperation of all. Therefore you cannot afford to neglect even the lowest and meanest element of the community. You must ask justice for all and adequate life for all. Why do revolutions occur? Simply for one reason: that conditions become intolerable for some section of the population, and that happens because other sections do not know how that particular section is living. Our tongues were made to tell each other our needs, to indicate how we can mutually help each other, and to learn to cooperate. There cannot be revolution, therefore, in a society that is open-minded, that is plastic, that is forward-looking, that is tolerant in the biggest and best sense of the word. In such a society everybody

will be looking to see how they can help someone else, and nobody will have a grievance that may not be listened to. In such a society we would not bar foreigners, nor Negroes, nor Jews, nor Roman Catholics, nor any other element from participating in the best our communities offered. There are these repressed elements in the United States of America, and they feel the repression. Isn't it our duty to do what we can to relieve them of the sense of repression and to help them to come up to the full measure of American citizenship, to the full promise of American life? And let me tell you, that promise of American life seems greater to many of those people than it does to us. I have been abroad several times, and I know that people in other lands look to our flag as a flag of hope; and when they come here, they find it sometimes a flag of disappointment. Let us see that it is not that any more in the future. Let us show everyone in our national household the hospitality that belongs to them as members of our national household. Intolerance will destroy every value for which this nation has stood. We all know that the values of life, the most precious things of life, are in the good will that other men have toward us and in our good will toward other men, and intolerance destroys these.

What is the remedy? I have said the scientific attitude, but I think something more is needed. I would call it true liberal-mindedness. That is what the social workers of this country need in order to assure social advance. What is a synonym for true liberal-mindedness? Two words: the open mind and the outreaching heart. You have got to teach your communities this remedy. You cannot keep quiet upon this most vital issue and be true to your ideals, to all that our nation has stood for and should stand for in the future. We are pursuing a course which is inviting shipwreck. We must stop it. We must tell our friends and neighbors to stop it. We must begin at home, with ourselves. Let us all deeply resolve that we will do all we can, without sacrificing truth and right, to unite, rather than to tear apart, humanity; that we ourselves will rise above all prejudice of class or creed or race, because we recognize all men as our brothers to whom we owe love and good will as unto ourselves; that in particular we will not allow any prejudice of race or color to injure our just and kindly and happy relations with our fellow-men, regardless of race or color; that we will not permit any differences of religion to separate ourselves from other good people, no matter what their religious beliefs may be; that we will not be religious bigots; that we will respect the honest beliefs of our fellows, whatever they may be; that we will finally try to seek out and to conserve the good in all men; that we will value men not because they belong to this group or that, but will value them as men, for what they are, and what they can do; and that therefore we will treat them all, regardless of class or creed or race, as ends in themselves, even as we consider ourselves ends; and that we will treat no one merely as a means to an end. Let us all so resolve with the help of God.

RESOLVED THAT THE PROPOSED TWENTIETH AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES SHOULD BE RATIFIED

(DEBATE: AFFIRMATIVE SIDE)

Owen R. Lovejoy, Secretary, National Child Labor Committee, New York

We may somewhat simplify the discussion by attempting first to discover points of agreement. I assume my distinguished opponent will agree that there is no imminent danger of the ratification of the pending amendment. The hectic and worried discussion of this amendment during the Massachusetts campaign and during the entire winter legislative season, the abuse of the proponents, the appeal to American fear that our government is to become subject to Soviet Russia-all such irrelevant matters can now safely be laid aside. Only four states have thus far voted to ratify the amendment, twenty-two states have either refused to ratify or have rejected, and in addition, seven states have so acted in one house. Therefore, for the next two or four or six years, it will be possible for the people of the country to consider this question on its merits, and I venture to assume this will be the desire of Senator Thomas on the present occasion.

While we are naturally disappointed that this proposition has been so generally disapproved for the time being, we are sure of ultimate victory and we have no desire to quarrel with the American people. Laws should reflect public intelligence and the public will. So long as the people were made to believe that this amendment would nationalize all our children, that it would supersede all parental responsibility and control, that it would control wages, leisure, education, and that, if ratified, no girl under eighteen would be permitted to wash dishes and no boy under eighteen could crank up the family Ford, there was no point in trying to bring legislature to a sane discussion of it. So long as men of prominence think that if this amendment had been in existence in their boyhood they could never have attained their present position in life, it is impossible to get them even to give fair consideration to it. All this type of objection, even though it has swept multitudes into its wake, is too puerile to merit your time or mine tonight.

There are real points of difference which I assume will require our thought on this occasion. On this assumption I wish to support the principle that this amendment should be ratified by the states on two grounds: first, that a sovereign government should have the power to protect its own children. Second, that the pending amendment is properly drawn for the purpose of conferring upon the government such power.

There may be differences of opinion on the first proposition, but to my mind this is fundamental. From the standpoint of every consideration that could be discussed during this Conference of Social Work, from the standpoint of the protection of our country from dangers abroad and from disruption or

disintegration at home, from the standpoint of the development of education, health, and other agencies of social service, from the standpoint of the development of our national resources, and from the entire range of our economic and industrial interests it seems obvious that a government theoretically based on the integrity and intelligence of its citizenship should have the power to protect that citizenship in the development of those qualities.

This is precisely the kind of power the American government does not today possess. This is why the opponents of child labor have asked for an amendment to the federal Constitution. So far as protection of working children in America is concerned (unless they live in the District of Columbia or one of our territorial possessions), our government is as helpless to protect them as though they lived in Abyssinia or Madagascar.

After many years experimentation in the effort to secure adequate laws in the various states, after patient efforts to secure uniformity in state standards, the friends of working children believe themselves driven to invoke federal cooperation in combatting the evils of child labor. The history of those efforts is well known. Two federal child labor acts were passed-one under the power of the government to control interstate commerce, and the other under the power of the government to tax. Each in turn was declared invalid by the United States Supreme Court on the ground that Congress had transcended its power under the present limitations of our Constitution. We have accepted this verdict of the Supreme Court and have seen no alternative other than to follow the suggestion so pointedly made by the late President Wilson, the late President Harding, and President Coolidge: that if the working children of this country are now beyond the pale of protection, the constitutional limitations should be pushed out far enough to bring the children inside of it, instead of leaving them on the outside. The Supreme Court in its second decision, written by Mr. Chief Justice Taft, indeed seems to leave us no alternative.

In taking this position we claim the highest type of appreciation of the Constitution of the United States. Quotations from Jefferson, Hamilton, John Marshall, and other of the early patriots in attempts to show that the Constitution in its original form had uttered the last word in governmental legal philosophy leave us cold. Whenever time permits we are able to produce, in opposition to these quotations, others from the same sources and from multitudes of the early fathers, proving that they never believed they had spoken the last word. We refuse to regard the Constitution of the United States in the light in which the Fundamentalist is accused of regarding the scripture. We deny that those who wrote the Constitution intended that it should be worshiped as a beautiful crystal or a valuable piece of antique furniture to be kept in a glass case and never touched by American citizens.

As a matter of fact, we look on the Constitution as a living organism written and compiled by the wisest political philosophers of their day (or perhaps of any day in human history), but intended by them to be as applicable to the