source, their effect, their whole tendency. Men are thinking ideas today that poison them morally, socially and economically. These ideas are as deliberately shot into society as poison gas was shot into ranks of soldiers in France. Our mental hospitality has been grossly abused, the public mind has been made a sewer. The time has come for a custom barrier to be raised for the examination of imported ideas. Unrestricted immigration of ideas has been as bad for the American mentality as unrestricted immigration of people has been for American society.
We have taken our amusements without thought of what was behind them in the way of deliberate intent to make us common and careless and coarse. We have read our newspapers, wholly innocent of the propaganda mixed with the news. We have even taken our religion in a Judaized form, without troubling to inquire whether it squared with the Bible, the textbook of religion. We have read our novels and have failed to see what serum the author was injecting along with his story. And all this has been possible because we have been asleep, enjoying, as we thought, a life which was swiftly being taken from us, and dreaming that the old principles still held sway.