CHAPTER XXIII

"There will be, presumably, much excited denunciation of the Board of Education for closing the public schools to meetings of the Teachers' Union. The familiar complaints about infringing the right of free speech will be heard, and--well, the complaints will be as ill-based as they usually are. "In the first place, while speech is free in this country, it is not, any more than it is or can be, anywhere, free to the extent that anybody is free to say anything at any time and any place. Restrictions of several kinds there are and must be, including those by which decency and the safety of our institutions are protected. On the other hand, the members of the Teachers' Union have not been reduced--as yet--to silence. They have simply been told that they cannot use the city's property in the campaign which they have undertaken against an important branch of the City Government. They are still privileged to hire as many halls as they please in which to accuse the Board of Education of tyranny, and to protest against the enforcement of discipline against teachers with a leaning toward Bolshevism, and a tendency to mingle Socialistic and pro-German propaganda with instruction in the three R's. "In this instance, as in so many others, the use of schoolhouses for meetings of adults with opinions to express and doctrines to preach has resulted unhappily. The adults who gather seem always, or almost always, to be, not average, well-disposed citizens, but a more or less incendiary minority who want to change things--and to change them a lot and very quickly. That aspiration is not wholly indefensible, for a good many things would be the better for changing, but real light and leading have not often been found on top at meetings in schoolhouses, and experience has proved that the Teachers' Union has neither to offer."