At the St. Nicholas dinner, held December 8 at the Bismarck Hotel, Mr. H. Van der Ploeg made a speech which must have made many of the Dutch people present very angry. We had hoped that one of them would protest against the statements of the speaker; full details of his speech were printed the next day in the American newspapers. But it was undoubtedly below people's dignity to answer such foul imputations in which the character of our Dutch nation was attacked.

The speaker's deep-rooted antipathy to--we should say inveterate hatred of--parochial elementary schools, made him burst out in invective against everything Dutch, and everything precious to them. It is entirely superfluous to defend parochial instruction against such crude attacks. Parochial instruction itself, and the fruits which it yields, here as well as in the Netherlands, are above all such criticism. In the Netherlands, people have given up that type of criticism for some time past; here, where this instruction is of 2relatively recent date, as is everything else in this country, people dare to place it in a wrong light. It is principally for that reason that a word of protest is not altogether superfluous. This is what the speaker had to say:

"Coming as these people (the Dutch immigrants) do from different parts of Holland, and chiefly from small villages and country districts, where wages are low and the necessities of life dear, they arrive here with very fixed notions and prejudices, which are often the result of their birth and environment instead of a sound education and wise judgment.....I am afraid that the majority of them are also opposed to the study and adoption of what is best in American life and manners. They seem to have such fixed notions and habits that it is difficult for them to realize the new order of things. They wish to continue to measure and to judge things by the standard of the home they have left, and not of the home they find.

"So extreme is this obstinate adherence to Dutch customs and usages, that our worthy Holland people establish Dutch parochial schools in many places, and 3would, if they could, establish exclusive small Dutch villages or settlements, even in our large cosmopolitan cities. It is usually only the poorer people who send their children to these schools, and so, besides paying their share of the taxes for the maintenance of our splendid public schools, they are also burdened with the support of these little private schools, which are usually poorly equipped. It is seldom that a school of this character has a competent teacher. As a rule he is not proficient in either English or Dutch, and seldom indeed in both.....The result is that the child must unlearn in later years what he should have learned correctly and well in his childhood, and is at a disadvantage for years to come, because of the time thus foolishly spent."

And so the speaker continues to heap nonsense upon nonsense. The last sentence, with which the speaker concluded his demonstration, is especially curious, and indicates how thoroughly he "understands" his subject. Indeed, how can a person, at an elderly age, forget that which he should have learned as a child, and thus, which he has never learned? A more impossible conclusion cannot be imagined.

His whole reasoning indicates that the speaker is completely uninformed on the subject of parochial instruction; otherwise he would have acknowledged the fact that the teachers in our parochial schools have grown old in the service; that our parochial schools, no matter how recently they may have been built, are turning out young men and women, who have been prepared for life; who are second to none of the children of the public schools. The speaker should have mentioned the fact that heretofore the parochial schools, due to lack of sufficient forces, offered instruction only as far as the seventh grade. Therefore, the Dutch students had to continue in public schools, and in competitive examinations carried off prizes, proving that they did not need to forget that which they had never learned. Then he ought to know that generally the teachers in our parochial schools are well matched (in both English and Dutch, if you please) with the teachers in our public schools, whose teaching, even for the greatest advocates of our public schools, is pronounced to be, to put it mildly, "inadequate"; and he ought to know that teachers in parochial schools are accepted without teachers' certificatesby necessity, and last but not least, that the teaching personnel of our parochial schools teach from principle and conviction, and therefore are inspired with an enthusiasm for the work which 5cannot be found in the public schools. Then he should know that the renascent Netherlands has to thank the parochial school for its development, and that men like Kuyper and Bavinck, who have even come to America to explain the development of the reform movement, belonged to the first advocates of national parochial instruction.

As we mentioned at the beginning, the parochial school does not need to be defended against such foul imputations. But we wish to emphasize particularly the fact that the future of America depends on its continuing to permit national parochial instruction of the youth of our people. If you take away the Bible and the doctrine of salvation from our children, your penal colonies and prisons will be enlarged.

Let our people cling a little more closely to the old Dutch principles. It will not do them any harm. Our Dutch people here in America are not surpassed by any group in the sphere of knowledge and science, or commerce and industry. Only--and is this an offense?--our Dutch people do lag behind so far as the 6number of criminals and drunkards are concerned. Of more than 20,000 native-born Dutch living in Chicago, not more than ten ever come in contact with the police. These are our Dutch people, who lag behind and stand in the way of other people, Mr. Van der Ploeg. Beat that record, if you can!

But it is not our desire to discuss this nonsense any further. It is really not our business, because, according to Mr. Van der Ploeg, the ministers, alone, are basically to blame, and we do not have any claim to that title.

Furthermore, the speaker says: "In many of the small Holland settlements in Illinois and elsewhere, that I have observed, there is a lack of public spirit and enterprise which should be foreign to people of our nationality. And I am not afraid to say, for nothing personal is intended, that this spirit of self-sufficiency and smugness is often due in no small part to their leaders, and especially their ministers, to whom they look for guidance and of whom they expect so much."

That closes the door for further dispute!