Speech #540103150

I think I could quote a dozen here that would puzzle a welleducated American on first thought to interpret exactly as to what they meant. or to understand them on first reading. It requires a pretty high state of education for a man even to understand the text of the Constitution of the United States. to say nothing of its interpretation. I think that they made a very difficult selection. and I shall make a different proposition in another amendment that I shall offer. having reference to naturalization. which is the real pith and merit of this whole business after all. so far as the influx of foreign people into our country is concerned. Tha question of naturalization is the question of citizenship. and I have another amendment which relates to that subject and incorporates a knowledge of the Constitution of the United States. or a capacity to read it. along with the Ten Commandments. If every man who is naturalized in the United States is compelled to read the Ten Commandments. that man will not die without having had an opportunity to understand the groundwork of the civilization and the Government of the United States. It can not do him any harm. Whether he reads it understandingly or not (I mean understandingly in the sense of a conviction of its truth). I propose that man shall not go to his grave harmed by the fact that he has not read the Ten Commandments. There are a great many men in the United States today. native born and naturalized. who have never read the Ten Commandments. They are none the better for that. The country is none the better off because those men have not been compelled in the presence of some officer of the Government. if you please. or some one else. to recite or to read that basis of all Christian law. So I put that in now for the purpose of giving the man who wants to be naturalized a double opportunity to study the two great things that control in American civilizationthe Constitution of the United States and the Ten Commandments. 1 am in the habit of calling the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States the ten political commandments.