y and most economically to secure the attainment of the
ends desired by the Legislature.

These ends we shall no doubt all agree to be--first: that any of the youth
of this city possessed of special talents, but lacking means for their
cultivation, may have placed within their reach an education the best
possible for the development of their powers for the benefit of
themselves and of the community; and, second, to provide for the
comparatively well-to-do the means of pursuing useful studies in
compensation for compelling them to provide for the instruction of their
less fortunate citizens.

As it is self-evident that whatever course of studies will tend to secure
the first of these ends will tend also to secure the second and less
important, we are spared the necessity of a two-fold investigation.

A very few statistics suffice to show that neither of these ends has been
hitherto attained by the College of the City of New York.

It is immaterial what year we select for examination, the numbers which
follow will be found to bear about the same relative proportions in every
year. I quote from the Trustees' Report for 1866 merely because it is the
latest document at hand which furnishes the numbers in the different
classes and of the graduates; from this report I find, that while there
were three hundred and eighty-one students in the introductory class, only
twenty-five graduated in that year. The number of graduates in 1867 was
thirty, and twenty-nine in July, 1868. Of the three hundred and eighty-one
who composed the introductory class in 1866, one hundred and fifty-one
left the College during the year, and doubtless the two hundred and thirty
who remained will have dwindled to about twenty-five or thirty by the year
1871.

Without doubt some proportion of the three hundred and eighty-one leave
the College because of the necessity they are under of obtaining, by their
labor, the means of subsistence; but when it is remembered that these
three hundred and eighty-one are the _picked youth from the many thousands
attending the public schools_, and when the sacrifices and privations
which men and youth imbued with a love of learning will make and undergo
for the acquirement of knowledge are borne in mind, we must look to
something in the constitution of the College itself to account for this
result. In short, we can but come to the conclusion that the main cause
of this falling off is to be found in the feeling which g