the Department of Education, and has grown more rapidly than the
expenditure for schools. It appears that, under existing conditions,
when property appreciates half a billion in value, it is necessary to
have four and one half millions' worth of police to watch over and
protect the half-billions' increase in assessed value from the ravages
of our paupers and criminals.

It seems also that in 1879 our police cost less than our schools,
while they now cost more. The problem assumes a still greater aspect
when the expenditure for paupers, criminals, and police are taken
together, for it then appears that they cost nearly twice as much as
the schools.

Thus the community is clearly moving in the direction of more
demoralized masses of population kept in check by the brute force of
an armed police, since each year the excess grows which is spent for
paupers, criminals, and police over the expenditure for education.

One retrogressive influence fails to find positive official
expression, and is, therefore, the more worthy of notice. This is the
collusion among officials to reduce primary school attendance. The
Board of Estimate and Apportionment never approves the full
appropriation made for the schools. The Board of Education strives to
live well within the sum allowed it, and crowds the greatest possible
number of children upon each teacher, the regular enrolment being
seventy primary pupils per teacher. Then to parry the charge of
over-filling schoolrooms, it becomes the duty of the principal to
reduce the enrolment per schoolhouse to the lowest point. Therefore,
when a zealous Sunday-school teacher finds that one of her little
charges has gone to work under age, the offices of the city's solitary
factory inspector being out of the question, she hunts up a truant
officer, who takes the child before a magistrate, who, in view of the
want of school accommodations, promptly discharges the truant. Behind
our local municipal administration lies our whole system of
capitalistic production, calling for cheap hands and profit, not
humane culture. And the school authorities do but seek to supply the
demand of that system for lads who can read the papers enough to vote
with the machine, and write and cipher enough to be available as
clerks.

Everything beyond this being unprofitable, the great mass of our city
children are turned out of school at the ages of ten, eleven, and
twelve years, to furnish "cheap" hands for industria