most necessary measure is to give equal educational facilities to all
classes of the population. Yet the most radical of the non-Socialist
educational reformers do not dare to hope at present even for a step in
this direction. No man has more convincingly described what the first
step towards a genuinely democratic education must be than Ex-President
Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, perhaps our most influential representative
of political as opposed to social democracy.

"Is it not plain," asks President Eliot, "that if the American people
were all well-to-do they would multiply by four or five times the
present average school expenditure per child and per year? That is, they
would make the average expenditure per pupil for the whole school year
in the United States from $60 to $100 for salaries and maintenance,
instead of $17.36 as now. Is it not obvious that instead of providing in
the public schools a teacher for forty or fifty pupils, they would
provide a teacher for every ten or fifteen pupils?"[86]

The reform proposed by Dr. Eliot, if applied to all the twenty million
children of school age in the United States, would mean the expenditure
of two billion instead of three hundred and fifty million dollars per
year on public education. Ex-President Eliot fully realizes the radical
and democratic character of this proposed revolution in the public
schools, and is correspondingly careful to support his demands at every
point with facts. He shows, for instance, that while private schools
expend for the tuition and general care of each pupil from two hundred
to six hundred dollars a year, and not infrequently provide a teacher
for every eight or ten pupils, the public school which has a teacher for
every forty pupils is unusually fortunate.

Dr. Eliot says that while there has been great improvement in the first
eight grades since 1870, progress is infinitely slower than it should
be, and that the majority of children do not yet get beyond the eighth
grade (the statistics for this country show that only one out of
nineteen takes a secondary course). "Philanthropists, social
philosophers, and friends of free institutions," he asks, "is that the
fit educational outcome of a century of democracy in an undeveloped
country of immense natural resources? Leaders and guides of the people,
is that what you think just and safe? People of the United States, is
that what you desire and intend?"

In order not only to bring existing p