positions will
constantly increase. But neither will the opportunities of these few
have been in any way equal to those of the higher classes, nor will even
such opportunities be extended to any but an insignificant minority.

Nor does President Eliot's advocacy of class schools stand as an
isolated phenomenon. Already in America the development of free
secondary schools has been checked by the far more rapid growth of
private institutions. The very classes of taxpayers who control city and
other local governments and school boards are educating their own
children privately, and thus have a double motive for resisting the
further advance of school expenditure. As if the expense of upkeep
during the period of education were not enough of a handicap, those few
children of the wage earners who are brave enough to attempt to compete
with the children of the middle classes are now subjected to the
necessity of attending inferior schools or of traveling impracticable
distances. The building of new high schools, for example, was most rapid
in the Middle West in the decades 1880-1899, and in the Eastern States
in the decade 1890-1900. But within a few years after 1900 the rate of
increase had fallen in the Middle West to about one half, and in the
East to less than one third, of what it formerly had been.[89] It might
be thought that, the country being now well served with secondary
schools, the rate of growth must diminish. This may be true of a part of
the rural districts, but an examination of the situation or school
reports of our large cities will show how far it is from being true
there.

In Great Britain the public secondary schools for the most part and some
of the primary schools, _though supported wholly or largely by public
funds, charge a tuition fee_. The fact that a very small per cent of the
children of the poor are given scholarships which relieve them of this
fee only serves to strengthen the upper and middle classes, without in
any appreciable degree depriving them of their privileged position. In
London, for example, fees of from $20 to $40 are charged in the
secondary schools, and their superintendents report that they are
attended chiefly by the children of the "lower middle classes," salaried
employees, clerks, and shopkeepers, with comparatively few of the
children of the professional classes on the one hand or of the best-paid
workingmen on the other. An organized campaign is now on foot in New
York C