sanitary authorities twice
condemned the Essex Market school across the way as wholly unfit for
children to be in, but failed to catch the ear of the politician who ran
things unhindered. When (in 1894) I denounced the "system" of
enforcing--or not enforcing--the compulsory education law as a device to
make thieves out of our children by turning over their training to the
street, he protested angrily; but the experts of the Tenement House
Commission found the charge fully borne out by the facts. They were
certainly plain enough in the sight of us all, had we chosen to see.

When at last we saw, we gave the politician a vacation for a season. To
say that he was to blame for all the mischief would not be fair. We were
to blame for leaving him in possession. He was only a link in the chain
which our indifference had forged; but he was always and everywhere an
obstruction to betterment,--sometimes, illogically, in spite of himself.
Successive Tammany mayors had taken a stand for the public schools when
it was clear that reform could not be delayed much longer; but they were
helpless against a system of selfishness and stupidity of which they
were the creatures, though they posed as its masters. They had to go
with it as unfit, and upon the wave that swept out the last of the
rubbish came reform. The Committee of Seventy took hold, the Good
Government Clubs, the Tenement House Commission, and the women of New
York. Five years we strove with the powers of darkness, and look now at
the change! The New York school system is not yet the ideal one,--it
may never be; but the jail, at least, has been cast out of the firm. We
have a compulsory education law under which it is possible to punish the
parent for the boy's truancy, as he ought to be if there was room in the
school for the lad, and he let him drift. And the day cannot be delayed
much longer now when every child shall find the latchstring out on the
school door. We have had to put our hands deep into our pockets to get
so far, and we shall have to put them in deeper yet a long way. But it
is all right. We are beginning to see the true bearing of things. Last
week the Board of Estimate and Apportionment appropriated six millions
of dollars for new schools--exactly what the battleship _Massachusetts_
cost all complete with guns and fittings, so they told me on board.
Battleships are all right when we need them, but even then it is the man
behind the gun who tells, and that me