ans the schoolmaster. The Board of
Education asked for sixteen millions. They will get the other ten when
we have caught our breath. Since the beginning of 1895[37] we have built
sixty-nine new public schools in Manhattan and the Bronx, at a cost of
$12,038,764, exclusive of cost of sites, furnishings, heating, lighting,
and ventilating the buildings, which would add two-thirds at least of
that amount, making it a round twenty millions of dollars. And every
one of the sixty-nine has its playground, which will by and by be free
to all the neighborhood. The idea is at last working through that the
schools belong to the people, and are primarily for the children and
their parents; not mere vehicles of ward patronage, or for keeping an
army of teachers in office and pay.

[Footnote 37: Up to June, 1902.]

[Illustration: Public School No. 177, Manhattan.]

The silly old regime is dead. The ward trustee is gone with his friend
the alderman, loudly proclaiming the collapse of our liberties in the
day that saw the schools taken from "the people's" control. They were
"the people." Experts manage our children's education, which was
supposed, in the old plan, to be the only thing that did not require
any training. To superintend a brickyard demanded some knowledge, but
anybody could run the public schools. It cost us an election to take
that step. One of the Tammany district leaders, who knew what he was
talking about, said to me after it was all over: "I knew we would win.
Your bringing those foreigners here did the business. Our people believe
in home rule. We kept account of the teachers you brought from out of
town, and who spent the money they made here out of town, and it got to
be the talk among the tenement people in my ward that their daughters
would have no more show to get to be teachers. That did the business. We
figured the school vote in the city at forty-two thousand, and I knew we
could not lose." The "foreigners" were teachers from Massachusetts and
other states, who had achieved a national reputation at their work.

There lies upon my table a copy of the minutes of the Board of Education
of January 9, 1895, in which is underscored a report on a primary school
in the Bronx. "It is a wooden shanty," is the inspector's account,
"heated by stoves, and is a regular tinder box; cellar wet, and under
one classroom only. This building was erected in order, I believe, to
determine whether or not there was a school