population in the
neighborhood to warrant the purchase of property to erect a school on."

[Illustration: Letter H Plan of Public School No. 165, showing Front on
West 109th Street.]

That was the way then of taking a school census, and the result was the
utter failure of the compulsory education law to compel anything. To-day
we have a biennial census, ordained by law, which, when at last it gets
into the hands of some one who can count,[38] will tell us how many
Jacob Beresheims are drifting upon the shoals of the street. And we have
a truant school to keep them safe in. To it, says the law, no thief
shall be committed. It is not yet five years since the burglar and the
truant--which latter, having been refused admission to the school
because there was not room for him, inconsequently was locked up for
contracting idle ways--were herded in the Juvenile Asylum, and
classified there in squads of those who were four feet, four feet seven,
and over four feet seven! I am afraid I scandalized some good people
during the fight for decency in this matter, by insisting that it ought
to be considered a good mark for Jacob that he despised such schools as
were provided for him. But it was true. Except for the risk of the
burglar, the jail was preferable by far. The woman into whose hands the
management of the truant school fell, made out, after little more than a
year's experience, that of twenty-five hundred so-called incorrigibles,
the barest handful--scarce sixty--were rightly so named, and even these
a little longer and tighter grip might probably win over. For such a
farm school is yet to be provided. The rest responded promptly to an
appeal to their pride. She "made it a personal matter" with each of
them, and the truant vanished; the boy was restored. The burglar, too,
made it a personal matter in the old contact, and the result was two
burglars for one. I have yet to find any one who has paid attention to
this matter and is not of the opinion that the truant school strikes at
the root of the problem of juvenile crime. After thirty years of close
acquaintance with the child population of London, Mr. Andrew Drew,
chairman of the Industrial Committee of the School Board, declared his
conviction that "truancy is to be credited with nearly the whole of our
juvenile criminality." But for years there seemed to be no way of
convincing the New York School Board that the two had anything to do
with one another. Even now it seems