riment would
in time require the deportation to New York of the entire male adult
population of Ireland, to be turned into the "finest police in the
world," to stem the tide of crime and immorality which such premium
upon ignorance would entail. Since even under the present munificent
and well ordered school system, it is almost impossible to elect a
Board of Aldermen from any other than the _slum_ elements of the
population--the liquor dealers, the gamblers, and men of their kind,
the President of the New York Board of Aldermen at this very writing
being a liquor-dealer, who can estimate the calamity which the
inauguration of the Kentucky system would bring upon the people of New
York--appropriating to the support of the public schools only such
taxes as were paid by the parents of the children who attend them!

And, yet, there is hardly an editor in the South who does not regard
it as so much robbery of the tax-payers to support schools for the
colored people--for the proletarian classes generally, white and
colored. They stoutly maintain that these people really add nothing to
the stock of wealth, really produce nothing, and that, therefore
charity can become no more magnanimous than when it gives, places in
reach of, the poor man the opportunity to educate his child, the
embryo man, the future citizen.

They think it a sounder principle of government to equip and maintain
vast penal systems--with chain gangs, schools of crime, depravity and
death, than to support schools and churches. Millions of money are
squandered annually to curb crime, when a few thousand dollars,
properly applied, would prove to be a more humane, a more profitable
preventive. The poor school teacher is paid _twenty-five dollars per
month_ for three months in the year, while the prison guards is paid
_fifty dollars per month_ for twelve months--ninety days being the
average length given to teach the child in the school and three
hundred and sixty-five being necessary to teach him in the prison,
whence he is frequently graduated a far worse, more hopeless enemy of
society than when he matriculated.

And the brutality of the convict systems of Southern States is equaled
by no similar institutions in the world, if we except the penal system
enforced by Russia in Siberia. The terms of imprisonment for minor
offenses are cruelly excessive, while the food and shelter furnished
and the punishments inflicted would bring the blush of shame to the
ch