ergreen, Santa Clara
county. There are state prisons with convicts working under the public
account system, at San Quentin, Marin county, and Folsom, Sacramento
county. The Preston (Sonoma county) School of Industry, for older boys,
and the Whittier (Los Angeles county) State School, for girls and for
boys under sixteen, are the state reformatories, each having good
industrial and manual training departments. There are state hospitals
for the insane at Agnew, Santa Clara county; at Stockton, San Joaquin
county; at Napa, Napa county; at Patton, San Bernardino county; and,
with a colony of tubercular patients, at Ukiah, Mendocino county. In
1906 the ratio of insane confined to institutions, to the total
population, was 1 to every 270. Also under state control are the home
for care and training of feeble-minded children, at Eldridge, Sonoma
county; the institution for the deaf and the blind at Berkeley, and the
home of mechanical trades for the adult blind at Oakland. A Juvenile
Court Law was enacted in 1903 and modified in 1905.

The educational system of California is one of the best in the country.
The state board of education is composed of the governor of the state,
who is its president; the superintendent of public instruction, who is
its secretary; the presidents of the five normal schools and of the
University of California, and the professor of pedagogy in the
university. Sessions are long in primary schools, and attendance was
made compulsory in 1874 (and must not be less than two-thirds of all
school days). The state controlled the actual preparation and sale of
text-books for the common schools from 1885 to 1903, when the Perry
amendment to the constitution (ratified by popular vote in 1884) was
declared to mean that such text-books must be manufactured within the
state, but that the texts need not be prepared in California. The
experiment of state-prepared text-books was expensive, and its effect
was bad on the public school system, as such text-books were almost
without exception poorly written and poorly printed. After 1903
copyrights were leased by the state. Secondary schools are closely
affiliated with, and closely inspected by, the state university. All
schools are generously supported, salaries are unusually good, and
pension funds in all cities are authorized by state laws. The value of
school property in 1900 was $19,135,722, and the expenditure for the
public schools $6,195,000; in 1906 the value of