the collar. "And you," I said, "why don't
you go to school? Don't you know you have to?"

The boy thrust one of his bare feet out at me as an argument there was no
refuting. "They don't want me; I aint got no shoes." And he took the
trick.

I had heard his defence put in a different way to the same purpose more
than once on my rounds through the sweat-shops. Every now and then some
father, whose boy was working under age, would object, "We send the child
to school, as the Inspector says, and there is no room for him. What shall
we do?" He spoke the whole truth, likely enough; the boy only half of it.
There was a charity school around the corner from where he sat struggling
manfully with his disappointment, where they would have taken him, and
fitted him out with shoes in the bargain, if the public school rejected
him. If anything worried him, it was probably the fear that I might know
of it and drag him around there. I had seen the same thought working in
the tailor's mind. Neither had any use for the school; the one that his
boy might work, the other that he might loaf and play hookey.

Each had found his own flaw in our compulsory education law and succeeded.
The boy was safe in the street because no truant officer had the right to
arrest him at sight for loitering there in school-hours. His only risk was
the chance of that functionary's finding him at home, and he was trying to
provide against that. The tailor's defence was valid. With a law
requiring--compelling is the word, but the compulsion is on the wrong
tack--all children between the ages of eight and fourteen years to go to
school at least one-fourth of the year or a little more; with a costly
machinery to enforce it, even more costly to the child who falls under the
ban as a truant than to the citizens who foot the bills, we should most
illogically be compelled to exclude, by force if they insisted, more than
fifty thousand of the children, did they all take it into their heads to
obey the law. We have neither schools enough nor seats enough in them. As
it is, we are spared that embarrassment. They don't obey it.

This is the way the case stands: Computing the school population upon the
basis of the Federal census of 1880 and the State census of 1892, we had
in New York, in the summer of 1891, 351,330 children between five and
fourteen[10] years. I select these limits because children are admitted
to the public schools under the law at the age of five year