age, all of them under fourteen, gathered to listen to my business
with Graccho. When they had become convinced that I was not an officer
they frankly owned that they were all playing hookey. All of them lived in
the block. How many more of their kind it sheltered I do not know. They
were not exactly a nice lot, but not one of them would I have committed to
the chance of contact with thieves with a clear conscience. I should have
feared especial danger from such contact in their case.

As a matter of fact the record of average attendance (136,413) shows that
the public school _per se_ reaches little more than a third of all the
children. And even those it does not hold long enough to do them the good
that was intended. The Superintendent of Schools declares that the average
age at which the children leave school is twelve or a little over. It must
needs be, then, that very many quit much earlier, and the statement that
in New York, as in Chicago, St. Louis, Brooklyn, New Orleans, and other
American cities, half or more than half the school-boys leave school at
the age of eleven (the source of the statement is unknown to me) seems
credible enough. I am not going to discuss here the value of school
education as a preventive of crime. That it is, so far as it goes, a
positive influence for good I suppose few thinking people doubt nowadays.
Dr. William T. Harris, Federal Commissioner of Education, in an address
delivered before the National Prison Association in 1890, stated that an
investigation of the returns of seventeen States that kept a record of the
educational status of their criminals showed the number of criminals to be
eight times as large from the illiterate stratum as from an equal number
of the population that could read and write. That census was taken in
1870. Ten years later a canvass of the jails of Michigan, a State that had
an illiterate population of less than five per cent., showed exactly the
same ratio, so that I presume that may safely be accepted.

In view of these facts it does not seem that the showing the public school
is making in New York is either creditable or safe. It is not creditable,
because the city's wealth grows even faster than its population,[16] and
there is no lack of means with which to provide schools enough and the
machinery to enforce the law and fill them. Not to enforce it because it
would cost a great deal of money is wicked waste and folly. It is not
safe, because the schoo