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clustered into organic arrangement and display the classes who are the constant natural enemies of society and of its police, and the strange spectacles they presented were photographed and preserved by the reporters who watched the strangest procession ever seen in our streets. These are the savages of civilization' who, in the deliberate judgment of Macaulay, were the coming perils of all the great centers of civilization. They would be, he was sure, foes more dangerous and savage than were the Goths and Vandals to ancient Rome, or 'the unspeakable Turk' whose incursions and atrocities aroused all Europe to the Crusades.

"They are here; they are gaining rapidly by accessions from the vice, crime, ignorance and diabolic destructive associations of Europe; they have their society, customs, standards of 'honor,' literature, news. papers, orators and representatives in office; they are conscious of their growing physical power."

If, from our boasted free public schools, we are each year letting loose an army of ignorant children, (ignorant because not suffered to stay in school long enough to be taught,) who will have no further opportunities for any kind of orderly training, and who, as citizens and as voters, are to add their numbers to that vast army of utterly illiterate persons, which, according to the census of 1880, is encamped all over the land; an ever increasing multitude whose presence is everywhere a menance, composed not only of ex-slaves at the South, and of European emigrants in the North and West, but of throngs of city vagrants and idlers, and of country poor whites, in all sections of the country; the time is soon coming when this problem will compel attention.

In the speech of Hon. Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire, in advocacy of Governmental aid to common schools, delivered in the Senate of the United States on June 13, 1882, accompanied with careful statisti cal tables prepared by the U. S. Bureau of Education, and by the U. S. Census authorities, there will be found an appalling array of facts showing the rapid increase and very general distribution of the ignorant population of the United States.

This speech is a concise encyclopædia of exhaustive statistical infor mation on all points relating to the school population and school attendance in the United States, and should be read by all interested in knowing the present status of the common schools of the Republic.

In considering the statistics of illiteracy it must be remembered that not only do not all who can read enough to be enrolled as "able to

read," really habitually employ themselves in acquiring knowledge by means of reading, but that it has been found, in point of fact, that rarely have those who cannot write as well as read, ability to read with sufficient ease to induce them to do so except upon great compulsion; practically only those who can both write and read readily, read at all. So that the statistics, appalling as they are, make a more favorable showing than would be warranted by exact facts.

The total population of the United States in 1880 is given as 50,155,783. Total population who cannot read, ten years of age and over, 4,923,451. Total population who cannot write, ten years of age and over, 6,239,958. Total white population, 43,402,970. Total white population who cannot write, ten years of age and over, 3,019,080. Total colored population (includes Indians, Chinese, etc.), 6,752,813. Total colored population who cannot write, ten years of age and over, 3,220,878.

Upon the basis of one voter to every five persons the voting popu lation in 1880 is given as ten millions; of these there are approximately two millions who cannot read or write-about equally divided between the white and colored races, and so generally distributed over the whole country that in "every one of the Middle, Southern, and most of the Western States," as well as in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, "these illiterate voters have power, if combined, to decide every political issue between the two parties."

There were about fifteen and one-third millions of school population in 1880. In 1882, these are estimated at eighteen millions; "with their education we are charged. * In less than ten years they will be the nation. Of these, ten and one-half millions are enrolled in public and private schools and six millions is the average attendance, while seven and one-half millions, or five-twelfths of the whole, are growing up in absolute ignorance of the English alphabet.

"This seems incredible but these are the figures. At this rate, before another census we shall have passed the line, and there will be more children in this country out of the schools than in them, and before half a century ignorance and its consequences will unquestionably have overthrown the Republic. We have reached the crisis of our fate. The education of the people is the most important issue before the country, and it must remain so for years to come."

A table of school population and attendance in eighty-six cities is given. These cities contain 8,300,081 inhabitants, or nearly one-sixth of the whole population of the country; with a school population of a

little more than two millions;―of these, at least one-half are not even enrolled in any school, public or private, while in some of the cities the percentage of the children without any school education is as high as per cent.

82

The facts of illiteracy shown by these census figures are indeed alarming and the discrepancy between the totals of school population and school attendance challenges attention; in few cities are there school accommodations for all the population of school age, but the limit of school age varying as it does in different States between the extremes of four years to twenty-one years of age, shows that it does not follow, because certain ones are not enrolled on a given day, that they will necessarily grow up ignorant; they may have already been in school several years, or they may attend hereafter. Where average attendance is only five years, there is considerable of a margin in the seventeen years of possible attendance. Still, if not as bad as the Senator fears, the evil is nevertheless real and menacing.

These unimpassioned figures, even after all allowances and deductions have been made, give terrible emphasis to the following question and its answer, by a recent writer: "Whence shall come the new barbarians? Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now their gathering hordes!"

Ignorance and poverty will as inevitably move festering masses of humanity to overthrow the existing institutions of society in the crowded cities of the new world, as they have done in those of the old; and all the sooner and more effectually because here, ignorance and poverty can put their hands on the very engines of political power, which, in the old world, were beyond their reach.

These latest statistics of illiteracy, as given in the foregoing extracts from the remarkable presentation recently made to the United States. Senate by the honorable chairman of their Committee on Education and Labor, in which the inadequacy of the common schools of the country to longer contend successfully with the ever rising tides of ignorance, unless immediately and largely reinforced, is emphatically shown; are commended to the thoughtful consideration of all well wishers to their country.

If this Republic is to remain a Republic in fact as well as in form, those who desire to preserve it in its pristine purity and who wish the great experiment undertaken to demonstrate the capacity of man for self-government, which was begun in the Eighteenth Century to at

least outlast the Nineteenth, must at once rouse themselves to apply some effectual remedy to the alarming conditions which have been so unexpectedly revealed. "To give the suffrage to tramps, to paupers, to men to whom the chance to labor is a boon, to men who must beg, or steal, or starve, is to invoke destruction. To put political power in the hands of men embittered and degraded by poverty is to tie firebrands to foxes and turn them loose amid the standing corn; it is to put out the eyes of Samson and to twine his arms around the pillars of national life." (Page 478.)

*Progress and Poverty, by Henry George. New York, 1880. D. Appleton & Co. pp.

508.

DANGERS DISCLOSED BY THE CENSUS.

The revelations as to illiteracy and non-attendance on schools made by the CensusThreatening dangers from ignorance illustrated by Victor Hugo-How can the number of the child's school years be increased?—Indifference of classes of citizens to the education of their children, as set forth by a writer in the Louisville Commercial-Compulsory attendance referred to - Evils incident to all such paternal legislation-A community in earnest can surely devise better methods of securing school attendance-The relation of the present training given in common schools to wage-earning capacity-Elementary industrial art training in all public schools, an important factor in the solution of the problem of educating a people-Man a productive, as well as a receptive creature. - True education would develop all his powers -- Does the present system on the contrary ignore all the productive faculties? If so, is not the training insufficient?—The public schools do not directly fit pupils for productive industries; consequent pressure of competition in the few occupations for which they are fitted - - When children learn that thought can be as truly expressed by the making of things as by an oration or poem, then the maker of thoughtful things will be honored by them equally with the orator or poet-When all public school children understand this, they will be eager to make such things, and then the art worker will take his rightful place—The Kindergarteners, for the very young children, and Mr. Leland, in Philadelphia, and Professor Adler, in New York, with older pupils, aim to develop the productive faculties-Most public school children must be workers, and it is not unjust to demand that the schools do more than they have done to prepare them for their work - The schools will readily respond to such demands.

To those who believe in the worth to the Republic of the training given to its children in the free common schools of the country, the statement by Senator Blair, quoted in the preceding paper, of the surprising facts shown by the census of 1880, will indeed be startling and portentous. These figures show that as an efficient means of giving elementary instruction to all the citizens of the United States the commonschool system, as now existing in the several States and Territories of the Union, proves inadequate. Since, according to the census, from one-third to one-half of all the children are now growing up without any schooling.

What it means not to know how to read, and with what dangers such ignorance menaces society, Victor Hugo shows, writing by the lurid