Under This System Of Popular Education, The Average Cost Per Scholar For 5 Years, Including Books, Stationery, Fuel, And All Other Expenses, Is 7 Dollars 2 Cents Per Annum.

This system of education is followed in nearly all the States; and while it reflects the highest credit on America, it contrasts strangely with the niggard plan pursued in England, where so important a thing as the education of the people depends almost entirely on precarious subscriptions and private benevolence.

With a gratuitous and comprehensive educational system, it may excite some surprise that the citizens of New York and other of the populous cities are compelled to supplement the common schools with those for the shoeless, the ragged, and the vicious, very much on the plan of our Scotch and English ragged-schools. Already the large cities of the New World are approximating to the condition of those in the Old, in producing a subsidence or deposit of the drunken, the dissolute, the vicious, and the wretched. With parents of this class, education for their offspring is considered of no importance, and the benevolent founders of these schools are compelled to offer material inducements to the children to attend, in the shape of food and clothing. At these schools, in place of the cleanly, neat, and superior appearance of the children in the common schools, dirt, rags, shoeless feet, and pallid, vicious, precocious countenances are to be seen. Nothing destroys so effectually the external distinguishing peculiarities of race as the habit of evil.

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