But the work of the American public school does not stop with the children who come directly under its control.  The board of education reaches, as no other organization does, the great mass of the population.  All the other boards and departments established for the help and guidance of these people only succeed in badgering and frightening them.  They are met, even at Ellis Island, by the board of health and they are subjected to all kinds of disagreeable and humiliating experiences culminating sometimes in quarantine and sometimes in deportation.  Even after they have passed the barrier of the emigration office, the monster still pursues them.  It disinfects their houses, it confiscates the rotten fish and vegetables which they hopefully display on their push-carts, it objects to their wrenching off and selling the plumbing appliances in their apartments, it interferes with them in twenty ways a day and hedges them round about with a hundred laws which they can only learn, as Parnell advised a follower to learn the rules of the House of Commons, by breaking them.

Then comes the department of street cleaning, with its extraordinary ideas of the use of a thoroughfare.  The new-comer is taught that the street is not the place for dead cats and cabbage stalks, and other trifles for which he has no further use.  Neither may it be used, except with restrictions, as a bedroom or a nursery.  The emigrant, puzzled but obliging, picks his progeny out of the gutter and lays it on the fire-escape.  He then makes acquaintance of the fire department, and listens to its heated arguments.  So perhaps he, still willing to please, reclaims the dead cat and the cabbage stalk, and proceeds to cremate them in the privacy of the back yard.  Again the fire department, this time in snorting and horrible form, descends upon him.  And all these manifestations of freedom are attended by the blue-coated police who interdict the few relaxations unprovided for by the other powers.  These human monsters confiscate stilettos and razors; discourage pocket-picking, brick-throwing, the gathering of crowds and the general enjoyment of life.  Their name is legion.  Their appetite for figs, dates, oranges and bananas and graft is insatiable; they are omnipresent; they are argus-eyed; and their speech is always, “Keep movin’ there.  Keep movin’.”  And all these baneful influences may be summoned and set in action by another, but worse than all of them, known as the Gerry Society.  This tyrant denies the parent’s right in his own child, forbids him to allow a minor to work in sweatshop, store, or even on the stage, and enforces these commands, even to the extreme of removing the child altogether and putting it in an institution.