smelling, unclean, and wholly unfit for children for purposes of play.  The drainpipes from the roof have decayed to such a degree that in some instances as little as a quarter of the pipe remains.  On rainy days, water enters the class-rooms, hall-ways, corridors, and is thrown against windows because the pipes have rotted away.  The narrow stairways and halls are similar to those of jails and dungeons of a century ago.  The classrooms are poorly lighted, inadequately equipped, and in some cases so small that the desks of pupils and teachers occupy almost all of the floor-space.”

Another school, located a short distance from Fifth Avenue, the “wealthiest street in the world,” is described as an “old shell of a structure, erected decades ago as a modern school building.  Nearly two thousand children are crowded into class-rooms having a total seating capacity of scarcely one thousand.  Narrow doorways, intricate hallways and antiquated stairways, dark and precipitous, keep ever alive the danger of disaster from fire or panic.  Only the eternal vigilance of exceptional supervision has served to lessen the fear of such a catastrophe.  Artificial light is necessary, even on the brightest days, in many of the class-rooms.  In most of the classrooms, it is always necessary when the sky is slightly overcast.”  There is no ventilating system.

In the crowded East Side section conditions are reported to be no better.  The Public Education Association’s report on Public School No. 130 points out that the site at the corner of Hester and Baxter Streets was purchased by the city years ago as a school site, but that there has been so much “tweedledeeing and tweedleduming” that the new building which is to replace the old, has not even yet been planned!  Meanwhile, year after year, thousands of children are compelled to study daily in dark and dingy class-rooms.  “Artificial light is continually necessary,” declares the report.  “The ventilation is extremely poor.  The fire hazard is naturally great.  There are no rest-rooms whatever for the teachers.”  Other schools in the neighborhood reveal conditions even worse.  In two of them, for example; “In accordance with the requirements of the syllabus in hygiene in the schools, the vision of the children is regularly tested.  In a recent test of this character, it was found in Public School 108, the rate of defective vision in the various grades ranged from 50 to 64 per cent.!  In Public School 106, the rate ranged from 43 to 94 per cent.!”

The conditions, we are assured, are no exceptions to the rule of public schools in New York, where the fatal effects of overcrowding in education may be observed in their most sinister but significant aspects.

The forgotten fact in this case is that efforts for universal and compulsory education cannot keep pace with the overproduction of children.  Even at the best, leaving out of consideration the public school system as the inevitable prey and plundering-ground of the cheap politician and job-hunter, present methods of wholesale and syndicated “education” are not suited to compete with the unceasing, unthinking, untiring procreative powers of our swarming, spawning populations.