430 APPLICABILITY OF OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. 



■which should guide us in this matter is Education now, not Punishment after- 

 wards." 



That something additional was needed to cure the evil is abundantly 

 evident from the strong language used by Mr. Randall, the City 

 Superintendent, in his report presented to the Board at the commence- 

 ment of the present year. 



After denying that the Public School system is responsible for the 

 crimes of those who refuse to take advantage of it, Mr. Eandall 

 continues : 



" Equally confidently and unhesitatingly is the allegation denied that the Public 

 School system either of the State or City is responsible as well for -what it has 

 failed to accomplish in the education of the entire population, to whom its doors 

 were freely opened, as for what it has actually done. Neither the officers nor 

 agents of these schools and systems have been invested with any authority to bring 

 within their supervision those who did not voluntarily choose to place themselves 

 under their guidance and control. Their doors were and have been invitingly open 

 and free to every child in the community, rich or poor, high or low, virtuous or 

 vicious. They have undertaken the responsibility of bestowing upon each child, 

 fully availing himself of the facilities thus afforded, a sound, practical. Christian 

 education, and to this high responsibility they should be rigidly held. But they 

 have not undertaken, nor bad they the power to undertake, the compulsory educa- 

 tion of any child — nor can they, with any pretension to justice, beheld responsible 

 for the vices or the guilt of those who have never, or only for brief and intermitted 

 periods of time, been placed under their instruction. There is, however, a fearful 

 and solemn responsibility resting upon those who possess both the power and the 

 means for securing the universal education of the future members of the community, 

 and who have hitherto neglected and still continue to neglect to make such provision 

 effectual. With the experience of ages before them, all pointing in the same 

 direction, and all combining to demonstrate the intimate connection between 

 ignorance and crime — with the moral certainty staring them in the face, that the 

 idle and the dissolute, the darkened and tlie benighted intellects of to-day will be- 

 come the paupers or the criminals, the robbers, the incendiaries, the burglars or the 

 murderers of to-morrow. With the full knowledge that the streets and avenues 

 of our great cities and towns are swarming with the rapidly ripening elements of 

 wretchedness, and vice, and crime, and with the undoubted and clearly deducible 

 power, even as a measure of self-defence and in the exercise of the most obvious 

 means of salutary prevention, to arrest the further progress of this desolating 

 plague, and to convert into a fertile source of blessing by a comprehensive and well 

 devised system of universal education. The legislators of the Commonwealth yet 

 shrink from the discharge of their imperative duty in this respect, and vainly and 

 ineffectually hope to acomplish the work of reform by penal enaetments and 

 vindictive punishments? These are the men, and not the officers or agents of 

 our public schools, who may legitimately be held responsible, not alone for the 

 consequence and results of what they have done, but for what, having the power 



