The annual
reports of the Department of Education were models of how to
say a thing so that no one by any chance could understand what it
was about. It was possible to prove from them that, while there
was notoriously a dearth of school accommodation, while children
knocked vainly for admission and the Superintendent clamored for
more schools, yet there were ten or twenty thousand seats to spare.
But it was not possible to get the least notion from them of what
the real need was. I tried for many months, and then set about
finding out for myself how many children who ought to be in school
were drifting about the streets. The truant officers, professionally
discreet, thought about 800. The Superintendent of Schools guessed
at 8000. The officers of the Association for the Improvement of
the Condition of the Poor, with an eye on the tenements, made it
150,000. I canvassed a couple of wards from the truant officers'
reports, and Dr. Tracy compared the showing with the statistics
of population. From the result I reasoned that there must be
about 50,000.
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