“We give the child, in the acquisition of information, complete freedom; you compel it to do certain things which you as adults believe to be right, but which, as a rule, are perhaps nine times out of ten wrong. We believe that the home, field and active society is the best school; you largely cut the child off from these natural means and confine it to the narrow school-house, or prison, we think, where it is not allowed to talk and exercise--the very things you desire it to learn. We endeavor to create a desire for inquiry by pleasant and attractive incentives only; you generally resort to compulsion. Hence, we believe that a child should study only _when_, _where_ and _what_ it likes; you believe that it _must_ study such a time and such branches, and at such a place, whether it finds pleasure in doing so or not. We believe that a teacher or parent, who must compel a child or pupil to study, does not know how to teach; you believe that the child’s dislike for study is grounded in the perversity of its nature. We teach and inculcate that manual labor is honorable; that one who lives from the labor of others is a social and industrial parasite; that a child should be enticed to establish the habit of manual labor while young. You believe that manual labor is disrespectful, that a washerwoman, as such, is not as good as a senator’s wife, that one who lives from the labor of others by means of profit, interest, rent, and taxes is a good, clever person. You largely teach inequality; we teach complete equality of man, woman and child. “On the money question our system of education has a great advantage over yours. Our child receives all it earns at the close of each month; your child works for the parent. It receives nothing for a number of years but board, clothing and sometimes a little pocket money. Some of your parents give their children some property when the children become ‘of age;’ some parents give their property to their children, perhaps, because they can not take the property with them when they die; some parents have nothing to give when the child becomes of age nor when the parents die. In a child, in which the ideas of time and space are yet very imperfectly developed, a remote reward is a very feeble incentive to labor. A child or a savage will do a great deal for a penny, if paid immediately, but they will do very little for ten dollars, if they are to be paid five years hence, or even a year hence. “You say, how can you make your children work if you do not force them; but the secret, you see, all lies in the system. Our system encourages a child to work, while yours encourages it to be idle. We have a short day, easy work and big _cash_ pay; you have a long day, toilsome work, and small pay _on ten to forty years’ time_.