=New York City.=--Meanwhile, an interesting development of educational facilities was taking place in New York City. In 1805 the opportunities offered in the private, church, and charity schools were seen by certain of the most prominent citizens to be totally inadequate for a city of seventy-five thousand inhabitants, and a ‘Free School Society’ was founded to provide for the boys who were not eligible for these schools. The president was De Witt Clinton, afterward governor, and in 1806 the first school was opened, from motives of economy, upon the monitorial basis (see p. 241). The state fund did not reach a sufficient amount to be available until 1815, but special gifts were made to the school society from time to time by the legislature, the city, and private individuals, and there was a rapid increase in the number of the society’s schools during the first quarter of a century. In 1826 the legislature authorized the organization to charge a small tuition fee and change its name to the ‘Public School Society.’ While the fee system was soon found to injure the efficiency of the work and was abolished within six years, the new title persisted, as it did not suggest pauperism in the way the old name had. In 1828 the society was allowed the benefit of a small local tax. For quite a time the work of the association was unhindered, but in 1820-1825 a vigorous effort was made to obtain a share of the state appropriation for the sectarian schools of the Bethel Baptist Church. This move was finally defeated, but the Roman Catholics made a more successful protest fifteen years later by indicating that the society, while nominally nonsectarian, was really Protestant. To settle this dispute, the legislature in 1842 established a city board of education, and after eleven years the institutions of the Public School Society were merged in this city system. Thus was the way prepared for a public school system in New York City, and this development was typical of the training of educational sentiment through quasi-public societies that took place in Buffalo, Utica, Oswego, and several other cities. [Sidenote: Constitutional provision in Pennsylvania produced only ‘poor schools.’] [Sidenote: Public system in Philadelphia and elsewhere.]