There are reasons, however, for thinking that the superstition is passing. In the first place, nowhere do we find more scepticism in regard to the pretensions of education than among those who have been educated, and this number is rapidly increasing. In the second place, the alliance between education and a social system depending on private capital is too obvious, and the abrogation of the true functions of the former is too complete. The so-called Americanization campaign is so crude an attempt to put something over that even the unsophisticated foreigner whom it is intended to impress watches the pictures or reads the pamphlets which set forth the happy estate of the American workman, with his tongue in his cheek. The social groups which feel aggrieved under the present order are marking their defection by seceding from the educational system and setting up labour universities of their own. So serious is this secession that New York has passed the Lusk Law, designed to bring the independent movement under State control. In the third place, the claim of education to be an open sesame to success in life is contradicted by the position of its most constant votaries, the teachers. The prestige which used to attach to the priests of learning and which placed them above the lure of riches has vanished; their economic station has declined until even college professors have fallen into the servantless class, which means the proletariat. Truly for such as they to declare that education means success in life is a dismal paradox. Another sign of approaching reformation in the educational system is to be found in the frankly corrupt practices which infest it. Here the parallel to the mediæval church is not exact, for in the latter it was the monasteries and religious houses that were the chief sources of offence, while the colleges and private institutions of higher learning which correspond to them are singularly free from anything worse than wasteful internal politics. It is the public educational system which by reason of its contact with political government partakes most palpably of the corruption that attends the democratic State. It is unnecessary to mention the forms which this corruption takes where a school board of trustees by political appointment is given the exploitation of the schools--the favouritism in appointments and promotions, the graft in text-books and equipment, the speculation in real estate and building contracts, the alienation of school property. There is scarcely a large city in the country in which pupils and teachers alike are not shamefully and scandalously defrauded by action of school trustees which can be characterized in the mildest terms as wilful mismanagement conducing to private profit.