It is in the city or town, where the public school is equal or superior to the private school, that the real test comes. Yet in these places well-to-do parents seem almost as indifferent as when they have the righteous defence that their children would be imperfectly educated, or breathe foul air, were they to be sent to a public school. They take no interest, and they fairly bristle with polite and ingenious excuses for evading compliance with the institutions of their country. This is true, probably, of three-fifths of those parents, who can afford, if necessary, to pay for private instruction. And having once made the decision that, for some reason, a public school education is not desirable for their children, they feel absolved from further responsibility and practically wash their hands of the matter. It is notorious that a very large proportion of the children of the leading bankers, merchants, professional men, and other influential citizens, who reside in the so-called court end of our large cities, do not attend the public schools, and it is equally notorious that the existence of a well-conducted and satisfactory school in the district affects the attendance comparatively little. If only this element of the population, which is now so indifferent, would interest itself actively, what a vast improvement could be effected in our public school system! If the parents in the community, whose standards of life are the highest, and whose ideas are the most enlightened, would as a class co-operate in the advancement of common education, the charge that our public schools produce on the whole second-rate acquirements, and second-rate morals and manners, would soon be refuted, and the cause of popular education would cease to be handicapped, as it is at present, by the coolness of the well-to-do class. If the public schools, in those sections of our cities where our most intelligent and influential citizens have their homes, are unsatisfactory, they could speedily be made as good as any private school, were the same interest manifested by the tax-payers as is shown when an undesirable pavement is laid, or a company threatens to provide rapid transit before their doors. Unfortunately, that same spirit of aloofness, which has in the past operated largely to exclude this element in the nation from participation in the affairs of popular government, seems to be at the bottom of this matter. Certainly much progress has been made in the last twenty years in remedying the political evil, and the public good appears to demand a change of front from the same class of people on the subject of common education, unless we are prepared to advocate the existence and growth of a favored, special class, out of touch with, and at heart disdainful of, the average citizen.