Each had found his own flaw in our compulsory education law and succeeded. The boy was safe in the street because no truant officer had the right to arrest him at sight for loitering there in school-hours. His only risk was the chance of that functionary's finding him at home, and he was trying to provide against that. The tailor's defence was valid. With a law requiring--compelling is the word, but the compulsion is on the wrong tack--all children between the ages of eight and fourteen years to go to school at least one-fourth of the year or a little more; with a costly machinery to enforce it, even more costly to the child who falls under the ban as a truant than to the citizens who foot the bills, we should most illogically be compelled to exclude, by force if they insisted, more than fifty thousand of the children, did they all take it into their heads to obey the law. We have neither schools enough nor seats enough in them. As it is, we are spared that embarrassment. They don't obey it. This is the way the case stands: Computing the school population upon the basis of the Federal census of 1880 and the State census of 1892, we had in New York, in the summer of 1891, 351,330 children between five and fourteen[10] years. I select these limits because children are admitted to the public schools under the law at the age of five years, and the statistics of the Board of Education show that the average age of the pupils entering the lowest primary grade is six years and five months. The whole number of different pupils taught in that year was 196,307.[11] The Catholic schools, parochial and select, reported a total of 35,055; the corporate schools (Children's Aid Society's, Orphan Asylums, American Female Guardian Society's, etc.), 23,276; evening schools, 29,165; Nautical School, 111; all other private schools (as estimated by Superintendent of Schools Jasper), 15,000; total, 298,914; any possible omissions in this list being more than made up for by the thousands over fourteen who are included. So that by deducting the number of pupils from the school population as given above, more than 50,000 children between the ages of five and fourteen are shown to have received no schooling whatever last year. As the public schools had seats for only 195,592, while the registered attendance exceeded that number, it follows that there was no room for the fifty thousand had they chosen to apply. In fact, the year before, 3,783 children had been refused admission at the opening of the schools after the summer vacation because there were no seats for them. To be told in the same breath that there were more than twenty thousand unoccupied seats in the schools at that time, is like adding insult to injury. Though vacant and inviting pupils they were worthless, for they were in the wrong schools. Where the crowding of the growing population was greatest and the need of schooling for the children most urgent, every seat was taken.