Those who could not travel far from home--the poor never can--in search of an education had to go without. The Department of Education employs twelve truant officers, who in 1891 "found and returned to school" 2,701 truants. There is a timid sort of pretence that this was "enforcing the compulsory education law," though it is coupled with the statement that at least eight more officers are needed to do it properly, and that they should have power to seize the culprits wherever found. Superintendent Jasper tells me that he thinks there are only about 8,000 children in New York who do not go to school at all. But the Department's own records furnish convincing proof that he is wrong, and that the 50,000 estimate is right. That number is just about one-seventh of the whole number of children between five and fourteen years, as stated above. In January of this year a school-census of the Fourth and Fifteenth wards,[12] two widely separated localities, differing greatly as to character of population, gave the following result: Fourth Ward, total number of children between five and fourteen years, 2,016;[13] of whom 297 did not go to school. Fifteenth Ward, total number of children, 2,276; number of non-attendants, 339. In each case the proportion of non-attendants was nearly one-seventh, curiously corroborating the estimate made by me for the whole city. Testimony to the same effect is borne by a different set of records, those of the reformatories that receive the truants of the city. The Juvenile Asylum, that takes most of those of the Protestant faith, reports that of 28,745 children of school age committed to its care in thirty-nine years 32 per cent. could not read when received. The proportion during the last five years was 23 per cent. At the Catholic Protectory, of 3,123 boys and girls cared for during the year 1891, 689 were utterly illiterate at the time of their reception and the education of the other 2,434 was classified in various degrees between illiterate and "able to read and write" only.[14] The moral status of these last children may be inferred from the statement that 739 of them possessed no religious instruction at all when admitted. The analysis might be extended, doubtless with the same result as to illiteracy, throughout the institutions that harbor the city's dependent children, to the State Reformatory, where the final product is set down in 75 per cent. of "grossly ignorant" inmates, in spite of the fact that more than that proportion is recorded as being of "average natural mental capacity." In other words, they could have learned, had they been taught. [Illustration: "SHOOTING CRAPS" IN THE HALL OF THE NEWSBOYS' LODGING HOUSE.]