The steady labor, punctuality, and order of a good school, the high tone in many of our Free Schools, the self-respect cultivated, the emulation aroused, the love of industry thus planted, are just the influences to break up a vagabond, roving, and dependent habit of mind and life. The School, with the Lodging-house, is the best preventive institution for vagrancy. The Massachusetts system of "Truant-schools"--that is, Schools to which truant officers could send children habitually truant--does not seem so applicable to New York. The number of "truants" in the city is not very large; they are in exceedingly remote quarters, and it would be very difficult to collect them in any single School. Our "Industrial Schools" seem to take their place very efficiently. The present truant-officers of the city are active and judicious, and return many children to the Schools. COMPULSORY EDUCATION. The best general law on this subject, both for country and city, would undoubtedly be, a law for compulsory education, allowing "Half-time Schools" to children requiring to be employed a part of the day. There is no doubt that the time has arrived for the introduction of such laws throughout the country. During the first years of the national existence, and especially in New England and the States peopled from that region, there was so strong an impression among the common people, of the immense importance of a system of free instruction for all, that no laws or regulations were necessary to enforce it. Our ancestors were only too eager to secure mental training for themselves, and opportunities of education for their children. The public property in lands was, in many States, early set aside for purposes of school and college education; and the poorest farmers and laboring people often succeeded in obtaining for their families and descendants the best intellectual training which the country could then bestow. But all this, in New England and other portions of the country, has greatly changed. Owing to foreign immigration and to unequal distribution of wealth, large numbers of people have grown up without the rudiments even of common-school education. Thus, according to the report of 1871, of the National Commissioners of Education, there are in the New England States 195,963 persons over ten years of age who cannot write, and, therefore, are classed as "illiterates." In New York State the number reaches the astounding height of 241,152, of whom 10,639 are of the colored race. In Pennsylvania the number is 222,356; in Ohio, 173,172, and throughout the Union the population of the illiterates sums up the fearful amount of 5,660,074 In New York State the number of illiterate minors between ten and twenty-one years amounts to 42,405. In this city there are 62,238 persons over ten who cannot write, of whom 53,791 are of foreign birth. Of minors between ten and twenty-one, there are here 8,017 illiterates.