600,000, but the seating capacity of the schools has never filled the wonderfully growing demand. The alternative of half-day classes in the most congested neighborhoods has even failed to take in all the children seeking instruction. The public schools attract a large proportion of the Irish-descended children of the great city, and, as has been noted, the number of Irish-descended teachers is very high in comparison with those from other nationalities. Here, however, side by side with the great educational work of the municipality, is a school system instructing one-fifth as many children in the name of religious ideality and entirely supported by the resident members of the Catholic faith. In addition to these are thirty-seven colleges and academies of higher learning and two religious seminaries educating for the priesthood. The 450 edifices, thus scantily summarized, represent a total valuation, according to the best authorities, of not less than $40,000,000, and possibly, with work in progress, approach the great total of $50,000,000. This is a very noble portion of Ireland’s monument in New York. Great as these sums may be, they give but a sorry measure of the value of the churches to the Irish themselves, furnishing as they have done a moral anchorage beyond the power of words to describe. Most necessary were they to a people taken rudely from their homes and sent naked and adrift in a new and strange world, where the battle was no longer the mere struggle for existence but a conflict for power and wealth, in which the sharpest wits, acting through the loosest morals, were often the victors. Well may the New York Irish view this array of churches, schools and colleges with some glow of pride—and gratitude. It is not that the Protestant Irish of New York were wanting in their share of church building. They more rapidly merged in the American branches of their respective sects, but it is well to remember that an “Irish Presbyterian Church” existed on Orange Street in New York in 1811, as well as an “Erin Lodge of Freemasons,” and that Irish Protestant clerics like the late Dr. John Hall have in goodly numbers filled the most important pulpits in New York and Brooklyn for over a century and a half. The famous John Street Methodist Church was founded by Irishmen. It is probable that in the greater city there are 200,000 persons of Protestant faith, who are either native Irish or in whole or in part of Irish descent. In such an establishment as St. Vincent’s hospital, in the New York Foundling Asylum, the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum, the Catholic Protectory, the House of the Good Shepherd are other highly valuable proofs of organizing genius and generous sustaining power on the part of the Irish of New York.