Can the philosophy of taxation be reduced to a more hurtful, a more demoralizing absurdity! Suppose the same standard of distribution of school funds should be applied to the city or the State of New York; what would be the logical result?
Should we appropriate annually from nine to twelve millions of dollars to improve the morals of the people by informing their intelligence?
Would the State be able, after ten years of such an experiment, to pay the myriads of officials which would be required to preserve the public peace, to protect life and insure proper respect for the so-called rights of property?
Such an experiment would in time require the deportation to New York of the entire male adult population of Ireland, to be turned into the "finest police in the world," to stem the tide of crime and immorality which such premium upon ignorance would entail.

Since even under the present munificent and well ordered school system, it is almost impossible to elect a Board of Aldermen from any other than the _slum_ elements of the population--the liquor dealers, the gamblers, and men of their kind, the President of the New York Board of Aldermen at this very writing being a liquor-dealer, who can estimate the calamity which the inauguration of the Kentucky system would bring upon the people of New York--appropriating to the support of the public schools only such taxes as were paid by the parents of the children who attend them! And, yet, there is hardly an editor in the South who does not regard it as so much robbery of the tax-payers to support schools for the colored people--for the proletarian classes generally, white and colored.

They stoutly maintain that these people really add nothing to the stock of wealth, really produce nothing, and that, therefore charity can become no more magnanimous than when it gives, places in reach of, the poor man the opportunity to educate his child, the embryo man, the future citizen.
They think it a sounder principle of government to equip and maintain vast penal systems--with chain gangs, schools of crime, depravity and death, than to support schools and churches.

Millions of money are squandered annually to curb crime, when a few thousand dollars, properly applied, would prove to be a more humane, a more profitable preventive.

The poor school teacher is paid _twenty-five dollars per month_ for three months in the year, while the prison guards is paid _fifty dollars per month_ for twelve months--ninety days being the average length given to teach the child in the school and three hundred and sixty-five being necessary to teach him in the prison, whence he is frequently graduated a far worse, more hopeless enemy of society than when he matriculated.
And the brutality of the convict systems of Southern States is equaled by no similar institutions in the world, if we except the penal system enforced by Russia in Siberia.