Dr.Eliot is well aware of the opposition that will be made to his reform, but he has not given the slightest indication how it is to be overcome.

The well-to-do usually feel obligated to pay for the private education of their own children, and even where public institutions are at their disposal they are forced to support these children through all the years of study.

This is expensive, but this very expensiveness gives the children of the well-to-do a practical monopoly of the opportunities which this education brings.

How are they to be brought to favor, and, since they are the chief taxpayers, to _pay for_ the extension of these same opportunities to ten times the number of children who now have them?
In the meanwhile Dr.Eliot himself seems to have become discouraged and to have abandoned his own ideal, for only seven years after writing the above he came to advocate the division of the whole national school system into three classes: that for the upper class, that for the middle class, and that for the masses of the people--and he even insisted that this division is democratic if the elevation of the pupil from one class to the other is made "easy."[87] Now democracy does not require that the advance of the child of the poor be made what is termed _easy_, but that he be given an _equal_ opportunity with the child of the rich as far as all useful and necessary education is concerned.

Democracy does not tolerate that in education the children of the poor should be started in at the bottom, while the children of the rich are started at the top.
Those few who do rise under such conditions only strengthen the position of the upper classes as against that of the lower.