Fort Worth gazette. [volume] (Fort Worth, Tex.) 1891-1898, 1891-11-08
annual scholarship, and this entities the
winner to collegiate school education of

annual scholarship, and this entities the
winner to a collegiate school education of
| about three years term.
The most effective commentary upon the
inherent wrong in the British system of
| compulsory education with compulsory pay
| ment for the same, is found in few briefly
stated facts. 1t is universally admitted by
all board school VISITORS" inspectors, de-
| tectiveS and officers, as well as by maglS-
| trates adjudicating school board cases,
| that it has come to be the most desperate
struggle for large portion of the lowly of
England, second only
| TO THEIR STRUGGLE FOR BREAD,
| to evade the registration of their children
| for school attendance If that, to them,
| miserable misfortune befallS, then it is
| their next unremitting struggle to defeat
| by every expediency, cunning device, false
| hood and downright villainy, the enforce
ment OF the law. 1t relentleSSly hunts,
| haunts aud harries them, so long as they
| possess child within the compulsory age;
| and personally know of scores of families
where one or both parents have been per-
secuted to their grave, and their children
driven from possible responsibility to per-
manent criminal life.
This information is based on the state
ments of school visitors, inspectors and re-
putable people. But anyone has access to
the fact that in London, for the nine months
ending March 81, 1887, out of the parents of
10,6I0 children summoned before the police
magistrates for non-attendance or irregular
attendance, 103 had been previously sum-
| moned between eleven and thirty-fve times.
Not only this, but, according to official re-
turns, for every hundred scholars seats
provided (whlle there is not provision for
one-sixth of all British children who are
entitled to receive elementary educatlon)
and pay system, an average attendance OF
only about % per cent. 1t is also true that
there is an attendance, forced and volun-
tary, of only about 40 per cent IN all
BRITISH ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS.
In other words, after an army of detect
ives have found certain number of chill
dren, which the law mercilessly drives to
school and into paying for the schooling
and the driving, the utmost rigor of British
Aforementioned by relentless magistrates,
by constables, detectives and ''vlsitors"
whose very sustenance depends upon their
vigilance, and the endless dread of prison
to both parents and children-can after all
compel school attendance of only three
fourths of the children under actual every
day surveillance. Is it any wonder that, I'M
der such system, the entire school at
tendance of the great city of Liverpool for
the month of July last, failed to reach ST.
600; and that to provided for the detention
of the rebelious among this number, its
ragged SCHOOL, prisons in Park Lane,
Bond, Queensland and Addison streets were
rated to hold 1925 child prisoners, with
their capacity quite overtaxed.
Children are got on the school lists in
three ways-by house-to-house registration,
when more than one-half of the poorer
classes deny all knowledge of their chill
dren, hide them in the most cunning man
ner and often incite riots with the aid OF
sympathizing neighbors; by parents pre-
senting their children for voluntary regis
tration and by spying them out in the
streets and DIGGING THEN footsteps until
they arrive at their homes, when an inves-
tigation, which often amounts to siege, at
once begins.
The devices resorted to for sequestering
children from registration are often pitt
fully grotesque. On one occasion when ac-
companying a visitor on his rounds, l
saw poor woman caught in the act of
squeezing her boy into the oven of her hob;
and among many quite as odd stratagems
witnessed was one by mother who stood
in the open door and after bluntly denying
maternity, was finally forced to admit the
ownership of two strapping girls that had
for the fifteen minutes parleying stifed and
trembled beneath
THE MOTHERS ovRR-AMPLR SKIRTS.
Stuffed beneath bundles of rags; actually
covered with Goals; wedged in chimney
flues; hid beneath floors; smothered be-
tween mattresses; and clinging to the sides
of privy vaults; are common bestowals OF
children to escape registration or subse-
quent capture. No wonder that the vaga-
bond and criminal instinct becomes pre-
dominant in the nature of folk thus har-
aSSed.
"Once on the school lists, always on and
always worried - is a common expression
among the British lowly. An ex-inspector
of the Liverpool police force, now rent
collector for wealthy Liverpool tenement
house owner, told me he believed there
were 10000 families in that city known as
'Scampers, +" that is, families that fit from
one habitation to another and leave the
landlord in the lurch for his rent. On
mentioning this to one of the most reliable
of the Liverpool school board 'svisitors" he
stated it to be his firm conviction that at
least one-half that number had been forced
into the ''scamping" habit and had become
utterly worthless people in their
loss Of home life and the saw
ing ambition to attain independ-
ence, from the unceasing pursuit of their
children for compulsory school attendance,
and the judgments hanging over the heads
of their parents for fees and fines which
they never had been, and never would be,
able to pay. In his opinion the whole of
these human beings had become veritable
outcasts and outlaws in a small way, through
ILLS System VI CUISINES, pctty, Dut W tleLA,
overwhelming persecution.
We will suppose, for illustration, boy |
has been hunted down and got within the |
school board Jurisdiction. If a single alb |
sence be recorded against him, he comes |
under all the possibilities of the law. The |
usual course is in case he makes a little |
more than half time, that is, six out of ten |
attendances-twosp per day, or ten per week |
being the reckoning-and a ''warning" hav |
ing been served for every absence, the |
mother or the father, and usually the for |
mer. is summoned before police magis- |
trate. The 'visitor'' is practically the |
prosecutor for the board. He makes oath !
to the boys ''presences" and absences"
If the mother answers the summons and |
enters good defense, the boy may get off |
with reprimand; but he is permanently |
thereafter
UNDER COURT ESPIONAGE.
If breach Of attendance now occurs. a
second summons is issued against the |
mother, and fine, the lowest being shil- |
ling, is never escaped. At the same time |
superintendent of the national school board /
is present who, whether the child Is from |
parish or board school, will recommend |
his commitment to an industrial school, and |
never for term of less than three years.
This commitment is a sentence to one of |
the three conditions or grades of industrial |