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these States the law is nowhere carried out with rigour, and the story of illiteracy in these five States is very dark.
In New Hampshire seven thousand persons are unable to read, nearly ten thousand persons are unable to write.
In Connecticut twenty thousand persons cannot read, thirty thousand persons cannot write.
In Michigan thirty-four thousand persons cannot read, fifty-three thousand persons cannot write.
In New York State there are a hundred and sixty-three thousand persons who cannot read, nearly two hundred and forty thousand persons who cannot write!
These ignorant folks are not all strangers; Irish labourers, German boors, and African riff-raff Many of them are natives of the soil, born under the Republic, in a land of public schools.
In New York, with her compulsory law of school attendance, more than seventy thousand of the natives cannot sign their names.
In Massachusetts and Connecticut the tables of illiteracy are not so swollen as in New York: yet in Connecticut more than five thousand, in Massachusetts nearly eight thousand of the natives cannot write.
In Michigan, a newly-settled State,
1875.
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