What! my boy obliged to go to school! Isn't this a free country? By and by you'll make a law to send him to meeting?" This is the indignant protest of a citizen sovereign at the proposition to compel all children, not idiotic or incapable of education, to attend. school, if not otherwheres provided for by their guardians. The poor man needs his boy to work for him, to run of errands, to tend the baby, to fetch the cows, and to get his bottle filled, for your sturdiest opponent of compulsory education has frequent calls on his boy for this particular service, and no cow yields, "such milk " to his taste. as comes in "that little brown jug." But the man who boiled his seed potatoes, and killed the goose of the golden eggs, was not quite the short-sighted and demented citizen that this indignant protester shows himself to be. It is handy, no doubt, to have a boy to earn a sixpence for you when your credit is low; but a great deal wiser to wait awhile that he may learn how to earn a dollar in less time. Very convenient to keep a little fellow trotting the baby, but a more cunning investment to get him educated, that he might make his fortune by inventing a baby jumper that would dispense with a thousand little tired hands. No sum at compound interest brings in returns like the money |