The crisis that threatens to cripple the public school system of Chicago is a present-day illustration of the saying of the Good Book that the sins of the parents are visited upon their children. The children of Chicago must now suffer because their parents, the voters of Chicago, have permitted themselves to be hoodwinked in the discharge of their duties as citizens. During the last years the efficiency of the schools has been seriously impaired by doubtful experiments and extravagance. The limit of profligacy has been reached at last, and we are face to face with the necessity of closing some of the schools or paying the teachers starvation wages as the only alternatives of a condition of hopeless bankruptcy.

As usual, when he is confronted with the inevitable consequences of his misrule, Mayor Harrison shrugs his shoulders and complains of lack of funds. According to the Mayor and his school board the present crisis is due to insufficient revenues. It is only too true that the revenues have been inadequate in the 2hands of the Mayor's school board; but it is not true that they would have been inadequate under a careful and capable financial management of the schools. The expenditures have increased nearly seventy per cent since Carter H. Harrison took the reins of the government, and the school board is now facing the largest deficit in the history of the city.

The annual appropiations for school purposes for the last six years figure as follows:

Here is an increase of some seventy per cent. The increase in the number of pupils from 1896 to 1901 was only twelve per cent, while the number of teachers 3increased eighteen per cent. The cost of instruction per capita was $26.45 in the school year of 1896-97, but $31.41 in the school year of 1900-01. Mr. Harrison's school board has added $4,007,300 to the annual expenditures that were sufficient during Swift's administration. The instruction of a child has cost $4.96 per annum more under Harrison than under Swift. If the instructions were so much better than before there would be some compensating advantages; but the general impression is that it is poorer.

Mayor Harrison was scarcely seated in the saddle before he and his henchmen reached out for the possession of the schools. The old members of the board were gradually replaced by trusty Harrison followers; A. G. Lane, under whose able, non-partisan administration the schools had attained a standing that was the pride of the city, was given his walking papers, and the era of spoliation was inaugurated. In the language of a member of the school committee of the City Council: "The members of the school board have filled up the teachers' pay rolls until they threaten to force the closing of the schools. Members have been getting places for their friends and relatives. Now the pay rolls are 4swamping them. They are willing to have the whole force suffer rather than have their friends taken off the pay rolls."

There is no mystery whatever about it: the school fund has been looted in common with every other fund within the reach of the Burke-Harrison machine. The result is only what we predicted by a minority of the voters and ought to have been foreseen by all. The people are now reaping the legitimate reward of their short-sightedness, prejudices, and folly. But the pity of it all is that the innocent children must needs be the chief sufferers.