Horace Mann lifted up his strong hands and voice against it;
physicians and physiologists came out gravely and earnestly, and fortified
their positions with statistics from which there was no appeal. Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, whose words have with the light, graceful beauty of
the Damascus blade its swift sureness in cleaving to the heart of things,
wrote an article for the "Atlantic Monthly" called "The Murder of the
Innocents," which we wish could be put into every house in the United
States. Some changes in school organizations resulted from these protests;
in the matter of ventilation of school-rooms some real improvement was
probably effected; though we shudder to think how much room remains for
further improvement, when we read in the report of the superintendent of
public schools in Brooklyn that in the primary departments of the grammar
schools "an average daily number of 33,275 pupils are crowded into
one-half the space provided in the upper departments for an average daily
attendance of 26,359; or compelled to occupy badly lighted, inconvenient,
and ill-ventilated galleries, or rooms in the basement stories.
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