So it was that "Dodd" got into the street and achieved the reputation
of being a boy that no teacher could do anything with. In the year or
two that followed he made several starts at school, but his reputation
always preceded him, and the old story was told over again--one or two
suspensions, then "expelled."

So time went on till "Dodd" was nearly seventeen. He was almost a man
grown now--a swaggering, profane, vulgar fellow, who ate his meals at
home and slept there, usually, but further than that lived apart from
his parents, who every day regretted that ever he had been born.

You all know this boy, don't you, beloved? He is in every town that I
know of, and there are duplicates and triplicates, not to say
centiplicates, of him in some of our larger cities. I wonder if it is
worth while to try to do anything with these boys, or for them? The
machine has dropped them, or thrown them out. They will not run
through the great educational mill known as the "graded system." They
seem destined to go to the bad, and it seems to me the tendency of the
machine, and some of its managers, is to let them go. Yet they ought
not to go. As there is a God in heaven, they ought not to.

But the machine does not care so very much for these things, either for
the boys or for the Personage just mentioned, whose name the managers
revere enough to teach the children that it should always be written
with a capital letter, but further than that do not trouble themselves
much about it. The machine is built on the theory that the pupils are
made for the schools, rather than the schools for the pupils, and that
the order of the grades must be maintained, no matter what becomes of
the graded. What is it to this great mill if the pupils do fall out of
the hopper? So long as the mill grinds and the grinders can hold their