ration. A few large prints hung on the walls and a board or two properly prepared would be all that would be required to enable many of the children to amuse themselves pleasantly in the school when weary of other things, and would open to them not only a source of recreation but of after profit, should they arrive at enough proficiency to be pattern drawers. The reading to them sometimes of an amusing story, or travels, by some one who can give it point and effect, would create a higher taste, for the reader could stop to explain what was difficult, and the cheap literature of the day supplies enough of really good publications to meet the demand of the poorest, if the taste for such could be aroused. All these and many more modes of recreation are possible, not only in Ragged Schools, but in those parochial ones in which the children now only try how little they can learn during four or five years of forced attendance, and were this matter attended to, we should in a very few years see a very different population growing up. Our scientific and industrial advancement has proceeded and is proceeding at an accelerated ratio;—are our people to be the only raw material which is to be subjected to no better system of treatment than it was in the days of our fathers? Already we have everywhere machinery and contrivances. which no ordinary servant or workman is able to manage properly-we complain of the stupidity of the lower orders, but should we not rather complain of our own?-We set brute matter to work, and forget that it requires intellect to guide it. The steam engine is applied to all kinds of purposes,-electricity is made our servant, but the human mind, that finest of all machines, the most powerful of all forces, is disregarded, and we think we have done all if we have fed the poor! Let us hope that the dawn of a better time is before us. ration. A few large prints hung on the walls and a board or two properly prepared would be all that would be required to enable many of the children to amuse themselves pleasantly in the school when weary of other things, and would open to them not only a source of recreation but of after profit, should they arrive at enough proficiency to be pattern drawers. The reading to them sometimes of an amusing story, or travels, by some one who can give it point and effect, would create a higher taste, for the reader could stop to explain what was difficult, and the cheap literature of the day supplies enough of really good publications to meet the demand of the poorest, if the taste for such could be aroused. All these and many more modes of recreation are possible, not only in Ragged Schools, but in those parochial ones in which the children now only try how little they can learn during four or five years of forced attendance, and were this matter attended to, we should in a very few years see a very different population growing up. Our scientific and industrial advancement has proceeded and is proceeding at an accelerated ratio;—are our people to be the only raw material which is to be subjected to no better system of treatment than it was in the days of our fathers? Already we have everywhere machinery and contrivances which no ordinary servant or workman is able to manage properly-we complain of the stupidity of the lower orders, but should we not rather complain of our own?-We set brute matter to work, and forget that it requires intellect to guide it. The steam engine is applied to all kinds of purposes,-electricity is made our servant, but the human mind, that finest of all machines, the most powerful of all forces, is disregarded, and we think we have done all if we have fed the poor! Let us hope that the dawn of a better time is before us. I I CHAPTER V. CONCLUSION. HAVE now fulfilled my promise, and ex amined the grounds of the success which has attended the teachers of Ragged Schools; and if I have shewn, as I think will be allowed, that these lie deep in human nature itself, we shall do well to make use of the experience thus gained. If we examine the statistics of crime, we shall find that for one wilful criminal,—by wilful I mean one who has by his education and station no previous training to vice, there are nearly a hundred who are offenders against the laws because no one has cherished in them the feeling of that higher moral law, which is the foundation of all society. They have been educated in the way they should not go, and when they are old they do not depart from it. It is a great mistake to suppose that because reading, writing, and other usual school knowledge has been withheld, that therefore no education has been given. The mind of the child |