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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.

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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

must receive its bent from the circumstances by which he is surrounded, and the companions among whom he is thrown, and this is education. By these and not by the merely mechanical attainments above mentioned, the character is formed.

It is not therefore by the almost universal diffusion of the power to read and write, that vice is to be curbed, or virtue strengthened: these are but means that may be used to good purpose, but which may also be used for the contrary, and it seems astonishing that when the necessity for the farther instruction of the lower orders has been so generally recognized, it should not have occurred to the promoters of what is called education, that the mere power of pronouncing sounds, or expressing them by letters, gives no impulse to mental progress, and thus a child may pass through a national school, and come out reading fluently, writing a good hand, and able to repeat by rote some few questions on doctrinal points, without having gained one idea; without having formed any habit but that of marching steadily round the schoolroom; without having developed even the germ of a spiritual existence; animal he entered, and animal he leaves it, and then, if hunger presses, or

indulgence is coveted, what hinders him from unscrupulously seeking the gratification of his animal needs? There is a possibility indeed, that with the power of reading a taste for less gross pleasures may be kindled; but this in the ordinary course of things is left entirely to chance nothing is done by the school towards awakening it. The master, for the most part, is not capacitated by his education to give instruction of a higher order; the clergyman examines the children in the Church Catechism and other catechisms of a like kind, where the answers if not learnt by rote at first, become so by frequent repetition, and rarely pauses to inquire how much they understand of the words they thus repeat.* Who then educates these children? Not the schoolmaster, not the clergyman, for they understand not what they say, -but the poverty, the discontent, the possible squalor, drunkenness, and violence of their

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In the course of a catechizing in church, the writer once heard a clergyman ask a child what he meant by the grace of God? 'Trinity in unity" was the answer! Why had this doctrine ever been taught the child in such hard words? He could have fulfilled all his Christian duties equally well had he never heard of them. How much he understood the answer shows.

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