Ir is the object of these schools (Parochial Union Schools) to educate children destined for country pursuits in such a way as to make them good labourers and prosperous cottagers, so that they shall not only acquire habits of patient industry and means of future livelihood, but such knowledge of useful arts as may conduce hereafter to improve their little stock of comforts and power of ministering to the welfare of their families. It is, therefore, expedient to give them some knowledge of the commonest handicrafts. The boys at the Faling school used to perform all the work that was required to be done; they were their own carpenters, bricklayers, and glaziers. To a cottager, there is no knowledge more useful than that of carpentering, shoemaking, and tailoring. In addition to bare necessaries, our labourers and mechanics have rarely the means of supplying the small comforts which add to the decencies of life, and minister to independence. The leisure hours spent at home will supply them when the labourer has skill enough to cultivate his garden; its vegetables add greatly to his table, while the flowers nourish a sense of beauty, and contribute to the cheerfulness of his dwelling.

A very small number of carpenter's tools, if he has learnt to use them, will keep his furniture in order, and his house in neatness, enabling him to construct cupboards, shelves, screens, clothes-chests, &c.; while the power of mending clothes and shoes would materially lessen his expenditure and add to the comfort and respectable appearance of himself and his family. For this purpose there should be a carpenter's as well as a shoemaker's and tailor's shop, besides the bakehouse and brewhouse at the district school. During the winter months, the long evenings, and the wet days, time might be thus most usefully occupied which is now wasted in knitting or idling. It should be an inflexible rule of a district school that there should be no unemployed time. It should be a course of almost incessant industry from morning till night. This is no hardship to the children, but quite the reverse. I have questioned numbers of them, and without a single exception have found that, however distasteful school was to them, they delighted in industrial pursuits. If they wish to punish a boy at an industrial school, they prevent him from working.

The boys should, in rotation, pass a certain number of hours in each of the shops, and also work in turn at all the various occupations in the farm of which they were capable; each being duly explained to them, as well as performed by them. Variety of work is essential to prevent fatigue, and due care must be taken to apportion it in kind, as well as amount, to the strength of the child; but it should be, with the exception of meal time, and three hours of school-time, and a very short period for walking exercise, continuous throughout the day. It is the best recreation the boys can have. The girls require more walking exercise, as their household and needlework is of a more monotonous and sedentary character.

Cheerfulness should be imparted to labour; and, for this purpose, vocal music is most useful. It not only relieves fatigue, and prevents weariness, but it cherishes good sentiments and kindly feelings. Its great influence over bodies of men, especially in the effects of the vocal chorus of the German armies, has been often noted. The young are even more impressible by music than adults. Singing is a natural gratification to most children, and they ought not to be debarred from it, for it is not only an innocent but an improving taste. The children in district-schools should be taught to improve this faculty, and strike up a merry song as they go forth to and return from their work. Precision in the performance of many of the labours in the field might be aided by the same appliance, just as the manœuvres of a regiment are regulated, as well as inspirited, by its band.— 'Minutes of the Committee of Council on Education for 1847-8-9.'

I HAVE heard it alleged by parents, as a reason for not sending their children to school, when they are of an age to be useful to them at home, or to go to work, that they are fearful lest, having had too much learning, they should not take kindly to labour. Some weight might be attached to this argument, if, in the kind of labour to which the child was first put, any consideration were had as to its influence on his future well-being as a labourer. To those persons who deny that the growth of a man's understanding

lends any aid to the development of his religious character, and who hold, that to make a labouring man sober, honest, industrious, and frugal, thews and sinews only are needed, and not principles; a hardy constitution, but not a sound mind; a body inured to labour, but not an enterprising spirit, or a good understanding, or self-respect, or forethought, it might seem a doubtful question, whether, in sacrificing the wages which the child would earn to send him to school, the labourer was in trutb benefiting his child. If the child's pursuits when he left school were calculated to give him habits of industry and self-dependence, it might be considered better, by persons holding these opinions, that he should be taken as early as possible from school.

The case is, however, far otherwise. There is no consideration had of the influence of the sort of work to which he is first put, on the formation of the character of the good labourer in him. His usefulness, and not his welfare, is the thing considered; and a long and dreary interval is allowed to intervene between the time he leaves school and that when his industrial education can, in any sense, be said to begin. He goes, it may be, into the fields at daybreak, to drive away the birds from the growing crops, and continues there until sunset; or he is sent out to watch pigs or geese, or to keep cattle or sheep. Thus employed, he is conversant with the same horizon, contends with the same flock of sparrows, traverses the boundaries of the same field, leans daily against the same gate, or sits under the same hedge, for months, and perhaps for years together.

It is difficult to conceive what, under such circumstances, is the state of the mind of a poor child, stored with nothing to reflect upon, and unaccustomed to reflect; with nothing to undertake, and nothing to accomplish, beyond that one wearisome duty; passing months and years of the most characteristic portion of its life in a state approaching as nearly as may be to one of sterile indolence. The intellectual stagnation of an existence like this eats into the soul of the child. I have often been told by those who have taken the pains to ascertain it, of the marvellous inroads it makes in his character; what a cloud it brings over his understanding; how, in a few months, scarce a trace remains of the knowledge he had acquired at school, except, perhaps its most technical and mechanical elements; and how seldom his conduct gives any evidence of those religious influences, to which it had been a principal object of the school to subject him.

In truth, although his intellectual life has been stagnating, it has not been thus with the life of his senses. On the side of these lies all his danger. The school had established indeed

some equipoise of the moral and intellectual elements of his being and of the sensual; but the preponderance of the latter has begun, and the animal in him is destined to grow with his growth and strengthen with his strength, as the antagonist principle shrinks in its dimensions by disuse, until the one is wholly lost in the excess of the other.-MOSELEY.

Jo lives-that is to say, Jo has not yet died-in a ruinous place, known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-alone's. It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people; where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants, who, after establishing their own possession, took to letting them out in lodgings. Now, these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery. As, on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in, and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever, and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred years-though born expressly to do it.

Twice, lately, there has been a crash and a cloud of dust, like the springing of a mine in Tom-all-alone's; and, each time, a house has fallen. These accidents have made a paragraph in the newspapers, and have filled a bed or two in the nearest hospital. The gaps remain, and there are not unpopular lodgings among the rubbish. As several more houses are nearly ready to go, the next crash in Tom-all-alone's may be expected to be a good one. This desirable property is in Chancery, of course. It would be an insult to the discernment of any man, with half an eye, to tell him so. Whether "Tom" is the popular representative of the original plaintiff or defendant in Jarndyce and Jarndyce; or whether Tom lived here when the suit had laid the street waste, all alone, until other settlers came to join him; or whether the traditional title is a comprehensive name for a retreat cut off from honest company and put out of the pale of hope, perhaps nobody knows. Certainly, Jo don't know.

M

"For I don't," says Jo, "I don't know nothink."

It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postman deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language-to be to every scrap of it stone blind and dumb! It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think (for perhaps Jo does think at odd times) what does it all mean, and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me? To be hustled and jostled, and moved on; and really to feel that it would be perfectly true that I have no business here or there, or anywhere: and yet to be perplexed by the consideration that I am here somehow, too, and everybody overlooked me until I became the creature that I am! It must be a strange state, not merely to be told that I am scarcely human (as in the case of my offering myself for a witness), but to feel it of my own knowledge all my life! To see the horses, dogs, and cattle go by me, and to know that in ignorance I belong to them, and not to the superior beings in my shape, whose delicacy I offend! Jo's ideas of a criminal trial, or a judge, or a bishop, or a government, or that inestimable jewel to him (if he only knew it) the Constitution, should be strange! His own material and immaterial life is wonderfully strange, his death the strangest thing of all.

Jo comes out of Tom-all-alone's, meeting the tardy morning, which is always late in getting down there, and munches his dirty bit of bread as he comes along. His way lying through many streets, and the houses not yet being open, he sits down to breakfast on the door-step of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and gives it a brush when he has finished, as an acknowledgment of the accommodation. He admires the size of the edifice, and wonders what it's all about. He has no idea, poor wretch, of the spiritual destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific, or what it costs to look up the precious souls among the cocoa-nuts and bread-fruit.

He goes to his crossing, and begins to lay it out for the day. The town awakes; the great teetotum is set up for its daily spin and whirl; all that unaccountable reading and writing, which has been suspended for a few hours, recommences. Jo, and the other lower animals, get on in the unintelligible mass as they

can.

It is market-day. The blinded oxen, over-goaded, overdriven, never guided, run into wrong places and are beaten out;