The beneficial results of moral training have been practically shown in every infant school where the subject has been properly understood and carried out, and numerous anecdotes illustrative of its beneficial effects might be here introduced, which would convince those who have any doubt on the subject, of the good effects of exercising kindness and consideration for others, in opposition to reckless mischief, hardheartedness, and cruelty, vices which render the lower orders dangerous and formidable; but as a complete collection of such anecdotes would form in themselves a volume, we will for the present lay before our readers a few taken at random, to illustrate the subject; they are from the appendix of the first report of the Edinburgh Infant School Society, the model school of which was organized by the author of this book.

“Two of the children, brothers, about five and four years of age, coming one morning late into school, were to go to their seats without censure, if they could give an account of what they had been doing, which should be declared satisfactory by the whole school, who should decide; they stated separately that they had been contemplating the proceedings of a large caterpillar, and noticing the different positions of its body as it crossed their path, that it was now horizontal, and now perpendicular, and presently curved, and finally inclined, when it escaped into a tree.  The master then asked them abruptly, Why did you not kill it?  The children stared. Could you have killed it? asked the teacher.  Yes, but that would have been cruel and naughty, and a sin against God.  The little moralists were acquitted by acclamation; having, infants as they were, manifested a character which, were it universal in the juvenile population, would in another generation reduce our moral code to a mass of waste paper, in one grand department of its bulk.

“This anecdote illustrates the good effect of inculcating into the infant mind an abhorrence of cruelty to animals, which is too often a seed sown in the young heart, which goes on increasing daily with the growth of the child, until a fearful career of crime is ended by murder, and its necessary expiation on the scaffold.  How many men who have suffered death for murder, could date their first steps towards it, from the time when in infancy they tortured a fly, or spun a cock-chaffer.

“The teacher mentioned to the children one day, that he had been occupied about a boy and a girl who had no father or mother, and whose grandfather and grandmother, who took care of them, were bed-rid and in great poverty.  The boy was seven years of age, too old for the infant school, but some gentlemen, he said, were exerting themselves to get the boy into one of the hospitals.  Here he purposely stopped to try the sympathies of his audience for the girl.  He was not disappointed, several little voices called out at once, ’Oh! master! What for no the lassie too?’ he assured them the girl was to come to the infant school, and to be boarded there; which intelligence was received with loud plaudits.”