see you any more, you must come home with me.”  I replied, “What do you want me to go home for?” The child answered, “I have nothing to give you, but if you will come home mother will give you some tea.”  I patted the child on the head, telling it I could not go.  The child went home, as I thought, and I remained some time talking to one of the ladies of the committee.  On walking down the street I saw the same child crying bitterly, and surrounded by many other children.  On inquiring the cause, I received for answer, “You would not come home to tea.”  If only one half the invitations that are given amongst men were given with as much sincerity and disinterestedness as was manifested by this infant, I am much mistaken if we should not see a very different state of society.

“Moral education,” writes Mr. Simpson in his “Philosophy of Education,” “embraces both the animal and moral impulses.  It regulates the former, and strengthens the latter, whenever gluttony, indelicacy, violence, cruelty, greediness, cowardice, pride, insolence, vanity, or any mode of selfishness shew themselves in the individual under training, one and all must be repressed with the most watchful solicitude, and the most skilful treatment.  Repression may at first fail to be accomplished, unless by severity; but the instructor sufficiently enlightened in the faculties, will, in the first practicable moment, drop the coercive system, and awaken and appeal powerfully to the higher faculties of conscience and benevolence, and to the powers of reflection:  this, done with kindness, in other words, with a marked manifestation of benevolence itself, will operate with a power, the extent of which in education is yet, to a very limited extent, estimated.  In the very exercise of the superior faculties the inferior are indirectly acquiring a habit of restraint and regulation; for it is morally impossible to cultivate the superior faculties without a simultaneous though indirect regulation of the inferior.”

It is indeed a melancholy truth, that moral training is yet, to a very limited extent, estimated, and this is mainly owing to its not being understood by the generality of those selected for the office of teachers of infants, nor can it be expected that persons of sufficient intellect and talent to comprehend and carry out this great object, can be procured, until a sufficient remuneration is held out to them, to make it worth their while to devote their whole energies to the subject.  It is a fatal error to suppose that mere girls, taken perhaps from some laborious occupation, and whose sum total of education consists of reading and writing, can carry out views which it requires a philosophical mind, well stored with liberal ideas and general knowledge, to effect.  They may be able to instruct the children in the mere mechanical part of the system; and as long as they confine themselves to this, they will go on capitally, but no further than this can they go; and though the children may appear to a casual visitor, to be very nicely instructed, and very wonderful little creatures, on a closer examination they will be found mere automatons; and then, without a thought on the subject, the system will be blamed, without once considering that the most perfect figure of mechanism will not work properly in any hands, except those that thoroughly understand it.