“Swinton School cost sixty thousand pounds, and is a handsome building in the Tudor style of architecture, with a frontage of 450 feet, containing more than 100 windows.  Pleasure grounds and play grounds surround it, and it resembles more a nobleman’s palace than the Home of Pauper Children.  The inmates consist of 630 children, of whom 305 are orphans, and 124 deserted by their parents, under charge of a Chaplain, a Head Master, a Medical Officer, a Roman Catholic Priest, a Governor, a Matron, six Schoolmasters, and four School-mistresses, with a numerous staff of officials, Nurses, and Teachers of Trades, receiving salaries and wages amounting to 1,800 pounds a-year, besides board.  Some in the institution are as young as one year and a half.

All are educated, and those who are old enough are taught trades and domestic employments.  When they leave they are furnished with two suits of clothes.  The character of the Institution stands so high, that the public are eager for the girls as domestic servants.  If it has not already been done, we hope that the cultivation of land on the system of market gardens will be added to the trades, as affording a more certain, and, in some respects, more generally useful employment.  Educated agricultural labourers are rare, much prized, and soon promoted to be overseers and bailiffs.

The education at Swinton is conducted on the modern plan, which prevails in the best schools under Government inspection.  The children are taught to love and look upon their masters and mistresses as friends, to be consulted and applied to as they would to kind parents.

   For instance take this bit, familiar to visitors of Infant Schools, but
   still new to many:—­

The children under six years of age, summoned by the sound of a whistle from the play ground, trooped in glad groups to an anteroom, and girls and boys intermixed, at a signal from the Master marched into the schoolroom singing a tune.

Then followed such viva voce instruction as too many better endowed children do not get for want of competent teachers.  Indeed a better education is now given in Workhouses than can be obtained for children under twelve years of age at any paid school that we know of.  For instance:—­

   “What day is this?”
   “Monday.” 
   “What sort of a day is it?”
   “Very fine.” 
   “Why is it fine?”
   “Because the sun shines, and it does not rain.” 
   “Is rain a bad thing, then?”
   “No.” 
   “What is it useful for?”
   “To make the flowers and the fruit grow.” 
   “Who sends rain and sunshine?”
   “God.” 
   “What ought we to do in return for his goodness?”
   “Praise him.” 
   “Let us praise him, then,” added the Master.

   And the children altogether repeated, and then sang, a part of the 149th
   psalm.”