The other school is strictly confined to the boys and men employed in the glass works.  It opened July, 1850, with 110 scholars, all boys from twelve years of age, before which none are admitted into the manufactory.  By degrees the men, at first deterred by shame, began to attend, and at present a considerable number avail themselves of the advantage for commencing or extending the imperfect education they had obtained at Sunday Schools.

These schools are not self-supporting, but are found, even in a commercial point of view, to repay the philanthropic firm by whom they have been founded and supported.

The Birmingham Free and Industrial School, founded in 1847 by the energetic exertions of the Hon. and Rev. Grantham Yorke, Rector of St. Philip, includes a day school for boys and girls above seven years of age; two industrial classes; and an asylum for deserted and orphans.  The scholars are not of the class to which we are specially calling attention.  We shall, therefore, content ourselves with mentioning the existence of such a School for the refuse population of this large town.

The deficient education of the working classes, consequent on unregulated infant labour, would alone be sufficient to account for the prevalence of the idle custom of losing at least one day every week in busy times, and the drinking habits, which are a blot upon a population of superior intelligence.  But a still more demoralizing influence exists in the state of the dwellings of the working classes in Birmingham, which, although at first sight very attractive in appearance, forming neat courts of cottages, compared with the crowded lodging-houses of many manufacturing towns, are, nevertheless, lamentably deficient in two essentials for health and decency, viz., efficient drainage, and a sufficient supply of wholesome water.

In two thousand courts, inhabited by fifty thousand people, the supply of water is either obtained at great loss of time from wells, often dirty, sometimes fetid, or purchased at an extravagant rate from itinerant water-carriers.

A Private Water Company exists, but has scarcely been called upon at all to supply the houses of the working classes.  Under these circumstances, with a clean external appearance, the filth in which fifty thousand people live seems to be only understood by the local Medical Inspectors, whose reports have hitherto produced so little effect, it is not extraordinary that after long hours of toil, the inhabitants fly to the bright saloons of gin shops, and the snug tap-rooms of beer shops.

We have dwelt thus at length upon the moral, and educational, and sanitary shortcomings of a town which can, no doubt, draw comparisons, very much to its own advantage, with other manufacturing district towns, because Birmingham is in a position to set an example, to lead the way in an all-important reform without consulting the opinions of the Ministers or the Parliament of the day.  Birmingham may, if it pleases, go far toward affording every working man the means of drinking and washing in an ample supply of clean water, of living in a well-drained cottage, and of sending his children to school for two hours every day, without waiting for the decision of Parliament upon all the crotchets of the Chartists, or plans of the Financial Reform Association.