The principle on which the industrial school proceeds, of giving employment along with instruction—­especially as that employment is designed at the same time, if possible, to teach a trade which may be afterwards available—­appears of the highest value.  It is a practical discipline—­a moral training, the importance of which cannot be over-estimated.

In a common school, too, there can be but little moral training, however efficiently the school may be conducted, just because there is little opportunity given for the development and display of individual character.  The whole management of a school requires that the pupils be as speedily as possible brought to a uniform outward conduct, and thus an appearance of good behavior and propriety is produced within the school room, which is too often cast aside and forgotten the moment the pupils pass the threshold.

The remark was once made by an experienced teacher, that for the purposes of moral training he valued more the time he spent with his pupils at their games, than that which was spent in the school room.

The pecuniary value of the work done in these schools is not so great as was at first hoped, from the difficulty of procuring employment such as children so neglected could perform to advantage.  The real value of the thing, however, they consider lies in the habits of industry and the sense of independence thus imparted.

At the outset the managers of the school regretted extremely their want of ability to furnish lodgings to the children.  It was thought and said that the homes, to which the majority of them were obliged to return after school hours, would deprave faster than any instruction could reform.  Fortunately it was impossible, at the time, to provide lodging for the children, and thus an experience was wrought out most valuable to all future laborers in this field.

The managers report that after six years’ trial, the instances where evil results from the children returning home, are very rare; while there have been most cheering instances of substantial good being carried by the child, from the school, through the whole family.  There are few parents, especially mothers, so abandoned as not to be touched by kindness shown to their offspring.  It is the direct road to the mother’s heart.  Show kindness to her child, and she is prepared at once to second your efforts on its behalf.  She must be debased, indeed, who will not listen to her child repeating its text from the Bible, or singing a verse of its infant hymn; and by this means the first seeds of a new life may be, and have been, planted in the parent’s heart.

In cases where parents are so utterly depraved as to make it entirely hopeless to reform the child at home, they have found it the best course to board them, two or three together, in respectable families; the influences of the family state being held to be essential.

The success which attended the boys’ school of industry soon led to the establishment of one for girls, conducted on the same principles; and it is stated that the change wrought among poor, outcast girls, by these means, was even more striking and gratifying than among the boys.