KINDERGARTENS AND MANUAL TRAINING. 381 



provement must be accomplished before they are twelve years 

 old, and we find that the earlier we begin the better." 



An instrument seems to be provided in the kindergarten, in 

 which a thoroughly thought-out science of instruction adapted to 

 the child-mind is put in practice with children as soon as they 

 show a longing for the companionship of other children ; it is an 

 institution which bridges over the chasm between the nursery 

 and the school. 



Philanthropists, looking at human material as a whole, per- 

 ceive that true economy of force concerns itself with forming, 

 thus preventing the need of reforming. It can be demonstrated 

 from the money standpoint alone, leaving out of view the inevi- 

 table misery involved in the latter process. 



In New York city there are now 142,519 children under five 

 years of age whose homes are in the tenement-houses. The latest 

 report of the New York Kindergarten Association states the cost 

 of conducting a kindergarten of fifty pupils at fourteen hundred 

 dollars per annum twenty-eight dollars per capita. At the El- 

 mira Reformatory it costs one hundred and eighty-eight dollars 

 per annum to support one of these children whose manual and 

 moral training has been neglected after the commission of some 

 crime has placed an indelible stain on his name. Mr. Brockway 

 states that very few of these young burdens on society have " any 

 acquaintance with any craft requiring skilled labor, and their 

 parents are just as deficient " ; so that the earnest men and women 

 who are now striving to lift the metropolis of the nation toward 

 the level already attained by Boston, San Francisco, St. Louis, 

 and a host of other cities by the establishment of free kinder- 

 gartens, are taking possession of the largest and most hopeful 

 missionary field still lying unoccupied under the broad arch of 

 heaven. Mr. Gilder truly says, " Plant a free kindergarten in any 

 quarter of this overcrowded metropolis, and you have begun, then 

 and there, the work of making better lives, better homes, better 

 citizens, and a better city." 



Pestalozzi saw that the moral forces of the human soul feel- 

 ing and will require to be dealt with in a manner analogous to 

 the cultivation of the intellectual faculties, that a training school 

 is needed for the moral side of cultivation one in which the 

 power of moral action may be acquired. He said, " There must be 

 a definite system of rules by which always without exception a 

 firm will may be produced " ; and the Baroness von Bulow adds, 

 "The development of children into men and women must be 

 brought under the laws of a well-considered system, which shall 

 never fail to accomplish its end, viz., the cultivation in them of a 

 firm and invariably right will." 



In discussing the necessity for the kindergarten, physiology and 



