KINDERGARTENS AND MANUAL TRAINING. 387 



detection in ill-doing when he gets out ; and this child of the beg- 

 gar or thief, with no skill in hand or arm for work, sees no way 

 but to do as he has done before. In the half-time industrial school 

 he is placed under new conditions, by which good thoughts are 

 impressed from day to day to the exclusion of bad ones : he 

 becomes grounded in the primary moral principles of attention, 

 patience, self-restraint, prompt and exact obedience ; hope springs 

 up in his poor crushed soul, as he gets interested in his work and 

 does it with a will. There is enough accumulated experience in 

 England and America to warrant the statement that the most 

 profitable investment that can be made in " futures " is in those 

 of the living children of the country by making the kindergarten 

 and manual training part of the public-school system throughout 

 the broad land. It would undoubtedly add much to the cost of 

 education, but it would be more than offset by lessening the cost 

 of reformatories and the support of criminals. More, it would 

 afford useful and congenial employment for thousands of women 

 for it is really impossible to imagine a man's becoming a success- 

 ful kindergartner ; the teacher in that school needs to be endowed 

 with the divine instinct of motherhood, and succeeds because she 

 follows it, just as a good trained nurse succeeds through her in- 

 herent I-must-care-for-somebody characteristic. A doctor of wide 

 experience predicts that the movement for the training of mascu- 

 line nurses will be a comparative failure, siniply from lack of this 

 foundation element in the pupils. There are now good training 

 schools for kindergartners, where all that can be imparted by 

 teaching, to supplement natural ability can be learned ; and we 

 venture to declare that the most promising missionary field in 

 the world is to be found on the outer fringe of our large cities, 

 where in a narrow tenement the mother has her creche on her lap 

 and her " kindergarten " and her " primary " and " secondary " 

 pupils at her side, all under the age to be admitted in the public 

 school. What more natural, when the smallest goes to sleep, than 

 to send the others into the street, where they must perforce learn 

 its evil lessons ? In the city of New York there are many thou- 

 sands of these children. Suppose that one thousand young women, 

 well instructed in the art of teaching according to Froebel's sys- 

 tem, should each gather about her a score of these undisciplined 

 waifs, teach them till they were six, and then pass them on to a 

 school where manual training is mixed with " book-learning " in 

 the measures experience has demonstrated is wisest, to be taught 

 till twelve it would result in the greatest salvation from evil, 

 and in the greatest addition to the working capacity of the gen- 

 eration, that could be made. 



In 1870, at the solicitation of Miss E. P. Peabody, the Boston 

 School Board established a kindergarten and conducted it for sev- 



