XXV RALAHINE AND ITS TEACHINGS 463 



labour for the common good in improving the character 

 and conduct. For it must be remembered that these 

 people were not selected at all, but were the very same 

 who had before worked on the estate, many of them 

 having been among what were considered the worst 

 characters, while some of them were almost certainly the 

 associates and abettors of the murderer of the former 

 steward. Mr. Craig assures us that their characters 

 seemed to be wholly changed ; for whereas under the 

 despotic rule of the steward they had been sullen, quarrel- 

 some, and dissatisfied, when working under the men they 

 had elected to manage the farm in which all had an equal 

 interest, they becaoie cheerful and contented. 



Educaf/ion and Sanitatiuii at Iialahine. 



Mr. Craig was a thorough educationist of the most 

 adv^anced type. He was one of the first, if not the very 

 first, to introduce the kinder- garten system, not only in 

 the training of infants but throughout all education. He 

 therefore at once established a school at Ralahine, in which 

 this system was carried out under a trained teacher and 

 his personal supervision. His own observation, after long 

 experience, assures him, he tells us, that children can only 

 attend with pleasure and profit to a purely intellectual 

 lesson for a very limited period, which he puts at fifteen 

 minutes for children of six to seven, increasing to thirty 

 minutes for those of fifteen to sixteen. He therefore 

 advocates a constant succession of subjects at each such 

 interval, alternating with some mechanical, and, if possible, 

 outdoor work, or with the experimental illustration of 

 natural laws and phenomena. He was also a specialist 

 in the general laws of health, and particularly as regards 

 the need of pure air ; and the result of his arrangements 

 was visible when an epidemic of cholera and fever was 

 raging all around the colony, attaining the proportions 

 of a plague in many of the towns. Ralahine had not a 

 single case, nor was there any illness during the three 

 3^ears in a population of eighty and upwards. 



A striking illustration of the value of the prohibition 



