Reformatory and Industrial Schools. 
205 
boys do a good deal of work for our neighbours : planting and lifting potatoes, 
hoeing and pulling oft' turnips, cleaning corn, harvesting, &c. A considerable 
number also live with farmers as hired servants, and gradually rise to the 
higher position of foremen and hinds. The demand far our boys generally 
exceeds the supply. 
" I conclude, from my experieocc, that our boys not only do not suffer but 
gain by the judicious combination of school work and field labour. 
" The uses of labour to society are its productiveness. These are also its 
uses to the individual. It is in its restraints, its reflective influence upon 
character, that labour is chiefly valuable in a Reformatory. Three or four 
hours out of every four-and-twenty during three years — and we have no 
vacations — afford sufBcient time for an average boy of from twelve to fifteen 
years of age for learning to read, &c., write, and count. Considering their 
previous habits and physique, I believe greater intellectual progress is 
possible under our combined system than under that of an ordinary ele- 
mentary school. 
" The children in an ordinary elementary school are of a different class, 
with which ours can hardly be compared. Ours are the waifs and strays, 
the truants, the incorrigible, and the vicious. Nevertheless, our general 
educational standard I believe very nearly, if not quite, attains to that of 
an ordinary eleuientary shool. With regard to the general question of com- 
biued elementary education and practical work, I am of opinion that it 
would be highly advantageous to the children of the labouring classes in 
agricultural districts if they could receive some practical instruction in 
school ; the girls in the rudiments of housekeeping, and the boys in those 
of ordinary farm work. Nothing can be more painful to witness than the 
helplessness of young untrained girls on going to service, or, for that matter, 
than that of their mothers also in their cottages, especially in times of sickness 
and distress. The scanty earnings of the family are frittered away from sheer 
ignorance of the simplest rules of domestic economy ; and nothing but the 
genuine pure country air in which they pass the day could save whole families 
from the natural consequence of their ignorance of the most elementary sani- 
tation. 
" If a boy, before he is old enough to go to farm service, could be taught to 
milk a cow and tend a pig intelligently, if he could put the gearing upon and 
guide a horse, if he had learnt ever so little about sheep and cattle and about 
the nature and character of soils, if he knew what weeds should be buried 
and what should be burnt, and a few other such practical elements of his 
daily life on the farm, his value would be enhanced five-and-twenty per cent, 
to begin with. 
" AH these and many other simple practical lessons might easily and 
advantageously be taught in an ordinary elementary day-school, to the relief 
of much monotony. 
"EicHARD G. Fish, 
" Resident Chaplain and Superintendent, 
" Castle Howard Eeformatory Farm School, Welhurn, York." 
From mj point of view this Reformatory School is one of the 
gems that 1 met with. Here one found a farm excellently 
managed, and the boys' technical instruction so well organised 
and carried out, that it enabled them to become foremen and 
Farm-bailiffs in their own county in after life. It is true that 
the money obtained for the farm-produce is, acre for acre, very 
much less than that at Stoke and other Reformatories which are 
near large towns, or where large quantities of fruit and early 
