tens so favorably before
the public in the _Christian Examiner_ for November, 1858, can be
procured at the Kindergarten, 15 Pinckney Street, Boston.]

The indispensable thing now is a sufficient society of children. It is
only in the society of equals that the social instinct can be gratified,
and come into equilibrium with the instinct of self-preservation.
Self-love, and love of others, are equally natural; and before reason
is developed, and the proper spiritual life begins, sweet and beautiful
childhood may bloom out and imparadise our mortal life. Let us only give
the social instinct of children its fair chance. For this purpose, a few
will not do. The children of one family are not enough, and do not
come along fast enough. A large company should be gathered out of many
families. It will be found that the little things are at once taken out
of themselves, and become interested in each other. In the variety,
affinities develop themselves very prettily, and the rough points of
rampant individualities wear off. We have seen a highly gifted child,
who, at home, was--to use a vulgar, but expressive word--pesky and
odious, with the exacting demands of a powerful, but untrained mind and
heart, become "sweet as roses" spontaneously, amidst the rebound of
a large, well-ordered, and carefully watched child-society. Anxious
mothers have brought us children, with a thousand deprecations and
explanations of their characters, as if they thought we were going to
find them little monsters, which their motherly hearts were persuaded
they were not, though they behaved like little sanchos at home,--and,
behold, they were as harmonious, from the very beginning, as if they had
undergone the subduing influence of a lifetime. We are quite sure that
children begin with loving others quite as intensely as they love
themselves,--forgetting themselves in their love of others,--if they
only have as fair a chance of being benevolent and self-sacrificing as
of being selfish. Sympathy is as much a natural instinct as self-love,
and no more or less innocent, in a moral point of view. Either principle
alone makes an ugly and depraved form of natural character. Balanced,
they give the element of happiness, and the conditions of spiritual
goodness and truth,--making children fit temples for the Holy Ghost to
dwell in.

A Kindergarten, then, is children in society,--a commonwealth or
republic of children,--whose laws are all part and parcel of the