was left utterly in the dark as to the
condition of the institution. Letters from masters to whom pupils have
been apprenticed were published in the Reports, but only the letters
which had nothing but good to say of the apprentices. Large numbers of
the boys, it is true, have done and are doing credit to the College;
but the public have no means of judging whether, upon the whole, the
training of the College has been successful.

Nevertheless, we believe we may say with truth that invaluable
experience has been gained, and genuine progress has been made. To
maintain and educate six hundred boys, even if those boys had
enlightened parents to aid in the work, is a task which would exhaust
the wisdom and the tact of the greatest educator that ever lived. But
these boys are all fatherless, and many of them motherless; the
mothers of many are ignorant and unwise, of some are even vicious and
dissolute. A large number of the boys are of very inferior endowments,
have acquired bad habits, have inherited evil tendencies. It would be
hard to overstate the difficulty of the work which the will of Girard
has devolved upon the Directors and teachers of Girard College.
Mistakes have been made, but perhaps they have not been more serious
or more numerous than we ought to expect in the forming of an
institution absolutely unique, and composed of material the most
unmanageable.

There are indications, too, that the period of experiment draws to an
end, and that the final plan of the College, on the basis of
common-sense, is about to be settled. Mr. Richard Vaux, the present
head of the Board of Directors, writes Reports in a style most
eccentric, and not always intelligible to remote readers; but it is
evident that his heart is in the work, and that he belongs to the
party who desire the College to be the useful, unambitious institution
that Girard wished it to be. His Reports are not written with
rose-water. They say _something_. They confess some failures, as well
as vaunt some successes. We would earnestly advise the Directors never
to shrink from taking the public into their confidence. The public is
wiser and better than any man or any board. A plain statement every
year of the real condition of the College, the real difficulties in
the way of its organization, would have been far better than the
carefully uttered nothings of which the Annual Reports have generally
consisted. It was to Philadelphia that Girard left his estate. T