ousands
of dollars are annually spent or squandered in running these Public
Schools, and which are recommended, in a particular manner, for their
_economy_!

But aside, for a moment, from these _Public Schools_, so numerous, so
costly, so grand and imposing in their exterior, managed by a little
army of high-paid professors, teachers, superintendents and assistants,
costing the people of every city and State hundreds of thousands of
dollars annually, there is another army, yea, a volunteer army, not
commissioned or paid by the State, but by a greater power--God--who, for
His love, and that uncomparable reward which only God bestows, devote
themselves to teaching, instructing, training and educating the poor,
the needy, the orphan, the houseless, the homeless, the forlorn, the
despised, as well as the more favored of the earth. These make no
grandiloquent printed reports in costly binding; they have no official
stenographers or reporters to noise their proceedings in "morning
papers"; they have no "Polytechnic Halls," fitted up with pretentious
libraries, and all the surroundings of upholstery, and heating and
cooling apparatus; but winter and summer, early and late, they keep the
even tenor of their way with an "_eye single_" to their humble and
laborious duties.

In nearly all the cities of America, in those busy and worldly centres
of traffic and trade, of luxury and wealth, with their average of good
and evil, virtue and crime, this "_volunteer army_" distributes itself
noiselessly, quietly, and as it were obscurely, not heralded nor
preceded by the emblems of pomp or worldly power, but nevertheless
making its conquests and asserting its quiet influence in lanes and
alleys, gathering up the little children, taking them to its camps, and
instructing and educating them in the service of God and society.

You may have seen, in some of those cities, that long line of little
boys or girls, two by two, extending to the length of a block or more;
you may have observed how regularly they are assorted, the tallest in
first, and ranging down to the little ones, whose busy feet are trying
to keep up with the column. You may also have noted the order and
silence (so unusual among children), and your attention was arrested,
and perhaps you know not how all this order in this beautiful panorama
was brought about. Well, with these boys you may have observed two men,
one at the head, the other at the foot of this long line. If yo