others, and in counteracting their follies and vain ambitions. With all
the faults that can be alleged against any of them, the conventual
schools, even as they are, it must be conceded, are infinitely the best
schools for daughters in the land, and, upon the whole, worthy of the
high praise and liberal patronage their devotedness and
disinterestedness secure them. We have seldom found their graduates
weak and sickly sentimentalists. They develop in their pupils a cheerful
and healthy tone, and a high sense of duty; give them solid moral,
religious instruction; cultivate successfully their moral and religious
affections; refine their manners, purify their tastes, and send them out
feeling that life is serious, life is earnest, and resolved always to
act under a deep sense of their personal responsibilities; meet whatever
may be their lot with brave hearts, and without murmuring and repining.

The editor of the _New York Herald_ prefaces an account of a Catholic
academy with the following remarks:

"However divided public opinion may be as to secular and religious
schools--no matter what differences in opinion may exist in the
community as to the policy of aiding or discouraging purely sectarian
systems of education--there can be but little opposition from any
quarter to the verdict of experience given by many thousand families,
that these devoted women--the Sisters of the Catholic Church--are the
best teachers of young girls, the safest instructors in this age of
loose, worldly, and rampant New Englandism. Those matters of education
which make the lady, in their hands, subordinate to the great object of
making every girl committed to their care a true woman, are imbued with
those principles which have made our mothers our pride and boast. Those
of us who cavil at Catholic pretensions, sneer at their assumption, and
ridicule their observances, must acknowledge that the Sisters are far
ahead and above any organization of the sort of which Protestantism can
boast. The self-sacrifice, the devotion, the single-mindedness, the calm
trust in a Power unseen, the humility of manner and rare unselfishness
which characterize the Sisters, has no parallel in any organization of
the reformed faith. The war placed the claims of the Sisters of Charity
fairly before the country; but these Sisters of the different branches
have, in peace, 'victories no less renowned than in war.' Educating the
poor children, directing the untutored mind