fant schools, we may look forward to a generation very
superior to the present, in the genuine parts of Christianity, and in
every moral and social virtue.

The beneficial results of moral training have been practically shown
in every infant school where the subject has been properly understood
and carried out, and numerous anecdotes illustrative of its beneficial
effects might be here introduced, which would convince those who have
any doubt on the subject, of the good effects of exercising kindness
and consideration for others, in opposition to reckless mischief,
hardheartedness, and cruelty, vices which render the lower orders
dangerous and formidable; but as a complete collection of such
anecdotes would form in themselves a volume, we will for the present
lay before our readers a few taken at random, to illustrate the
subject; they are from the appendix of the first report of the
Edinburgh Infant School Society, the model school of which was
organized by the author of this book.

"Two of the children, brothers, about five and four years of age,
coming one morning late into school, were to go to their seats without
censure, if they could give an account of what they had been doing,
which should be declared satisfactory by the whole school, who should
decide; they stated separately that they had been contemplating
the proceedings of a large caterpillar, and noticing the different
positions of its body as it crossed their path, that it was now
horizontal, and now perpendicular, and presently curved, and finally
inclined, when it escaped into a tree. The master then asked them
abruptly, Why did you not kill it? The children stared. _Could_ you
have killed it? asked the teacher. Yes, but that would have been
cruel and naughty, and a sin against God. The little moralists were
acquitted by acclamation; having, infants as they were, manifested a
character which, were it universal in the juvenile population, would
in another generation reduce our moral code to a mass of waste paper,
in one grand department of its bulk.

"This anecdote illustrates the good effect of inculcating into the
infant mind an abhorrence of cruelty to animals, which is too often a
seed sown in the young heart, which goes on increasing daily with
the growth of the child, until a fearful career of crime is ended by
murder, and its necessary expiation on the scaffold. How many men who
have suffered death for murder, could date their first steps toward