and even, on the whole, more useful, than that attempted in Massachusetts. It is enough to say, that Massachusetts has attempted a plan which differs from it in almost every important particular. The estate at Westborough, consisting of near four hundred acres, has the nobility of location and beauty of surrounding, which befit the country-seat of a gentleman of fortune. The buildings, large and costly in themselves, stand on an eminence rising seventy-five feet above Chauncy Pond, in front, distant nearly a quarter of a mile, from which water must be forced by expensive machinery for all the uses of the establishment. The same engine which does this heavy task also warms the main building, some two hundred feet distant, thoroughly and expensively, by means of steam. There is no water communication with any centre of business, or railroad nearer than three-quarters of a mile; and the only contract-work that can be had in any quantity, seating chairs with cane, - must be brought and delivered by some thirty miles' conveyance, leaving a very scanty margin, indeed, of profit. These circumstances all tell strongly on the financial results of the school, and are, in some degree, allowed for in the Report we have referred to.

Other circumstances, equally beyond the Superintendent's control, have added to the costs, and diminished the earnings, of the school. We have spoken of the moral condition of it previous to his appointment in January, 1861. That was at the very eve of our four-years' civil war; and those who remember the alarm and utter stagnation then, in most departments of business, will not find it hard to account for the Secretary's statement of the scanty earnings of the school. During that first year, indeed, it was almost literally impossible to find any occupation for the boys that would give any return in money; and, the year following, their labor was worth, in the market, only about six cents and a half a day. But did they go idle all that time, or were they only housed and taught in their ample and convenient halls? On the contrary, they were kept at work in those solid tasks of a NewEngland farm, to be justified only by a long-headed economy and an over-supply of labor, — of laying wall, and "burying

stone," so as to rescue, for tillage, some ten acres of unprofitable and rocky soil. As soon as more remunerative work could be had, it was given to the boys. But, meanwhile, a very great increase of value has been given to the farm and orchard: three acres of grapes are coming already into profitable bearing; strawberries alone, last summer, brought, by the labor of a single household, a clear income of fourteen hundred dollars, and are likely, this season, to bring two thousand; and several varieties of the smaller fruits, cultivated on a large scale, are making, perhaps, the most profitable occupation on which this large force of raw and unskilled labor can be employed. "In work that requires fingers," says Mr. Allen, "this school can compete with the world." If the next five years show the financial results we hope, no small share of the credit will be justly due to the stewardship and husbandry of the late Superintendent.

Entering on his office with the scarcely disguised hostility of the Board of Trustees, and with an opposition among his own subordinates which more than once sought, in unmanly ways, to take advantage of that hostility, — all resting on the ground of sectarian jealousy, open or unavowed, he has been able to carry out his plans, in the moral government of the institution, only by dint of resolute conviction, unflinching steadiness of purpose, and an unbending will. Such qualities, in such a position, are more necessary than conciliatory; in their manifestation they may now and then seem overbearing and harsh; and they may have had some share in confirming the hostility which made his resignation necessary. But they are combined, in him, with a very serious and conscientious devotion to official duty; with a devout and sincere, though unsectarian, piety; with an absolute respect for the conscientious opinions of other minds;* with a rare sagacity and tact in dealing with his charge; with experience as a teacher and director of public schools, of remarkable success, extending over something like twenty-five years; with a profound and genuine

*For Catholic as well as Protestant: and here, we suspect, is the most serious grievance.

feeling of the moral wants and claims of the pupils given to his care; and with that singular moral ascendancy, and personal control, which minds of a different order cannot comprehend, and vaguely call by such names as magnetic, mysterious, and the like. He himself regards this rare power as partly physical and partly moral. "I always thought I magnetized that boy," he said once, in speaking of a very critical case, in which he had elicited some information by personal confession, -for certain mesmeric experiments of former years had shown that he possessed that curious gift. But chiefly he regards it as moral, and as resting on the principle he has always followed, of holding his personal relations with the boys to be confidential and sacred. No secrets of that confessional have ever been betrayed. Hence the absolute, the unlimited confidence, the boys have reposed in him. Their confessions have included the acknowledgment of theft, lying, truancy,- almost all the faults of which boys in that class and keeping can be guilty, frankly owned, promptly and voluntarily atoned, under the compulsion of that confidence. When Mr. Allen took possession, three sets of keys were missing, with which some of the inmates had made their escape, and were known or suspected to be in circulation among the boys with a sagacity that reminds one of a diviner's rod, he detected where they were, and, by voluntary act of the boys themselves, secured possession of them all. A sum of money had been stolen from one of the subordinate officers: suspicion of a particular boy was almost certainty; but nothing whatever could be done, till the Superintendent's own eye, and his direct question, in private, brought a full confession, and got back the stolen property. A case of falsehood or pilfering or petty vice would be followed up, watchfully and warily, perhaps for weeks, like a hospital case under some intelligent physician, till the right moment came, and the plain, direct question would bring the frank reply. This, among more than three hundred boys,— some coming, and some going, every week,- many of them habitual liars and trained thieves, vagrant, profane, lawless; boys of various and evil parentage, outlawed, homeless, "such as you shun, instinctively, when you meet them in the street."

And among them all, he believes that there has rarely, if ever, been a case of wilful lying to him. He will never force a boy to tell the truth: "that would not be the truth." He will not ask a question till he is sure he shall get an honest answer. And we feel entitled to say it here- his heart has been drawn by a great tenderness to those vagrants and exiles, friendless, so many of them, except as they have found a friend in him. He has thought of them as, by their very birth and position, the natural enemies (so to speak) of the well-housed, the prosperous, the carefully educated, the comfortably clad. He has believed it possible, if there is no pretension in the confidence shown them, to win their absolute confidence in return; and, by frank good-will, to make a bridge between the classes so widely separated in society. And as it is part of his religious faith, that nothing is made in vain, so he believes that no human life, however evil and base, is without its purpose, if it is only to call out the offices of Christian charity from the more favored and intelligent.*

We have tried to indicate something of the method and the spirit that have brought about moral results which a very slight acquaintance sees to be extraordinary, and which some who have known them have held to be quite unparalleled. As one indication of the influences among which they had to be brought about, we do not mean positively unfriendly, but unsympa

* Groundless and vague charges of an attempt to control the boys' opinions, in a way hostile to the "evangelical" creeds, are sufficiently refuted by the following, from a former teacher in the school, not of Mr. Allen's own religious faith:

"I am very happy to bear my testimony to the entire absence of sectarianism which has always characterized your religious instruction to the boys. I have often noticed and admired the care with which, in your public intercourse with them, you confined yourself to the essentials of religion, and avoided introducing any peculiar views which you might personally hold. . . . The kind of religious instruction which they receive from you, is, in my opinion, exactly that which is best calculated to do them real good, namely, the application of right principles of action to cases to which their attention is, at the time, drawn by circumstances.

"You ask me for suggestions as to any new or better way of promoting true religion among the boys. I have none to make, however. I entirely approve, as I have said, of the course now pursued. Preaching, except in rare instances, has little if any effect. All that is done must be done by timely precept and example. And that, so far at least as you are concerned, they certainly receive. Yours respectfully,

66 'MILTON, Dec. 13, 1865.

GEORGE K. DANIELL, Jun."

thetic, and probably unintelligent of his motives, - we find that, among the subordinate officers and teachers of the institution (about forty in all), more than six to one are persons of what is called "evangelical" belief. The difference of view, consciously or not, is radical, touching the whole theory of moral discipline and penal justice. Till he went there, it was as convicts, not as pupils, that the boys were treated: and the more keenly they could be made to feel it, and be cowed by it, the better. Even his most faithful subordinates would sometimes hardly understand why, when guilt has once been frankly confessed, any further penalty is as frankly remitted: but, as he has held, the very object, and the only object, of the discipline has been effected when the offender has once been brought to that point. And his judgment is fully borne out by the character of the boys (more than eight hundred) who have been dismissed from under his charge. Nor will a mind of different cast easily catch the motive which draws the teacher near enough to the pupil to make that personal influence possible. A part of Mr. Allen's moral power, in dealing with his boys, has come from his being their nurse and hospital-physician at need, and even, for the last five years, their operating dentist in all ordinary cases. It is a literal truth to say, that, in his presence, those boys have shown the affection, the frank confidence, even the rough good-humor and playfulness, of sons by the side of an indulgent father; and that, when he left, there was as genuine grief among them as at a father's leaving home for a distant and uncertain journey.* And, as one token among many, of the degree to which his confidence in them was deserved, it was his custom to let them go, unguarded and unwatched, thirty or fifty at once, to attend a lecture or religious service in the neighbourhood; while, of more than a hundred who were allowed to visit a cattle-show in the village, not one was complained of for any mischief, or failed to report himself at the proper hour.

Before going to assume this charge in Westborough, Mr. Allen had known something in outline of the "Irish system" of

See a letter in the Boston Transcript of May 10.