freedom from rudeness of conduct or language, in fact, their really gentlemanlike behavour towards each other, will feel that the moral training quite keeps pace with the physical. Then the cricket and the summer excursion (of which I have still to speak), are felt by them all to be part of the same system with the Sunday services and the winter's hard schooling. The last alone might perhaps be too plain food for the rather weak intellectual and moral appetite of many of our boys, but the cricket and summer excursion make the whole to be pleasant. I feel that the amount of money, though so large, has been exceedingly well laid out, except that here, as in many other cases, with the thing to do again with our present experience we could do it cheaper. I must state, for it is a fact too gratifying to be omitted, that the labour required for erecting the fences cost us nothing. The men of the factory knowing that we had taken the ground, and that we were going to fence it in, begged to be allowed to do the work gratuitiously in their evenings.

I think the mixing of the boys and myself with the men in the cricket and gardening produced much good and kindly feeling among us all, and has made many work together in the factory during the winter as friends who felt as strangers before. I can answer for myself that I got to know well, and to like many of the men whom I had scarcely known at all before, and I believe they got to know and like me. I hope for very much more of these good effects from the cricket of the coming summer. Everybody, especially those who happen to be most ignorant of the whole subject, such as some of the well intentioned persons who have been backing up the Amalgated Society, is ready to preach about the necessity of this knowledge of each other by masters and men, but I suppose only masters can know the extreme difficulty of getting to be on a footing at all deserving the name of personal friendship with men of a factory when the number of them is large, however anxious they may be to get on such a footing. In business hours both master and men are too busy to have time for gossiping, and directly business is over the best of the men go, and ought to go, straight home to their families, not to see the masters again till business hours are again begun. And, although speaking from our experience here, the masters are always most cordially welcomed in the families, and the notion of such visits being considered an intrusion is a libel upon both masters and men, yet anything like general visiting is a simple physical impossibility. What little time the masters can give to visiting is sure to be required by those families of the boys which have no male head to take care of them, and, therefore their visiting has no tendency to bring them into acquaintance with the men under them; except, indeed, in cases of dangerous illness.

With the boys and young men brought up in the factory the case is quite different, for there is no need of their going straight home to their families when work is over, so the masters can keep them in the school room or elsewhere, and gain their affections and get great influence over them. With many of our young men we are, I trust, upon terms of true and deep personal friendship such as will last for life, although, of course, when they in their turn become fathers of

families there will be the same want of much intercourse as with our present men; but when you once know a man thoroughly, and he you, the mere moving about in the same work, with a kindly word or look when you happen to be thrown together, quite keeps up the cordialty of feeling. In speaking of not knowing the men generally, I should, however say that there are many exceptions, at least as true and as happy as with the boys; but still these are exceptions, the rule being the other way, and anything tending to increase the number of the exceptions, as our cricket and gardens were found in practice to do last year, is of very great value; you catch the men one by one, as circumstances bring them within your reach, the boys, a whole net-full together, but with both of them it seems to be of comparatively very little consequence what it is with which you first get a real hold over them, gardens or cricket, or schooling, or some trouble which they come to consult you about; once get well thrown in with them with a conviction on their part that you are thoroughly in earnest in wishing their good, and the better educated and more formed mind is quite certain to get very great influence for good over the less educated and less formed one, and this influence once obtained goes on working almost unconsciously to the person exercising it, except in its effects.

I cannot leave the gardens and the cricket without noticing that they have been the means of softening to the boys one of the greatest evils now existing in the factory-the night-work, for which the men and boys come in at six in the evening to leave at six in the morning. My brother and myself live in hopes of seeing this entirely done away with in the course of years. To do away with it now would require so very heavy an outlay, that we feel it would be out of the question to propose it. The boys who are on night-work do not go to bed directly their work is over, being generally unable to sleep if they do so. They used to dawdle about or take a walk, or in some other way get rid of the time till a little later in the day, when they went to bed just time enough to get as much sleep as they needed before getting up for work again. The same boys are not always at nightwork but there are two gangs which take it in turns; those who are on day-work one week are on night-work the next, and so on. Now all last summer the night gang of boys on leaving work at six o'clock in the morning, went straight to our field, and there they thoroughly enjoyed themselves in gardening and cricket until about a quarter past eight; they then collected in a shed which we have on the ground to hear a verse or two of the New Testament read to them, and to say the Lord's Prayer together before going home to sleep; and the way in which they joined in this little religious service, coming as it did just as a part of their enjoyment, would make one hope for very happy effects from it. I think had the factory and its profits belonged to me, and had the cricket and gardens cost double what I have stated, I should have thought it but a sort of consciencemoney, well spent in thus strengthening the physical and moral health of these boys obliged by the necessities of the work to keep such unnatural hours. On four mornings a week they went out in this way; on the other two they attended our school from six till eight to prevent their falling behind through missing the evening school,

which of course they must when on night-work; these two school mornings have continued through the winter. We hope this summer, unless it should be very hot, to do with very much less night-work than we were forced to have recourse to during the last.

The next thing to notice is the summer excursion, Our first experiment was on Saturday, the 29th June, 1850, when 100 went down to Guildford, starting by a train at, I think, half-past six in the morning, and coming back at nine at night. It was a beautiful day, and one of thorough enjoyment to them. Breakfast, dinner and tea were provided to eat on the grass. They strolled about the beautiful country in the neighbourhood of Guildford, played what was then our only cricket match of the year, the apprentices against the rest of the factory (for in the then state of our cricketing a match did not take very long to play), and in the middle of the day the clergyman of the little church on the top of one of the hills, with a lovely view round it, who had been begged for the use of the church, kindly came and did his part of the service, the boys, their books having been brought with them, chaunting their part as they do in their own chapel. I had not felt at all sure how far this might chime in with the other proceedings of the day, but it did so most perfectly, partly, no doubt, through their having had plenty of the running about first. The church service was a quiet and resting pleasure in such a place, and under such circumstances, between the two divisions of the active pleasure which was the chief object of the day. The country about Guildford is so really country, so absolute a contrast in its quietness and extreme beauty to all the common life of these boys, that one felt what a world of new ideas and feelings they were being introduced to; the very many of them, at any rate, who had never seen anything like real country before. way they looked at and spoke of the country to each other when there, and spoke of it after returning, I am sure many of them if they live till ninety will remember that one day, and with a feeling more beneficial to their minds than any which months of ordinary schooling would be likely to produce."

From the

The cost of this expedition was £28, and excursions of the same kind but to other localities have been since undertaken at an expense of sums double this amount. Mr. Wilson has some very excellent observations on the necessity for these amusements; he considers it hard enough that boys who have worked all day in the factory should be asked to attend school in the evening; but when they are so well disposed as to do these things, he believes those relaxations are useful employer and employed.

to

The large school-room, built in 1848, was soon overcrowded, the boys for want of space being compelled to write upon pieces of thick pasteboard held upon their knees; another objection to this crowding was, that young men of nineteen or twenty years of age were mixed with boys of eleven or twelve.

A new room was thus proved indispensable, and, for want of space elsewhere, Mr. Wilson was compelled to build the new school-room upon the top of that erected in 1848. It cost, with its furniture, £276; and that those attending might not be forced to pass through the dirt and grease of a portion of the factory close by the school-house, an iron stair-case and long gallery were erected communicating with the school,at a cost of £56. In the year 1819 Price's Patent Candle Factory purchased the night-light trade of Mr. Childs, and by this purchase a considerable number of boys and girls passed into the employment of the Company: for some short time these young persons were paid for as evening pupils at the National School, Brompton, where they had been placed by Mr. Childs, but Mr. Wilson was by no means satisfied of the efficiency of this plan of education, and the boys were removed to the school at Belmont, and a special school was opened for the girls at a little distance from the factory. This mixing the Brompton boys with the Belmont was not approved, and accordingly one of the railway arches close by the factory was taken, made water tight and fitted up as a school, to which the boys and girls of the Brompton works were transferred; the cost of this railway arch school, in furnishing and fitting, was £93.

Upon the general effect of these schools, upou the necessity of a chaplain, and upon other important matters worthy of the most serious attention, the following observations offered by Mr. Wilson are placed here before the reader, that he may judge for himself, upon the humanity, the christian feeling and the more than good sense, the wisdom, of the views by which Mr. Wilson is actuated.

“On bringing the girls' work over here from Brompton, it was of the utmost consequence, that its first start in the new place should be a well managed one. If we had begun with a bad set of girls, we must have continued with them, for with a bad name once given to the factory, all the good parents would have kept their girls away, so that we could have got none but bad ones, and the factory would have soon deserved the bad name, whatever might have been the case at first. We hope that we have made a good start, from the fact that good parents are very glad to send their daughters; and we hope also that by careful weeding out of the doubtful ones, at each time of slackness of work, we shall always be getting a better and better set. Their management will of course be the most difficult part of our school system, but I am happy to say that a lady of much experience has consented to take the charge of them.

This lady wished to make the whole of the expenses a part of the charge so taken; an offer which I shall very gladly accept, if, after the coming meeting of the proprietors the annual expenses remain upon me, as they are of an amount beyond what I am able to pay. But I have begged that this part of the arrangement may stand over until after the coming meeting, as the Company has the first right to the privilege of doing all that is to be done for the education of its own people, and I should have felt, in allowing any other person to do any part of this before the Company had declined it, that I was accepting charity for the Company without being authorised to do so. On this principle I have always refused pecuniary help when offered by individual shareholders, except as personal loans to myself when I happened to be short of funds; and except also for matters not included within the Company's birth-right, as for instance, a better organ for our chapel, for which I gladly accepted £300 from another lady not even a shareholder.

You will notice how very much more confidently I speak here of the success of much of our plans than I did when the subject was under your investigation at this time last year. The reason is, that we have been succeeding so far better last summer and throughout the winter than we ever did before, and have such very happy prospects that this success is to be permanent and increasing. One principal element in the permanence and increase of success, is the getting among us a competent person to give his undivided attention to the moral and educational charge of the factory. This really is abundantly sufficient occupation for one person, and to have it left entirely on the shoulders of those who have the charge of the business, is to cause them to be always pulled two ways, and to be in danger of neglecting one duty in trying to fulfil another. I had felt this so strongly that I had long been in search of a person (for many reasons it was desirable that he should be a clergyman) to whose undivided care the charge could be entrusted, and having found one last summer, I begged him to come and take charge of us as chaplain of the factory; but it was not until the beginning of November that he was able to come. I look upon this appointment as the means of binding together and securing all the efforts for good that are being made in the Factory, for there are many of us very anxious to help forward all that is good, but we are all busy, and it seems much better that the orginating and superintending of the educational arrangements, should not be with any of us, but with some person with nothing else to attend to, and that we in our several positions in the factory should only have to back him up and assist him. Then on this plan so much less is dependant upon the life and health of any individual, for if the chaplain dies another can be appointed, but if every thing depended upon my brother or myself, our successor, in case of our death, might not choose or might not be able to give himself up to such matters, and so they would fall to pieces for want of a head. Again, the person having the chief charge must live on the spot, for he must be at his post at a quarter to six in the morning, and at eight in the evening: but my brother's health would not let him sleep at the factory, and mine failed the winter