children, who always do as they are toldy-poldy, exist only in the juvenile literature of a past generation.

2. Let your teaching be nicely graduated. If you do not lead your scholars on, you will soon drive them off. You have a structure to build, let each lesson be in advance of the last. Do not take too rapid strides, but lead them gently along the flowery path of knowledge, and endeavour to charm into admiration of the panorama, as fresh views are unfolded at each successive stage in the journey. It is a mistake to regard your children as though they were cooped up in a parish pound, to be kept in existence by the supplies you bring them from week to week. Progress is the law of being, and progress is the law of all true teaching. "Let knowledge grow from more to more,

let

But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul according well,
May make one music as before,

But vaster."*

3. Have regard to harmony-the law of association of ideas. Do not your lessons be mere fragments, like the pebbles on the beach; let there be such a thing as affinity between all you teach, then the grains will crystallise into the solid rock of truth. Method in teaching not only economises labour, but gives one of the best guarantees of success. It may be pleasant to roam through a pathless forest and examine single trees, but you miss the view of it as a whole.

4. Remember, harmony grows out of variety; then let your teachings be as varied as the seasons, but one as the year. Let there be the bracing winds of Spring, when sunshine struggles with clouds; the beauty and melody of Summer; the fruitage of Autumn; and the purity of Winter's driven snow. Perpetual reproof is like the biting wind of early March, nothing grows under it, and what buds begin to shoot are soon nipped. But reproof is necessary; let it come in season. To deal in nothing but poetical imagery and prettiness may please for a time, but flowers soon fade and birds cease their song. But the Summer is essential to the year, so is poetry and song in teaching. Always let the Spring and Summer of your teaching lead up to Autumn's luscious fruits. In every lesson give your children some fruit worth the toil of gathering, and let the purity of Winter's snow characterise the whole. The Bible is an exhaustless store, and vastly varied; teach the Bible and you will never lack variety. Avoid crochets, and do not be theological Pagininis, always fiddling on one string.

5. Use judicious repetition, but do not bore the children by constantly using well-worn platitudes. Present the same truths from time to time in new forms and from new stand-points. The Apostle Paul says, in his epistle to the Philippians, "To write the same things to you, to me indeed is not grievous, but for you it is safe." Wise reiteration clenches the nail, and fixes the truth so securely in the mind that it demands an effort to forget it.

6. Interrogation is the last method I shall mention. The art of questioning should be studied by all who wish to be apt to teach. Never put a question which requires "Yes," or "No," for the answer.

* Tennyson.

By the Socratic method of teaching you can make your scholars masters of an entire subject. The effort to answer a question puts the learner's knowledge to the test, and grounds him more thoroughly in the subject taught.

I have thus endeavoured to sketch a teacher who is apt to teach. If you have not attained to my ideal, do not grow discouraged and give up the work. The recruit on the parade-ground does not regret his enlistment, when he is reminded of Wellington, but resolves to attain the standard of his lofty ideal. The qualifications and the means are yours to command, and the methods are easy of adoption. Your dissatisfaction with the past may prove an incentive to diligence in bringing about a better future. There are infinite possibilities in us all; let us labour to become apt to teach. The work is Christ-like. It is for his glory, and what other stimulus do we want? The sacrifice by which we can qualify ourselves for the work is not worth naming a little personal ease. To achieve his life-work our blessed Saviour gave up everything; yea, laid down his life! Oh, is it not time to be in earnest? Our period of service is short, and the golden opportunity to labour in the Master's vineyard will soon be past. We have only to prove true to our mission, and God will honour his own gracious promise: "He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." Then "go forth." Let duty be your watchword, and the glory of God in the salvation of souls your supreme aim. The tear of sympathy for the suffering, and the tear of regret for the lost, will soften many a hard heart, and make it more receptive of the "precious seed" you bearthen go forth "weeping." Thus your path shall not be dimmed by the shadow of irresolution, nor your spirit saddened by the gloom of mistrust. The promise shall be your pole-star, and the soft radiance of its light shall cheer you onward to the time when, with a rejoicing heart, you shall bear your "sheaves" into the garner of the Lord, to the universal shout of an eternal harvest home.

The Little Brickmakers.

NE of the most pathetic choruses in Handel's overpoweringly grand oratorio, "Israel in Egypt," is that which illustrates the sufferings of the children of Israel under their cruel and unreasonable taskmakers. Few passages in that masterly production have greater power to touch the sympathies than the affecting opening chorus, " And the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage." The wonderful old story of a nation's sufferings under the reign of rigour has been recently quoted in illustration of another class of brickmakers, who in this nineteenth century are sighing for deliverance from an unnatural bondage. The demand for child-labour in some parts of England has for many years been very great; and the sufferings and hardships of the children of poverty have not failed to receive public attention. A very great improvement in consequence has followed. To one of the noblest of noblemen, the Earl of Shaftesbury, we are indebted for not a few

radical changes in the treatment of youthful toilers. Factory children are better protected, the sons and daughters of agriculturists are less degraded, and it is hoped that whatever may be the defects of the Education Bill of last session, it will free us from some of the reproaches under which England has been laid. The cry of the little matchmakers of Bethnal Green has awakened universal sympathy, and we are called by an earnest voice to express our sympathies with another and equally ill-used race of children whose case has not hitherto received much attention.

:

Throughout the brickyards of Staffordshire and several of the Midland Counties, a large number of children are employed in carrying clay from the clay-heap to the brickmaker. The great demand for lads of from fourteen to eighteen years of age in the ironworks and collieries has led to the employment of mere boys and girls in the clay works. Children of nine or ten years find, therefore, ready employment, although, in justice to the manufacturers, it should be said that they do not all favour the plan, and some are openly opposed to it. One master brickmaker states that many efforts have been made to dispense with the labour of women and children, but "they have always found insuperable obstacles in that direction." The cheapness of female labour, and the difficulty of obtaining men and boys, have operated against reform. It is said that seventy-five per cent. of the persons employed are females, and perhaps two-thirds of these are young girls from nine to twelve years of age. Elihu Burritt, who has written his impressions of a brickyard in the Black Country, thus describes a scene at the moulding bench:"A middle-aged woman, as we took her to be from some dress indications of her sex, was standing at the bench, butter-stick in hand. Apparently she had on only a single garment reaching to her feet. But this appearance may have come from her clothes being so bespattered and weighted with wet clay, that they adhered so closely to her person that it was as fully developed through them as the female form of some marble statues through the thin drapery in which they are clad by the sculptor. . . . . The only thing feminine in her appearance was a pair of ear-drops she wore as a token of her sex, and of its tastes under any circumstances. With two or three moulds she formed the clay dough into loaves with wonderful tact and celerity. With a dash, splash, and a blow, one was perfectly shaped. One little girl then took it away, and shed it out upon the drying-floor with the greatest precision to keep the rows in perfect line. Another girl, a little older, brought the clay to the bench." This girl was about thirteen, pleasant in appearance, but evidently suffering from exhaustion. "She first took up a mass of the cold clay, weighing about twenty-five pounds, upon her head, and while balancing it there, she squatted to the heap without bending her body, and took up a mass of equal weight with both hands against her stomach, and with the two burdens walked about a rod, and deposited them on the moulding bench. No wonder, we thought, that the colour in her cheeks was an unhealthy flush. With a mass of cold clay held against her stomach, and bending under another on her head, for ten or twelve hours in a day, it seemed a marvel that there should be any red blood in her veins at all. How such a child could ever grow an inch in any direction after being

She

put to this occupation was a mystery. Certainly, not an inch could be added to her stature in all the working-days of her life. could only grow at night, and on Sundays." Mr. Burritt's attention was arrested by a little boy, exactly nine inches higher than his umbrella (three feet and a half high) whom he found, to his great surprise, to be seventeen years old. No wonder that Mr. Baker, one of the best-informed inspectors of factories, should-regard the employment of children in brickyards as absolutely cruel. "I have seen," he says, in one of his reports, "a boy of five years old, working among two or three and twenty females, being 'broken in,' as they call it, to the labour. In one case, a boy of eleven years of age was carrying fourteen pounds weight of clay upon his head, and as much more within his arms, backward and forward, from the temperer to the brickmaker, walking eight miles a day upon the average of six days; and in another, a boy of sixteen was carrying green bricks to the floor in the mould, weighing fourteen pounds there, and three pounds the empty mould back, and walking eighteen miles a day upon the average." Similar, if not more astounding evidence is given in one of the Blue Books (1864); and Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, Leicester, has recently published a most arousing appeal, entitled, "The Cry of the Children from the Brickyards of England," which cannot fail to reach the hearts of all who read it. Mr. Smith writes with all the vehemence of indignation against a system from which he personally suffered in early life, and the marks of which remain to this day. He has seen thousands of boys and girls bearing the burdens which he himself bore; suffering in body and soul through the polluting moral atmosphere which they have breathed; has sought by telling, as he says, simply a dark chapter in the "annals of the poor," to awaken a deep and practical interest in this class of sufferers. Stung by opposition from only one brickmaster, he has indulged in perhaps too vigorous language; but the whole tone of his pamphlet bears testimony to his intense and earnest desire that the little brickmakers may be protected by the law from the perils in which they are now placed. The fact which he is anxious his countrymen should know is, that "in our brickfields and brickworks there are from twenty to thirty thousand children-from as low as three and four up to sixteen and seventeen-undergoing a very bondage' of toil. and a horror of evil training that carries peril in it." His own personal experiences are, he insists, illustrative of thousands of others, and they are certainly extremely painful. He commenced life's labours at nine years of age by carrying about forty pounds of clay upon his head, from the clay heap to the table on which the bricks were made. When there was no clay, he had to carry the same weight of bricks. "This labour," he says, "had to be performed, almost without intermission, for thirteen hours daily. Sometimes my labours were increased by my having to work all night at the kilns." He was cruelly treated by the adult labourers—not a new experience in the history of the children of poverty. It seems almost incredible that the sons of toil should practise such unnatural cruelties upon the children under their control; but he who is acquainted with factory life will not be wholly surprised at Mr. Smith's statements. "On one occasion," he writes, "I had to perform a very heavy amount of labour. After my customary day's work, I had

to carry one thousand two hundred nine-inch bricks from the maker to the floors on which they are placed to harden. The total distance thus walked by me that night was not less than fourteen miles, seven miles of which I traversed with eleven pounds weight of clay in my arms, besides lifting the unmade clay and carrying it some distance to the maker. The total quantity of clay thus carried by me was five and a half tons. For all this labour I received sixpence! The fatigue thus occasioned brought on a serious illness, which for several weeks prevented my resuming work."

If these experiences are by no means uncommon-and facts are adduced that are strongly corroborative of them-the immoral and irreligious results can be readily imagined. The present system is a prolific source of immorality and vicious habits that leave their traces indelibly behind. It seems pretty generally acknowledged that, to use the words of Mr. Mundella, M.P., "There is no trade in which ignorance, vice, and immorality prevail to a greater extent than amongst the employés in brick and tile yards." "Out of the many hundreds of brickyard girls," Mr. Smith stated in a paper read at the Social Science Congress at Newcastle, "whose career I have personally marked, not more than a dozen have become decent and respectable wives." This statement is very awful, and we should hope that it cannot apply to all the brickyards of the Black Country; but we fear from the published details that the evil is more general than is supposed. A master brickmaker laments the extreme ignorance and viciousness of the girls and women. Not one in ten of them can write: not more than onehalf have ever entered school. Their parents' main concern seems to be to make whatever money they can out of their illiterate and prematurely faded children; and they regard even elementary schooling as the luxury of other classes. Not that poverty is the only or general excuse for sending their children to the clay-yards. "I have known parents," says one master, "in receipt of two, three, and four pounds a week, send their children out to work at clay-works, for a few shillings per week, hung in rags, whilst the parents themselves rioted at home in luxuries and drink."

Happily, however, there is another and a brighter side of the picture. "On the other hand," says this same witness, " I have seen, and I say it with pride, two or three little girls, working hard, anxious for over-time, always cheerful, always at their post, striving like the good angels they were, to win an honest crust for a poor kind sickly mother or grandmother." Still, the evils to be witnessed in brickyards are so palpable, and the type of character formed in early life so degrading, that some severe remedy should be applied by the Legislature. The law prohibits child labour in other pursuits; why should it allow young girls to work in brickyards? It is only reasonable that the law which applies to factories and agricultural gangs should also apply to the brickmakers. But it appears that the Factory and Workshops Acts do not apply to establishments in which less than fifty persons are employed. Surely this can be remedied, the employment of girls for a labour so unsuited and demoralizing stopped, and the working hours of the boys considerably shortened. The present system is deliberately cruel. A newspaper published in the Potteries