Many young women are beginning to learn that true happiness is the evidence and fruit of conscious usefulness, and that the work of the kindergarten and industrial schools, in producing conscious good results, creates much happiness and enthusiasm in their devotees, and they are being drawn to appreciate, and will eagerly participate in, so pleasurable an occupation,—the only one that quite satisfies the mother impulse within them.
It is also a recognized fact, as an outgrowth of the development of character-school training, that no other preliminary experience is so good in fitting a young woman for the duties of married life as a course of kindergarten study; and, furthermore, there is no part of the kindergarten work that is not useful, in its simple suggestiveness, to anyone, of no matter what sex or age.
This is not, however, a plea for any particular system of pedagogy, although the method of Froebel seems to merit all praise, but for the recognition of the fact that Character-Building and Habit-Forming schools should be appreciated as the most important branches of government and not as minor branches of education, and that they should be supported as becoming the nurseries of good citizenship.
Don't wait for fine buildings; any habitable room in the deepest part of a slum, cleaned and whitened to suggest Godliness, such as have already been used effectively for mission kindergartens is better than nothing, and sometimes better than the best, for the initial work of redemption.
PROFITABLE SUGGESTIONS.
It is the proper function of the government of a community to support so important a thing as a nursery of Apprentice Citizenship. Charity exercises great good in that "It is more blessed to give than to receive," but it is a poor regulator of unbalanced conditions. When it is most needed, as in cases of industrial depression, it is hardest to find.
Perfunctory charity gets weary of giving and demands the stimulation of novelty to excite it to action. It is such a poor regulator of unbalance that helpless infancy should not suffer neglect by its caprice.
As long as charity is lending its support to partial measures of relief it seems almost as if it were throwing money and effort in a hole, for there is little appreciable diminution of the need. This is why charity gets weary of its good work.
Were there a complete aim to be sought, and an estimate of cost prepared, the additional expense would not be large, while the results would soon be very evident in a community purified of its expressions of persecution and neglect, and the city or the State or the nation or whatever branch of the federal government which assumed the charge would always be ready to meet any need of the service of social quarantine as its first duty to its sovereign units.
SOCIAL ASPHYXIATION.